Brilliant Borlotti – allotment beans

I’ve just been up to look at my beans.

It’s not impressive at first sight, I agree, but this is my Borlotti bean pyramid and those are lots of beautiful borlotti beans drying in the pod, on the plant. I didn’t think we’d get away with it in the UK, and maybe next year we won’t but a good 9/10s of the pods are dry and the beans inside are too.

They are gorgeous! There’s something very special, very Jack and the Beanstalk about growing your own beans for drying (as opposed to growing them and failing to harvest them so they end up being dried beans by accident) and Borlotti’s rehydrate so beautifully to make a big, meaty, juicy bean that’s ideal in robust Italian cooking (particularly good with lamb, I think). It’s all gone so wonderfully well that I find it hard to believe this is the first year we’ve grown drying beans. And borlottis are as wholesome and pretty as a speckled hen's egg.

But to be on the safe side, I harvested all the dry pods and just left the ones that are still a bit soft on the plant – if it rains I could lose the whole crop and whenever the weather forecasters say ‘sunny weekend’ I think of Michael Fish saying ‘there is no hurricane’ and I go and bring in the washing – or in this case, the beans!

Labels: allotment-beans, allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-drying-beans, allotment-harvest

Allotment harvests, and waiting for harvests

While we could spend all day, every day, picking French beans and still find when we got to the end that some beans had magically matured at the other end of the row, there are other crops that don’t quite want to get there.

I know that we have a while to wait for our borlotti beans. In fact, I’m wondering whether it was a good idea to grow them in the UK at all, given that they apparently have to be dried on the plant and given that our September, last year, was notable for its peculiar blend of rain and fog, meaning that sometimes you got wet vertically and sometimes you got wet horizontally, but either way, you got wet – that doesn’t bode well for beans drying on the plant at all. They are shy beasts too, given how colourful they are, it took me ages to find any to photograph.

The other crop that is keeping us hanging on is the sweetcorn. Whenever I think about it, my mouth waters, but each time I peel back some of the covering leaves and pierce a kernel with my nail, it still runs clear, not milky, which is the sign that the cob is ripe. It’s Lark Early which should be ripe by now, I’m sure, but it simply isn’t and I’m not sure if:

1. I’m impatient
2. We’ve done something wrong
3. Our corn is jinxed.

Okay, I know that last one isn’t true, but never having grown corn before, and having had only a 50% germination rate, I can’t help expecting the worst all the time. Is everybody else’s corn ripe, or am I jumping the gun, sweetcorn-wise?

Labels: allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-french-beans, allotment-sweetcorn

Gluttier and gluttier – excess allotment crops

According to the Allotment Cookbook by Kathryn Hawkins, you can boil new potatoes, drain and toss in melted butter, and put in a freezer bag, and they will survive being frozen for 6 months. Has anybody tried this method?

I’m making lots of potato ‘things’, like our favourite mashed potato laced with strong cheese, steamed red chicory, bacon bits and chopped onion, which is then packed into containers and frozen – lovely with summer cabbage, for example. I’ve never tried freezing whole new potatoes though and the idea has its appeal.

Our Pink Fir Apple potatoes have gone insane – they must have heard me saying I was disappointed and bucked their ideas up, because we have bushels of them and they are delicious, but even I can’t eat potatoes more than twice a day. We’ve had potato soup, potato salad (hot and cold), potato and cucumber soup (cold), potato mash, fried potatoes with shallots and baked new potatoes with mint dressing. So new ideas would be welcome.

And even as I speak, the borlotti beans are making a bid for glut status – although I know what to do with them: dry them!

Labels: Allotment Cookbook, allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-potatoes, Kathryn Hawkins, pink fir apple potatoes