Our three cooking Apple trees are heavily laden in fruit, so what better to do over an August bank holiday than pick apples and make delicious recipes. Mrs D picked some blackberries from the front garden and together with the apples baked a wonderful crumble, as well as stewing the rest for the freezer.
It’s tomato fortnight, they have all turned red and we have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. Time to take a Hugh F-W idea and bake them down to a rich tomato base for the freezer ready for any future bolognese or chilli dishes. On that note, the chills are also following the tomatoes lead and also ripping in colour whilst on the plant.
I’m a great advocate of this little site Quidco. Simply search for your shop on Quidco, click through to the shop using their link and make the purchase as normal. Within hours your transaction is tracked and a few weeks later it’s paid directly into your bank account. There are some great deals on there – I’ve recently cashed in on £70 when I signed up to O2 broadband for a year and £15 for LOVEFilm to send Free DVDs to me for a month.
In two years of online shopping we’re approaching £1000 cashback. Not bad for clicking a few links!
The first Carrot has been pulled and it’s not much of a feast yet.
I’ll give it a couple more weeks – watch this space!
I’ve recently upgraded my Macs to Adobe Creative Suite 4. It’s a great update to the workhorse package. (Apart from a troublesome upgrade where my serial number was invalid, then valid, then invalid again which left me reinstalling CS3 then CS4 three times!)
One thing that was annoying me in Photoshop CS4 is the compass that appears when using a MacBook trackpad. It’s actually a “Canvas Rotation Tool”.
Thankfully Adobe had created a Photoshop Plug-In to disable this. Go here to download and simply drag into the Photoshop Plug-Ins folder.
UPDATE :::::::
Disable Canvas Rotation in Adobe CS5 too with it’s annoying trackpad Photoshop compass thing
The first flowers have dropped from the potato plants so we decided to dig up two of our twelve plants. I liken the feeling to winning at a summer raffle! In the fork goes and up comes half a dozen spuds.
I planted twelve Estima tubers in late May so they’ve had just over two months growing time. I picked a few courgettes and a few handfuls of french beans too – both of which were grilled on the BBQ later in the day.
I have picked our first red tomato – great! It’s been a steep learning curve on my first year as they have required a lot of attention, here are the things I’ve picked up.
The tomato seeds took the longest to propagate from all my seeds – about 1 month, I then transferred them to a 3″ pots to gather strength and after another 3 weeks I moved them to their final home in three grow bags. It was required to loosely tie them to the canes at several points up the main stem to keep the plant straight. The fruits are now ready to pick 3 months on.
The primary maintenance job is is pick off sideshoots as you see them – the sideshoots appear between the main stem and the main leaf. I missed a couple of sideshoots and now two of my nine plants have double main stems and consequently are not producing as plentiful fruit as the other plants.
The last job is to remove the main stem head once you have four trusses off your stem (a truss is a branch with buds/flowers – these will be your tomatoes). This encourages the plant to stop growing skyward and put it’s energy to ripen it’s fruit. Water with a liquid fertiliser at least once a week, and consistently during the week while being careful not to over water.
