Some extra colour

There's not much colour in the garden yet. Right now it's mostly dirt and a few small plants. The garlic area has some green, but there's not much else happening. So my parents got us some flowers to make things a bit more lively. Nice. We also bought some flowers at the Lidl, but they died almost instantly. So that was 2 euros down the drain. Don't buy plants at the Lidl, there's no point. But the flowers from the garden store are doing well.

Assortment of color

Flower

Tulip

Chive

Butterfly bush: Buddleja davidii

Seedling inventory: Tomatoes, cukes, and aubergines. Full house.

Our kitchen table is slowly becoming over grown. We've got seedlings all over the place. Time to organize them a bit. In another week or 2 we'll put them outside. It's so warm already that most people already have their tomatoes and aubergines in the garden.

So currently there's 9 aubergines (snowy and regular purple ones), 2 cucumbers (with 3 more in the greenhouse), 2 squash, 1 courgette,  20 sweet-corn, 6 pumpkins (delicata, butternut squash, and orange), some cabbage and lettuce shoots, and finally 32 tomato plants (9 different kinds). Big parts of the garden are still empty, but the kitchen is pretty full. At least now we have some decent windows in the house. Our last apartment had the smallest window ever. It was almost depressing. But it's all good now. And it will be good to get all this stuff out of here and into the ground.

So much for eating at the dinner table

9 aubergines and a cucumber

Sweet corn

Tomato corner

From l to r: Brandywine Red, Principe Borghese, Brandywine Yellow,
 Black Krim, Tigerella, San Marzano, Black Cherry, Green Zebra, Red Cherry

Making cheese at home. Cheese #2

More cheese. Cheese is awesome. It's not gardening related, but whatever. Also my brother's  girlfriend liked the last cheese post, so here's a new one for her. This time I tried to make a hard cheese that will need to ripen for a few weeks before we eat it. I made the cheese about 2 weeks ago, so in a couple weeks I'll post the result and let you know how it tastes.

So, cheese is pretty much just the solid particles from milk that have curdled and ripened. The best will no doubt be farm-fresh milk, but right now I'm trying with store bought milk. It's easier because I don't have to pasteurize it myself, but there will be less cheese from it.

The biggest pot I have fits about 4 liters, so that's what this cheese was made from. Besides that I have microbial rennet (ordered online), and some cultured buttermilk which I let sit overnight and then put in the freezer until needed. Cheese needs bacteria to ripen, and regular supermarket milk has already had all the bacteria killed through pasteurization. So, the ripened buttermilk will supply the bacteria. You can also buy mesophilic starter culture in powdered form online. For my next cheese, I'll probably order some starter culture. Since this is my first real cheese I didn't feel like investing much money.

Ingredients

After sterilizing the pot (with some boiling water) I heated the milk slowly to 30 C. while stirring Add the buttermilk and rennet. Wait one hour for the curds to form a solid mass. After an hour, you can cut the curds into 2 cm blocks with a long knife.

After the curds have been cut, leave them to sit for 30 minutes. After this, I did a process to wash the curds 3 times by removing the whey, adding warm water and very slowly heating the whole thing to 35 C. This took approximately an hour. Once this was done, the rest of the whey was drained off (you can save it for soups or sauces) and the curds were hung up in a cheese cloth (or just a regular cloth in my case). After squeezing most of the liquid out, I put it into a press.

Since I'm very much the amateur, I have no real cheese press. Of course, beer is always handy, and I used this crate and some plastic buckets to improvise a cheese press. The cheese was pressed for roughly 12 hours.

Crates of beer are always useful.

And this is the result after pressing. I soaked this little cheese is a salt brine for 8 hours,  and the let it sit out for 3 days to develop a rind. Now it is thoroughly sealed and aging in the fridge. I turn it over every 3 days, and in 2 weeks we're gonna eat it. I don't have much patience, so it's going to be a young cheese. I have no idea if it will be any good, but it's fun trying anyway. Pictures of the finished cheese will follow.

Planting schorseneren (black salsify) seeds

Well the time has come. Time to plant some salsify. I got these seeds as a present for Dutch-Santa-Claus-Day, which is a pretty crazy holiday. Then again, Santa Claus as a fat man in a red suit living on the North Pole with a bunch of elves and flying around the world with some reindeer is pretty crazy too. Our santa claus, known as Sinterklaas, is a turkish saint, who now lives in Spain and comes to Holland every year on a boat with his black helper Pete (zwarte Piet). Kids put carrots in their shoes for his horse and get presents in return. Black Pete throws ginger cookies at people in the streets. On December 5th, everybody gives someone (chosen from a secret ballot) one gift, plus a surprise gift that you have to make yourself and a poem that makes fun of them. From the surprise and the poem you're supposed to guess who gave you the gift. My poem last year pretty much made fun of me for turning into a gardening nerd, and I got a pitchfork and lots of seeds. Good stuff.

I've never grown schorseneren before, so looking forward to seeing how it goes. Since these things get pretty long, I tried to dig down at least 2 spade-depths for the whole row. The seeds look like small woody twigs.

The trench I dug is filled with a bit of potting soil and covered with a bit of garden soil. The seeds are sown about 1 cm deep at about 10 cm apart. If necessary I'll thin the plants out later. They're quite a slow plant, so sometime in November I'll be pulling them up. Hopefully without too much forking or other mutations. 

And for some random trivia, in Holland schorseneren are also known as 'Keukenmeid verdriet,' or 'kitchen-girl's sorrow' because the skin is tough and barklike but also very sticky when peeled.

Cheers: rhubarb champagne and pie

The weather gets better every day. The rhubarb is huge so we grabbed some stalks for desert.

The first harvest for this season. Calls for a toast. Rhubarb champagne. We got the idea from Jamie Oliver's At Home. It's definitely a good one if you want something sugary and cool on a warm day. For a bit of extra flavor we added some strawberries and mandarin orange slices to the mix.

Cook the rhubarb (we have about 6 large stalks, but its also for the pie), strawberries and orange slices until it's a thick mixture. Add sugar to preferred sweetness. Take about 500 ml and blend it to a smooth liquid. Let it cool for 20 minutes. Fill a serving glass (we only have wine glasses) about one third with the rhubarb liquid and the rest with chilled prosecco or champagne. Cheers.

And of course rhubarb calls for rhubarb pie. So good. We use pastry from a package (its easier). There's a layer of mascarpone on the bottom and the cooked rhubarb/strawberry mixture goes on top. In the oven for about 50 minutes at 180C.

Cucumbers and beer

Applications to gardening. Crate of beer comes in handy as a low table for the plants. Good weather calls for a beer in the garden.

Tuinboontje

We've got some fava beans coming up. The dutch name for these guys is Tuinboon. Gardenbean.

I had some seeds. I put them in the ground and food appears. Like magic.

I'm still impressed by how plants grow. They just hang out in their own world on their own time-frame. No rush, but they'll get there. Slow and steady, but determined as ever.

Growing garlic (4): update

Our garlic is not looking too bad. Also you can now see a difference between the two types I planted. I planted the largest cloves from some big garlic bulbs I bought at the organic market and 1 clove from regular store-bought garlic. The red arrow is the store bought clove. Go little dude, go. Hopefully in a couple weeks I can show you the difference in yield.

I'm still a bit nervous about the outcome. The clay soil we have here holds a lot of moisture, and even though I tried to thoroughly dig the soil and get it properly loose before planting, I'm not sure there is enough drainage. I don't want the cloves to rot. But we'll see what happens. The stalks seem to be doing alright, so I guess it can't be all bad, right? On the upside, on hot and dry days when we don't have time to go over and water everything, the added moisture retention helps.

Green onions

Our onion patch is coming to life.

Shishkebab-skewer seedling stakes

Our seedlings are trying to escape their small root-prisons and expand outward. You see them leaning eagerly towards the sunlight through the window. As if that tiny bit of extra light will make all the difference. So Leonie added some stakes to keep them from leaning all over themselves. We had a package of wood kebab-skewers and those work perfectly for this format. And if you use wire twist-ties, you can easily adjust how tightly they're attached to the plants as they grow.

 

 

Keeps them from getting too rowdy before we put 'em in the ground. The weather has been amazing, so hopefully we can transfer them pretty soon.

Berries. Blue, Black and Red

We got some berry plants from Leonie's brother. Blueberry, blackberry and red currents. Good stuff. We also have a raspberry bush from last year.

Tomato and squash seedlings

Our tomato and squash seedlings are slowly improving in size. Also the cucumbers has been moved to bigger pots. This is from a few days ago. We've got 9 types of tomatoes, some sunburst squash, snowy eggplants and regular eggplants.

Fava beans. We'll get a nice Chianti later.

The weather was perfect this weekend. We spent saturday morning trying to be productive. We got a row of favabeans going.

These have been sitting in some potting soil at home for a few days to get germination going.

 

The nice things about these guys is that you can put them in the ground pretty early. Actually, early spring is recommended to avoid heavy louse infestation in warmer months. They also don't require very much maintenance. We plant these with 2 beans next to each other so that later on the stalks will help support each other against strong wind.

A month or so and we should be seeing some pods coming out.

Growing garlic (3): Rabbit-free garlic

The netting I put up to keep the rabbits out seems to be working. The garlic stalks are coming up with no more bite marks.

We added some fertilizer last weekend for the last growth spurt. In a month or two looking forward to the first homegrown garlic. Big juicy cloves.