For several years now Mrs Diary has insisted on attempting to grow sweet peppers, and for years the Diary has been irritated at how.... paltry the results have been. Not that this has put the lady off, and this summer she grew two pepper plants in our glass-fronted vestibule. They produced, by the standards of Scottish peppers, a quite magnificent crop, but Mrs Diary refuses to harvest it. Each time the Diary passes them, he wonders why.
The brassicas that normally keep us in green vegetables through the winter have done very badly. Weeks of grey skies and heavy rain haven't helped, but the real killer has been the salt-laden wind. Several of the plants have been blown over, and many have burnt leaves. We had a few brussel sprouts at Christmas, and the first crop of cabbages, which we ate before the December storms, were okay, but the other day we were reduced to tinned tomatoes at supper.
We felt pretty rotten, then, when we unearthed this little winter food store as we were moving logs from the wood pile at the back into the house. The store looks like the bulbs of bluebells, of which there are plenty around here, but we do wonder what buried them so carefully amongst our logs.
What do you call these brassicas, as a matter of interest? They're a staple here on Flores in the Azores where they're called simply couves (which is the Portuguese for pretty much any sort of brassica) but I've never known what the English for this ubiquitous plant is. It makes a very good soup called caldo verde.
ReplyDeleteI think these were broccoli - but they're in such bad condition that it's difficult to tell. Jon
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