Catering for Coeliacs: Orange and Chicken Hot Salad, Orange Drizzle Cake, Brandy Snaps
More recipes from Sallie Darnell – delicious cakes designed with coeliacs in mind and an unusual savoury dish – all working with oranges
Oranges are full of Vitamin C, other nutrients are vitamin A (as beta carotene), potassium, calcium and most other vitamins and minerals but in small amounts. Orange juice is a popular drink but in reality eating an orange is better than consuming juice as the membrane contains bioflavanoids which have antioxidant properties.
The many types of orange include Jaffas, mandarins, clementines, satsumas, tangerines, the bitter Seville orange (suitable for marmalade) and kumquats. They can all be used in different recipes both sweet and savoury.
Chicken and Orange Hot Salad
Chicken & Orange Hot Salad
500g/1lb 2oz boneless chicken, cut into strips
1 tabsp olive oil
1 onion finely chopped
1 packet rocket
2 large oranges
2 tsp wholegrain mustard mixed with 1 tabsp olive oil
1 tabsp sunflower seeds or chopped chives
Fry onion and chicken in oil quickly until browned. Add oranges, mustard and oil to warm through
Put rocket onto serving dish and place chicken/orange mixture on top. Sprinkle with sunflower seeds or chopped chives
Orange Drizzle Cake
Orange Drizzle Cake
110g/4oz margarine
110g/4oz caster sugar
110g/4oz rice flour
2 eggs
One heaped teasp baking powder
Topping – juice 1 orange
2 tabsp caster sugar
Heat oven 180 degree / gas 4
7″ square cake tin lined with baking parchment
Put all ingredients in a bowl and using a hand electric mixer whiz together until a smooth creamy mix is obtained. Do not overbeat otherwise you will have a heavy cake. Add approx 1 tabsp milk to mix.
Put mix into lined tin and bake 20mins
When cool remove from tin and sprinkle cake with orange juice, then sprinkle over remaining sugar
Brandysnaps for coeliacs
Brandysnaps – Special recipe for coeliacs
110g/4oz dairy free margarine
110g/4oz caster sugar
2 tablsp golden syrup
110g/4oz rice flour
1 tsp ground ginger
Makes approx 14 brandysnaps
4 oranges – peeled and sliced. For a touch of luxury the slices can be marinated in brandy.
Cream or dairy free ice cream
Heat oven 180degrees/ gas 4
Melt margarine, sugar and golden syrup together in a saucepan, remove from heat, stir in rice flour and ginger
Line a baking sheet with baking parchment and place small spoonfuls of mix on to paper. Make sure these are well spaced as they spread on cooking.
Cook until golden and bubbling approx 10 mins.
Allow to cool for a few seconds and roll over small pieces of plastic tubing. Allow to cool completely. Can be stored in an airtight container for several days.
Fill brandy snaps with whipped cream or dairy free ice cream and serve with the marinated oranges.
This NHS website has some very useful information and Coping with Coeliac Disease is a good reference, available on Amazon
Sallie Darnell
Sallie Darnell – Sadly Sallie died a couple of years ago. Sallie was an inspired and down to earth professional cook whose husband became wheat intolerant. That led her to devise scrumptious and appealing recipes for him. We admired and valued her recipes and are pleased to pass them on, a valuable resource for coeliacs.
Catering for Gluten Free Diet: Tried & Tested Coeliac Recipes
Sallie Darnell
The prospect of having to cook separately for a member of the family can be a daunting experience. However, Sallie Darnell* a professional cook faced up to it when her husband became wheat intolerant needing gluten free dishes
Having trained as a Home Economist Sallie’s interest had always been healthy eating. As such she ran a popular outside catering company for 22 years, working for corporate and domestic clients alike. In many instances she created her own recipes.
However when her husband became wheat intolerant she needed to re-think how to cook on the domestic front. She had cooked for wheat/gluten/dairy intolerants on a professional basis but as a one off this was easy. Her new challenge in life was obviously how to create interesting fabulous food, giving variety for all time. Whilst relearning cooking principles she also discovered new recipes for wheat free food and became more concerned about vegetarian and vegan food as well. She realised her interest in healthy eating had only just begun.
Cooking lessons for specific food intolerant persons were not available at that time and so she devised a range of recipes, all easy to prepare. Here are a couple of cake recipes suitable for anyone wanting to achieve a wheat free regime.
Fairycakes
This Victoria Sandwich recipe for instance can be adapted by changing flavours
It will make 12 fairy cakes, lemon cake, or add coffee (liquid) and walnuts
4oz /125g soft margarine or butter
4oz /125g rice flour
4oz /125g caster sugar
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
Mix all ingredients together with hand mixer, put into prepared tin
Bake gas no 4, 180C
Chocolate cake
Her husband found this Chocolate Cake irresistible!
5oz /150g low fat spread or butter
5oz /150g caster sugar
2oz /50g cocoa powder
100ml boiling water
3 eggs
5oz /150g rice flour
2 heaped tsp baking powder
Mix spread + sugar until light and fluffy
Mix cocoa + water to smooth paste, then mix in eggs, flour/baking powder.
Put into cake tin 6 or 7”, lined with baking parchment
Bake 30 min Gas 4 180 C
More recipes suitable for those with a wheat intolerance – muffins, sweet and savoury filled pancakes – will be added to this Recipe Section of In Balance Magazine website in the near future.
*Sadly Sallie died some years ago. She was an inspired and down to earth cook whose work we admired.
We recommend highly the online grocery suppliers GoodnessDirect for healthy, fresh, eco and organic shopping for all your cooking needs
For information on coeliac disease and a gluten-free lifestyle see www.coeliac.org.uk
For information on allergy and intolerances see www.allergyuk.org.
There is good information on the NHS website
For information about eating well go to the Food Standards Agency website www.eatwell.gov.uk
NEWS: You may have heard that Novak Djokovic, the Men’s Wimbledon 2011 Champion, had recently being diagnosed as Gluten Intolerant and claims his new diet helped him to improve his game.
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
Borage: Excellent Culinary Herb – Tried and tested recipes
Borage biscuits
Borage is an excellent culinary herb and can be used in a variety of ways. Borage is far better used fresh, as the flavour and colour deteriorate when dried and some essential oils lost.
The leaves taste of oil and cucumber and together with the flowers (say three leaves and three flowers) can be added to 500ml (1pt) of homemade lemonade.
To make lemonade combine the juice of a lemon with 30ml (2 tbsp) of sugar or honey dissolved in 500ml (1pt) of boiling water, and then chill. For a different refreshing drink, add borage flowers and lemon balm leaves to apple or pear juice.
Borage seed packet Thompson & Morgan
Young leaves can be boiled as a spinach substitute or cooked with cabbage (two parts cabbage to one part borage). Chopped leaves can be added, for the last few minutes of cooking, to pea or bean soup and to stews, or finely shredded in salads (before the hairs on the leaves become stiff with age).
Traditional recipes recommend borage leaves and seeds, together with fennel in salads for increasing the milk supply in nursing mothers. The leaves and flowers are still added for flavour and garnish to wine cups, Pimms and gin-based summer cocktails and the flowers are still candied for confectionary as cake and ice cream decorations.
Borage seed packet Thompson & Morgan
A delicious herb butter can be made by finely chopping young borage leaves, parsley and dill, producing one 15ml (1 tbsp) of each herb, blending them into 150g (5oz) of butter and then adding a little lemon juice, one 5ml spoon (1tsp) of chopped onion plus salt and pepper. For a sandwich filling or party dip, try blending 15ml (1tbsp) of finely chopped young leaves into 100g (4oz) of cream or cottage cheese and a squeeze of lemon juice.
Here is a recipe for biscuits, adding the flowers for decoration.
VANILLA BISCUITS
225g (8oz) self-raising flour
110g (4oz) sugar
160g (6oz) butter or margarine
Pinch of salt
One beaten egg
12 drops vanilla essence
Runny preserve for brushing eg homemade redcurrant, apple or raspberry jelly.
Sift the flour into a bowl, add the salt and then rub in the fat until the mixture is like breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar. Add the beaten egg and the vanilla essence and mix to a stiff paste. Roll out, cut into shapes and place onto a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with jelly. Place a borage flower on top of each biscuit, pressing down the petals so they adhere to the jelly. Gently drizzle and brush jelly onto the flowers. Bake in an oven preheated to 190C (375F) Gas mark 5 for about 20 minutes, until the biscuits have a good warm colour. Remove from the oven but leave on the tray for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool.
Alternatively, for a darker, crisper effect, bake the biscuits without the flowers. Once removed from the oven, brush over more jelly, add the flowers as before and then, instead of jelly, sieve icing sugar over the flowers and biscuits. Place them on the wire rack of a grill pan and grill for one minute.
For a good all-round read about herbs, try Leslie Kenton’s Healing Herbs: Transform Your Life with Plant Power. You have only to look at the front cover of the dust jacket to know the author acknowledges the beauty of the borage flower. It has some excellent reviews.
Photography Sine Chesterman ®
Sine Chesterman, Contributing author
NB At this time of year it’s possible to sow some seeds that will still give flowers and seeds for cooking in about two months. You can freeze the flowers in an ice tray and use them to brighten up drinks in the winter months. Thompson & Morgan sell an excellent variety. Editor
www.ourfrontgarden.com is the website we write about the ongoing renovation and care of a front garden in a garden city
The Tropical Tale behind Delicious Dried Fruits+Bundles of Giveaways!*
We enjoy hearing about successful projects with a strong social theme and Tropical Wholefoods is just that with the bonus of selling great products. We love their dried mangoes and there’s a whole range of dried fruit, mushrooms and even vanilla, to choose from available in good healthfood stores, Oxfam, Fairtrade stores and online. You can enter the giveaway of bundles of gorgeous Tropical Wholefoods healthy Fairtrade goodies at the bottom of the page.*
Adam Brett grew up in Uganda but went to the UK during the Amin period and subsequent civil war. In the late 1980s, he returned to Uganda as an adult with a plan: to enable Ugandan farmers to produce quality sun dried fruits using a low tech, low cost solar drier he had designed.
Dried mangoes
Teaming up with a Ugandan friend, Angello Ndyaguma and his English partner Kate Sebag, Adam set up the fairtrade company Fruits of the Nile. It distributed solar driers to farmers at cost, trained them in using and constructing them and then bought the resulting dried fruits at guaranteed good prices from the farmers. Soon, considerable numbers of farmers began working with the driers, producing gorgeous sun dried pineapple, bananas and mangoes for onward sale.
Back in England, Adam and Kate marketed the products under the label Tropical Wholefoods, initially from market stalls and then from a factory in south London. They quickly built up a small but dedicated fan club for Tropical Wholefoods products. People were attracted by the fresh and powerful flavour of the dried fruits – especially because they were 100% natural with no added preservatives or sugars. 
Because the fruits were dried immediately after harvesting, they preserved extremely good flavours. The buying public also liked the simplicity and directness of the operation and the clear benefits that Tropical Wholefoods was able to deliver back to farmers in Uganda.
Dried apricots
Adam and Kate were able to sell directly to retail shops in London and attracted the custom of larger distributors in the health food and delicatessen trade. According to Kate, “Running a packaging factory and doing delivery runs around the capital wasn’t exactly what we imagined we would be doing when we started the business. We thought we would be living in Uganda, but we found that intensive marketing and product control in UK was necessary to build our brand.” With Adam and Kate deeply involved in building a market in the UK, day to day control of the Uganda operation passed to Angello Ndyaguma. Supported by a number of Ugandan aid agencies, Angello undertook extensive training sessions with farmers in solar drying operations and business management. Today, there are about 100 different solar drying sites in Uganda, who have organised themselves into six different Community Based Organisations.
Mango harvest
Dried pineapple
In many cases, people operating solar driers use their own fresh fruit to fill their driers, adding value to fresh fruit. Solar drier owners also buy fresh fruit from other farmers, therefore providing them too with a market for their produce. Both fresh fruit farmers and solar dryer operators are certified Fairtrade by the international Fairtrade Organisation FLO.
After nearly 20 years of operation Fruits of the Nile estimates that at least 1,000 adults are benefiting from the solar drying operations they have initiated and trading with around Uganda. The most common use people have for their additional income is to pay children’s secondary school fees and medical bills, neither of which are freely available in Uganda. One of the producer groups, Nakatundu Muslim Farmers Group, has also been able to send one of their founder members, Umaru Wasswa, back to school:
“Thanks to solar drying our pineapple, I have not only been able to send my child to a good city boarding school, I also have now managed to go back to school to advance on my academic standards as I had dropped out when my dad passed away,” says Umaru.
Sangar TON community
Farmers are also able to improve their farms and homesteads by being involved in solar drying. When people expand their solar drying operations, they often incorporate drying fans powered by solar electricity into the dryer, so speeding up their fruit processing. This also provides the opportunity to install solar lighting and power into their houses and community centres. Since very few villages in rural Africa or Asia have access to the national electrical grid, this is a great resource to have. As Umaru comments, “Now I no longer use candles but electricity in a rural Ugandan village!”
Apricot kernels
Tropical Wholefoods’ good example in Uganda led other fairtrade businesses in developing countries to get in touch and Adam and Kate are now trading and doing business development work with partners in Burkina Faso, West Africa, Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Raisins
Back in the UK, Tropical Wholefoods teamed up with Fullwell Mill in 2001. Initially a small Sunderland bakery employing people with special needs, Fullwell Mill has now expanded to a staff of 35 who pack all Tropical Wholefoods products as well as baking their dried fruit and cereal bars and making energy and health food bars for other companies.
Fullwell Mill now owns the Tropical Wholefoods brand, and Kate and Adam are directors of FM along with original founders Richard Friend and Peter Fawcett. This merger has left Adam and Kate freer to concentrate on development work overseas as well as marketing work in the UK.
Alya Noorin, Mountain Fruits, Northern Pakistan
In 2003, Fullwell Mill was awarded first place in the North East for the Inner City 100 Index – an index launched by Gordon Brown MP, the New Economic Foundation and Royal Bank of Scotland to reward the fastest growing and best run inner city companies in the UK. Nationally, FM was sixth overall. This is not the only prize to have been collected by the Tropical Wholefoods/FM Foods team. In 1998, they were the winners of the World Vision Award for Development, when the judges commented that “Tropical Wholefoods are an outstanding entrepreneurial team, giving heart to people who would not normally aspire to a stake in the quality end of the food market of the developed world.” In 2000, they won the National Westminster and Directory of Social Change Enterprising Solutions Award. In 2010, FM were winners of Sainsburys’ Own Brand Supplier Awards – Best for Corporate Responsibility.
Tropical Wholefoods website has an excellent recipe section, we specially liked the mango chutney and amoretti biscuits recipes.
Amoretti biscuits
Bread and butter pudding
Tropical Wholefoods products are available in all good health food stores, Oxfam stores, Fairtrade shops and catalogues and of course at our favourite online supplier GoodnessDirect
Call 0845 258 2781/2782 for details of your local stockist
*WE HAVE TEN BUNDLES OF Gorgeous Tropical Wholefoods health Fairtrade goodies to GIVEAWAY to IN BALANCE READERS
Last date of entry 30 August 2011 One entry per household
The winners announced on 8 September 2011
Did you Win the £35 GoodnessDirect Voucher? Check here
Our article about Online Shopping highlighted the service offered by GoodnessDirect who provided a £35 voucher to give away to an In Balance reader.
The winner was P Gibson of London. Congratulations! Have fun selecting your goodies from the GoodnessDirect website!
By the way we will soon be adding some wheat free recipes using rice flour available from GoodnessDirect.
If you have any recipes suitable for anyone with a particular food intolerance let us know and we could add it to our Recipe Book.
If you are interested in other In Balance giveaways go to the Giveaways Section
Good Health – The Influence of Sitcoms & Drama Series
Good health and its maintenance concerns most of us, although it seems women take the greatest interest. This was graphically highlighted in a recent survey of couples that found men took little or no responsibility at all for how healthy they were, leaving their diet and choice of food up to their partner. Amazingly more than half the men consulted their partner before having a drink and three quarters asked her before eating unhealthy food which would seem to indicate some awareness of the importance of good health but a preference for relying on their partner’s advice.
So where do women go to build up that bank of knowledge they need to keep their family healthy. Well, family, magazines, friends, the web, but it seems the most influential are tv sitcoms and drama series where scriptwriters take on topical health issues, based on contemporary medical research and findings. And it would seem we take them seriously, rather than regarding them as fiction, thereby getting positive health messages across effectively.
With the most popular TV drama series with powerful plotlines in the US off air during the summer EverydayHealth, one of the most comprehensive and accessible health websites we have found, looks at next season’s content and questions the general view of the unhealthiness of mindless tv soap addiction.
Parenthood
PARENTHOOD is an NBC drama with humour grounded by the difficulties of parenthood and the next series includes a father confronting his son’s emotional issues the son having been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. By the way if you are interested in one of the most inspiring accounts we have read do have a look at Look Me in the Eye written by John Elder Robison. A compulsive read.
Army Wives
ARMY WIVES on ET on Lifetime, focusses on a very fit and seemingly healthy wife who receives a diagnosis of diabetes. This is particularly topical in the light of the huge increase of diabetes in the Western world.
The Big C - Showtime
THE BIG C Showtime puts a young woman in the limelight, chronicling her way of dealing with a diagnosis of melanoma with just a year to live. Who hasn’t been touched by someone with cancer and wondering how they would cope with a similar diagnosis?
Breaking Bad
BREAKING BAD, an AMC drama, relating how a high school chemistry teacher reacts in an unconventional and fearless way to provide money for his family when he dies.
Glee
A musical drama by Fox, GLEE, has two storylines, one that develops the character playing a student with Down Syndrome at McKinley High School, the other explores the mental illness of one of its teachers. Two storylines with strong human interest threads. This is the show that had Gwyneth Paltrow as a feisty teacher last season.
The United States of Tara
UNITED STATES OF TARA, another Showtime drama, portrays a character with dissociative identity disorder (DID), once known as multiple personality disorder one of the lesser known afflictions .
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
Online Shopping is Greenest … unless you walk! + Voucher Giveaway
Shopping online with a home delivery service is twenty four times ‘greener’ than a car journey to the shops¹
Delivery from Goodness Direct
Makes sense. One vehicle for lots of addresses, rather than every household burning its own petrol.
Of course, taking the bus is preferential (you have to get out of the house some time) but it can still be more eco-friendly to have your shopping delivered to your home – leaving you more time to do the things you like.
If you shop with Goodness Direct you’ll find even more ways to go green. They have thousands of ethical goods on their shelves, whether it’s organic foods, eco-cleaning products or earth friendly cosmetics.
It’s an Aladdin’s cave of natural products and ethical goodies. There’s fairtrade foods, cruelty free toiletries, natural baby products, organic fruit and veg and special diet foods. It makes shopping a breeze.
So paint each and every day a little more green with GoodnessDirect. Plus, online orders over £35 ordered online are delivered free to anywhere in the UK.
WIN A VOUCHER WORTH £35 to spend at the Goodness Direct website
We have a prize voucher £35 worth of GoodnessDirect shopping vouchers to give to one lucky In Balance reader! Using the form below enter the prize draw and be in with a chance of winning your first GoodnessDirect home delivery FREE!
Entries, limited to one per household, should reach us no later than 15 July 2011.
17 7 2011: Update: The winner was Pauline Gibson of London
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
¹Green Logistics paper: Carbon Auditing the Last Mile: Modelling the Environment Impacts of Conventional and Online Non-food Shopping; J. Edwards, A. McKinnon and S. Cullinane, 2009
Fancy a Free Meal? Really!
Sunday 19 June is Barter Day at Hummus Bros who are offering free meals in exchange for donations to Cancer Research UK. Those donations could be:
Clothes
DVDs
Books
Homeware
On Sunday, just take your unwanted items into the Wardour Street branch of Hummus Bros where you can haggle the value of your possessions with staff from the Marylebone Cancer Research UK shop. Vouchers will then be given out matching the value – two or three good quality donations should be enough for a completely free meal!
Barter Day runs from midday to 6pm on Sunday 19 June at Hummus Bros, 88 Wardour Street, Soho, W1F 0TH and all quality donations will be accepted. To get directions, see their mouthwatering menu and see what journos thought of the cuisine see the Hummus Bros website.
With Barter Day, Hummus Bros continues to offer unprecedented value while being socially and environmentally responsible – keeping your conscience and tummy happy.
So why not get a few things together and meet other likeminded diners on Sunday …
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
Grow your Own Veg in a Town Garden
Growing veg in a town garden - my mixture
It isn’t difficult to grow your own veg in a town garden but you do need to have a realistic expectation of success and ways of avoiding disaster. So where do you go to get really reliable information on how to grow veg?
I think tv programmes don’t always provide the real picture and give a false expectation to the whole subject. Do you remember Jo Swift transforming an allotment into a perfect vegetable plot on that top viewing show Gardeners’ World? What they didn’t tell you there was an army of helpers to clear and weed the plot. I reckon they must have used some kind of weed killer to destroy the horsetail, a plant that is usually very, very hard to eradicate. Then there was GroundForce – just how did they get rid of those serious weeds in such a short time before planting up? What I want is reality and how problems are overcome, not a smooth, problem free entertainment show with perfect results. Having said that I have found a whole load of excellent short BBC videos. The one about growing potatoes in bags on your patio is particularly good.
More realistic are books giving reliable advice from experience and two gardeners I both admire and respect are Carole Klein and Anna Pavord. Both write in a most accessible way.
But for me the most inspirational book is The Edible Garden by Alys Fowler. I find her down to earth approach to growing veg in her tv programmes and books very appealing and resonates with my own experience.
My failures include newly planted cabbage and lettuce seedlings decimated within a day of planting by voracious slugs. Yes I used organic slug pellets and the dreaded beer traps, but somehow there was always a wayward specimen on the prowl and we never did get to eat any lettuce or cabbage that wet summer. My husband used to collect the slugs and throw them into the hedge across the road reasoning that the hedge was better cover for them and if they did venture across the road the chances were they would be run over. Well that was the theory although the slug numbers didn’t seem to drop.
The only solution that has ever worked for me is to use self adhesive copper strip attached to plastic bottles with the tops and bottoms cut off. It does mean a lot of work to begin with, but the containers can be used for years if you use reasonably thick plastic. If mine break up I remove the copper strip and reuse it as it is fairly expensive.
I have had great success with brassicas for the first time ever. In the past I have given up on growing any kind of cabbage because pigeons systematically stripped the cabbage seedlings. So this year I covered the area with fleece. Then as the plants grew I removed that and put netting over them, which works. I forgot to cover this one.
Kale decimated by pigeon
What has worked well for me so far this year
Seeds that germinated easily, that is to say fast and profusely!
- Leeks & Onions – not having sown these before I wasn’t sure what to expect. They germinated quite quickly and came up ‘broken’ but gradually straightened out. They were quite floppy though as seedlings.
Leek seedlings
- Parsley – I add the leaves to veg/fruit when I use the juice extractor as parsley has such a good reputation for providing valuable vitamins. It is an annual though so be prepared to resow every year and don’t rely on seed from those plants, the growers are really good at making them sterile so you have to buy new every year. However I do let some plants go to seed and add them to stews for flavour in winter
- Par-cel – a cross between parsley and celery, the plants are doing well, good to add to salads, stir fries, even stews
Par-cel, excellent garnish and addition to veggie smoothies
-
Mizuna, used in salads and stir fries
Mizuna – can be used in salads and stir fries
- Kale – the purple leafy kind
The broad beans have been very successful. I received this advice from Sine Chesterman, our gardening guru:
Pinch off the tops once you see the first beans forming on the lower stem. This stops blackfly colonising the tops of the beans and hence working their way down and ruining the crop. We used to give the tops to our goats (who love the whole plant) but when our last goat died and we didn’t replenish, we ate the leaves ourselves. Boiled with a little salt, strained and warmed with a little pepper and butter – superb.
Another tip I received was to be sure to water the beans regularly – just at the base. I added mulch thickly round them as well to retain moisture and to keep the plants from going through the stress of drought which results in stunted/slow growth and poorer crops.
One new herb I sowed from Suttons is Stevia. The seeds germinated quickly. Once the plants are about 4 inches high the leaves can be used to sweeten drinks – one leaf per cup. I will be experimenting with the leaves in baking and cooking. The seed packet came with recipes.
Copper strip used to deter slugs - it works
I put some wooden frames together and sowed carrots, beetroot, spring onions and large onions with a fleece cover, a system that has worked very well. I like the frames, they give protection from wind and put off insects. On the outside of the frame containing the salad stuff I’ve added copper strip to deter the slugs.
I’ve sown some climbing beans in the same way as from experience slugs absolutely love them. I like to see the flowers moving in the wind on the bamboo wigwams. When the beans were first introduced to Europe in the 1400s they were grown just for their flowers, I’m not sure how quickly the beans were found to be good to eat. A big advantage of purple beans I found is they are highly visible and quick to pick.
Poor results
The only real disappointment were the first purple dwarf french beans sown. Out of four rows only three beans germinated, I assume mice got the rest. To reduce the risk of mice getting the seed I sowed more beans in loo roll centres in the conservatory, like I did for the broad beans. They quickly germinated in the warm weather.
I have had a lot more success this year by spot targetting plants reusing milk containers with an adjustable tap. See article
To encourage germination of my fruit I deliberately sow seeds of plants attractive to bees and other pollinating insects throughout the garden:
- borage
- pot marigolds
- love in the mist
- cosmos
- foxgloves
- daises
- violas
- thyme
- pansies
- forget me nots
My seed suppliers:
By the way www.ourfrontgarden.com is the website we write about the ongoing renovation and care of a front garden in a garden city
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
We love Wine especially Pinot Grigio on a Sunny Day!
Pinot Grigio
The wine just slipped down so easily, no sharpness, clear white wine that we drank all afternoon. It was so good, and reminded me of hot sunny days in France, in the countryside, where I spent so many summers, so many years ago.
I bought it by chance from Virgin Wines when they had a week of specials and I splashed out on the Pinot Grigio, four bottles from the Piedmont area in Italy, four bottles from South Africa and four bottles from d’Arcana in Italy. They are so good I have decided to buy another case!
Can Rafols 2001
I also bought some Can Rafols 2001. Made with great care using no chemicals whatsover, this Spanish wine compares well with classic bordeaux and at £9.99 a bottle it has to be the best bargain going! In fact the six bottle cases sold out quickly. There were still some twelve bottle cases on the website when I looked today, have a look to see if there are any still available. We have until 2021 to drink it at its best! We can really spread it out – that would be roughly a bottle to celebrate every six months! – with fillet steak, sautéd onion, boiled new potatoes. Oh bliss!
2009 Bordeaux
There are still some cases of 2009 Bordeaux vintage wines, three bottles of four wines. Am tempted to buy some to put to one side … Yes, I’ll go for it! Good health!
Val Reynolds Brown, Editor
In Balance 