Harvest Fun with the BOBS Group

"Unscrewing" a courgette

Harvesting is a big part of the fun of growing your own, and at Windmill we are always delighted to give people the chance to get involved at harvest time, so it was great to welcome the BOBS group to the site to do some picking with us today. They visited us a few years ago, and it was brilliant to hear stories from some of the children about how much they had enjoyed their previous visit, and the taste of the sweetcorn. Those new to the site also got stuck in, and were soon experts in harvesting carefully to make sure the plants didn't get damaged.

Shark's fin melons hiding under their leaves

Where have the beans been hiding?

Tomato about to be enjoyed

Luckily, we had ripe sweetcorn to give the willing workers again this time too. It's always nice to be able to reward hard work. Whilst some of the older children helped us to prepare the corn, the younger folk and their parents and carers used some of the harvest to make a picture. There was a bit of disagreement amongst the artists, so the face you see is a woman with long hair, carrot earrings and courgette hair slides, but with a beard - she'll be representing the UK at Eurovision soon, no doubt!

Preparing the sweetcorn

Plum Job!

Today was the major plum pick of the year. Thanks to Helen, Ash, Guy, Hassan, Kathy and Cicely for all your help in picking our huge crop! It is earlier than usual, due to the warm weather we had in July and early August. If you look back to previous years, you'll see that we normally pick them in September. We don't want to disappoint the folk who like to make plum jam with us then, so we're freezing some so they can still do that later. If your group is one of them, give us a call!

The fruits of our labours

Cicely found a new friend!

Kathy stayed for a well earned lunch of ratatouille.

Tomato 'Costoluto Fiorentino' makes a great pizza topping

Tomato 'Costoluto Fiorentino'. What a beauty. 

Thursday's session was mostly in praise of a new tomato variety we have tried this year at Windmill - the tomato 'Costoluto Fiorentino'. Not sure what costoluto translates as, because Google won't oblige, but Fiorentino means it comes from Florence, so we hoped it would bring a taste of Italy with it. The tomato doesn't disappoint with a really nice fruity hit of flavour, which is less sweet than most cherry tomatoes, but still strong enough to make a great sauce. It is meaty, with very few seeds. It is heavily ribbed, but this isn't an issue if you just slice it across its width, and the resulting slices look really attractive with their scalloped edges. We think the green ones will be amazing for making fried green tomatoes, especially because they seem to hold their shape well when cut..

These tomatoes have the added value, as we saw on Monday, of providing some fun deformed fruits which taste fine, but can look quite entertaining.

Tracey used the first pick of the crop to make tomato sauce for pizza, and we fired up the oven. One of the things we proved is that the wind direction and speed makes a big difference to the way the oven functions, especially because it was strong enough to blow back down the chimney a few times, even with a healthy fire going. That meant it took a bit longer than usual to provide a pizza treat for the volunteers of the day. Despite a bit of a wait (hey, more weeding time - what's not to like!) Guy, Joyce, Ash, Chris and Mac were very happy to enjoy a well-deserved snack. Mac is a vegan, so we used almond butter instead of cheese on his, and he had a bit of a fight on his hands as several folk wanted to tuck in to try it.

Pizzas ready for action

The finished article

About Jam Time Again!

After some dodgy weather last week, we had a great day's harvesting today. It was perfect sunny weather with a light breeze. Just as well, since we welcomed some local folk to come and make bread and jam with us from scratch, and doing that in a gale isn't so much fun!

We also got on with harvesting lots of yummy stuff, and some weird things too. Every year, the tomatoes surprise us, and this year we seem to have a few alien spaceships arriving on site...

The aliens have landed...

One of the harvests was potatoes that we grew in tyres. The long dry spells make it difficult to keep these moist enough, because the leaves tend to deflect the rain when they are grown in a tub. Desiree potatoes seem to work best for this, certainly they don't wilt like other varieties, and as Chris found, they produced a decent crop.

Chris with his Desiree.

We're pleased to report that the clay oven behaved beautifully, and that the bread tasted great with the freshly-made plum jam.

Birgitte enjoys the fruits and bread of her labour

It was also great to see Mac, who visited for some ideas for setting up a community allotment, and did a great job helping out. Hope to see you all again soon.

Some of today's harvest

Aubergines! And Thinking Ahead

Good session today, with lots of reasons to be pleased with ourselves.

The first is that we harvested the first aubergine of the year - and it was a beauty! Keep reading to find out what we did with it!

We picked a mega-harvest of currants and blackberries - thanks to Hassan, Mark and Guy.

Hassan finds where the red-currants were hiding

We also planted our Christmas potatoes - which may sound like we're doing it at the wrong time of year. If you haven't come across this before, it's a question of confusing the tubers into thinking they've had a very long Winter by keeping them in chill-storage until late Summer. When these are then brought out, they will very quickly begin to grow in the warm soil, and the result, in a good year, is a nice crop of new potatoes, which should taste wonderful at Christmas. It's a risk, as the amount growing season left can vary wildly, but we're always hopeful! We have been gifted some plastic dustbins with the bases removes, so we put some of the spuds in those to make it easy to cover them with straw if it's cold. They will also help keep the straw in place if it then gets windy.

Not Binning Them! Mark plants the Christmas Potatoes

Another good job that we've started is cutting back the meadow. Most of the flowers have set seed now, so we need to cut down the vegetation, leave it for a short while to drop the seeds, then remove it. If we leave it to rot down, it will make the ground too fertile, so we usually remove the cut material and stuff it under our dead-hedge to help create habitats for some of the local critters.


Lunch was a gourmet cheat treat - cream-cheese and saag-stuffed aubergine slices in a tomato sauce - quite quick to do on the stove top, and delicious with some crusty bread.

Stuffed Aubergine Slices in Tomato Sauce with Basil

Recipe -

1 large aubergine
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
healthy cooking oil, e.g. coconut, olive or rapeseed
10 large leaves or saag, or 20 leaves of spinach or chard.
1 pot of cream cheese or ricotta
2 - 4oz of extra mature cheese or 1oz of parmesan
Jar of ready made italian tomato sauce

First slice the aubergine down its length, and fry the slices in some olive or coconut oil until they become bendy.

A wok gives lots of room to fry aubergine slices.

Finely slice an onion, 1 clove of garlic and some saag, spinach, kale, cabbage or other leafy veg. We used about 10 large leaves. Drain the spare oil from the aubergines (you can squeeze them with a spatula) into the cooking pot and use it to fry off the veg until the onion looks see-through and the saag has wilted. Add the cream cheese / ricotta, and the strong cheese and mix together. 

Mixing the cheese into the vegetable mixture

Now take each slice of aubergine, place a spoonful of the mixture on it and roll it up to contain the filling.

The stuffed aubergine slices

Put the sauce into the cooking pot, then place the stuffed aubergine slices in the sauce, being careful to keep them rolled up. 

Heat the sauce through until it is bubbling, then scatter torn basil leaves on the surface and serve with crusty brown bread. Tastes amazing!

Heat wave and the risk of getting swallowed at Windmill...

When a school book a visit to Windmill, we try to provide a bespoke experience that relates to their curriculum work, and we love to throw in a little something that's weird but wonderful if we have the chance. Today we had a chance to help pupils revise their learning of the digestive system, through being swallowed!

Pupils exploring where plants we eat originated and
investigating food miles

Tracey realised that the pattern of the pathways and spaces in the orchard area could be used as a model of the human digestive system, so she mapped out a plan, and our student volunteer Komal got to work on creating the elements with some extra ingenious ideas from Joyce. The results seem to have gone down a treat with the pupils, especially when we sprayed them with water to show when the body releases different liquid chemicals to aid digestion.

Looking into the "mouth"...

We've now got a kit together, including all the relevant elements of the digestive system, even a tongue with taste-buds (great idea Joyce!), so if you know of a class that will be studying digestion and might enjoy a trip down the alimentary canal, just let us know! 

Pupils experiencing the "small intestine" with Komal

Despite the heat, everyone did a great job. Mark wrangled teams of pupils doing watering and weeding, and Kath (the artist who created our log), put her environmental educator hat back on to run, and improve, our food miles activity. Hassan, Martin, Guy and Chris got on with the jobs around the site, and we were also joined by a volunteer from a few years ago, Emma Grivicic who proved to be completely heat-proof and helped us pick the crop from the fruit cage.

Our crops are doing well!

Whilst some of us created a lunch of freshly gathered veg in a peanut sauce with rice, Kath got on with creating us a banner version of our logo. We also got a present from our allotment fairy godmother, Lynn, of more pond weed to help our pond stay clean, and volunteer Carrie turned up right on time to help us add that to the pond, and do a bit of extra watering to make sure that the crops survive the heatwave. Fab day!

Kath in mid creative mode

The finished banner

Fun in the Sun and Nepalese Cooking

 Windmill was a hive of activity today, with lots of happy volunteers, and some young visitors who also worked like mad. The aim of the day was to make sure we harvested all the crops that are ready, sowed some final root crops and got the potato bed ready for another go around with Autumn crops. We also hoped to do some tidying up in the shed, but the forecast suggested rain in the afternoon, so we settled for clearing up the area around the keyhole bed. We'll need to bite the bullet and sort out the shed soon though - it looks as if there was an explosion in there!

At the moment, the fruit cage seems to be doubling as the local ant disco, but Dean was wearing heavy boots and tight trousers, so he dived in and did a great job collecting the lovely ripe fruit that was waiting. Guy elected to pick strawberries, undeterred by the possible presence of the frog that was patrolling the bed on Monday, and which surprised Komal!

Dean braves the fruit cage, currently home to
the national collection of ants.

 Meanwhile, Brian was inducted into the select group that can use the scythe. He quickly got the hang of it, clearing the grass around the keyhole bed and the benches in strimmer-quick time. Joyce brought along her son Finlay to help out too, and he did a grand job moving Brian's clearings to the various compost piles.

Finlay also helped Guy with the watering, and they made a quick job of it. Just as well, since the blazing sun quickly made the polytunnel more like a sauna. Hassan tackled the potato bed job, so we now have a beautifully weeded and fertilised patch ready for the new spuds to go in.

Guy and Finlay after they survived
watering duty.

Dean had to leave early, but we made sure he took a good selection of fruit and veg. He's looking forward to his Mum making something delicious with it. We're looking forward to teaching him more recipes to so he can give her a night off next time.

Dean with his harvest

We planned a meal of Pakoras, so we were delighted when Komala arrived to help us harvest the Nepali Saag that she brought the seed for, and to show us how to cook it. She came with her two boys (off school due to the teachers' strike), and they quickly got involved.

Komala gets garlic ready to go in the Saag 

A lesson in slicing cucumber from big brother

We also got some fresh chutneys. Komal brought a Pakistani touch to her mint chutney, and Komala's eldest made sure we had a cucumber and cumin version. It all made for a really good meal that was much enjoyed by everyone. The Saag was simply cooked with garlic and tasted wonderful. Sitting in the sun enjoying tasty food. It's a hard life at Windmill!

Komal chops mint for a fresh chutney

Enjoying lunch!