Autumn tomato chutney

Tomato blight ripped through the allotment in August this year, turning stems and leaves sooty-black and blotching the fruit. Every plant was dug up and burnt by August Bank Holiday leaving just the greenhouse plants, safe behind closed doors, to carry on free of infection.

My greenhouse isn't frost-free and we've had a few very cold mornings now, with the temperature dipping just freezing. While the chilli plants seem to be able to withstand temperatures hovering around zero, the tomatoes are grinding to a halt, the plants looking pretty exhausted, with brown papery leaves and wizened stems, just a few small fruit still slowly turning red in the sunny days.

I decided last week that it was time to put them out of their misery and to gather up all the remaining fruits, whether ripe or not, and make a big batch of late harvest chutney, so that none go to waste.

I've called this autumn tomato chutney because while it might lack some of the sweet sunshine and honeyed notes of tomatoes picked in high summer, the rag-tag of season's end tomatoes, green, pinkish, orange and red in places, has a concentrated, distinctively sharper flavour.

I added a few more autumn pickings: the last of the huge glut of tomatillos, which restore some of the zingy freshness of flavour, a warm chilli or two from the greenhouse for a little bit of fruity heat, and also one of my favourite chutney ingredients, dates. I use these instead of sultanas or raisins quite simply because I like them better, but also because they add a depth of sweet flavour, and a fudgy texture that definitely contributes to the finished chutney.

Apart from that, I kept the recipe as simple as possible - I don't think chutneys are meant to be complicated either in quantities or method. If you sterilise the jars and lids and utensils, this chutney will keep for a year or so - leave it for three months to mature before starting to eat it.


Autumn tomato chutney
500g tomatoes, mixed green and red
300g tomatillos
500g yellow onions
3 cloves garlic
Large thumb of fresh ginger
500g cooking apples
200g dried pitted dates (I used Deglet Nour from Waitrose but any will do)
300ml cider vinegar
175g soft brown sugar

Chop the tomatoes, onions, garlic and dates. Peel and grate the ginger. Remove the papery husk from the tomatillos and rinse any sticky residue off under the tap. Give a quick shake to throw off most of the moisture. Peel and core the apples, then chop roughly.

Put all the ingredients into a large non-reactive pan and mix with a spoon. You might want to hold back 25g or so of sugar and add it to taste as the chutney cooks, depending on how sweet your tooth is.

Bring to the boil over a medium-high heat, then cover the pan, reduce the heat and simmer for an hour and a half by which time the chutney should be dark and thickened.

While the chutney is simmering, sterilise jars for potting up. The amounts given here will fill around six or seven 250ml jars. I think the easiest way to sterilise them is to run them through the dishwasher on a hot cycle, then dry them off in the oven at 120 degrees while the chutney is bubbling away. You should also sterilise the lids and the utensils used for transferring the chutney.

When ready, spoon the chutney into the prepared jars, seal and leave to cool on a wire rack. Label, and transfer to a cool dark cupboard to mature before eating.

Save the seed - tomatillos

You can never predict with any certainty which crops will do well at the beginning of the season. This year, the Swiss chard, usually one of my bankers, all ran to seed in May and I was barely able to pick a single leaf. I planted the borlotti beans far too late and despite the fine summer and mild autumn, they never caught up. And the tomatillo seeds inexplicably refused to germinate - I got a grand total of three plants from 20 or so seeds sown.

I always feel faintly amazed when the tomatillo plants grow strong and productive most years - they always seem very exotic in my north London allotment. They are closely related to physalis, or Cape gooseberry, and grow similarly, the fruit maturing within a papery husk (see picture, above). The fruit itself looks like a green tomato, another relative, though the tomato is more of a cousin than a sibling. Tomatillos (Physalis philadelphica or Physalis ixocarpa) have a fresh zingy taste, not unlike either a physalis or tomato without the sweetness, and are commonly used in Mexican and South American cooking, in salsas, and cooked sauces

Thinking about how to ensure better germination rates, I considered saving seed from this year's tomatillos to provide seed for next season. Horticultural lore says that over generations, self-seeded plants will become more and more adapted to the specific conditions in your soil - your terroir, if you like. This is one reason why saving your own seed is so effective (it's also economic and sustainable, but let's just stick with the adaptive advantages for now).

The idea of saving seed from my plants has always been irresistible but there are practicalities to take into account. You should also only save the seed of open pollinated plants. These are plants which either self-pollinate, or which are pollinated by a plant of the same variety. The resulting seeds will then 'come true', ie, produce fruits like those of the parent plants.

Don't try saving seed with hybrid (F1) plant varieties - they won't come true to type. And if you grow more than one variety of a plant - or indeed, if your neighbour does - you may get undesirable cross-fertilisation: the seeds you gather and sow won't then come true to type. Squash and pumpkins are particularly known for this. Even with self-fertilising plants like chillies, it's recommended to isolate the different varieties because they will also cross-pollinate, for example by bees en passant.

If tomatillo seeds can be tricky to germinate, then seeds which you have saved yourself could well be more likely to sprout the next year, the parent plants having thrived in the comparatively cool, damp UK conditions. The plants that grow from the saved seed will then be even more predisposed to do well in my allotment, having been derived from two generations of plants which managed to deal with London clay and the omnipresent bindweed. And so on, through the generations, until the plants are completely at home, strong and reliable and productive. That's the theory, anyway.

I reckoned saving tomatillo seed should be similar to that of its cousin, the tomato. It turns out that it's quite a bit simpler. With tomato seeds, you have to let them ferment a bit, with tomatillos it's a comparatively fuss-free process.

Top left: 1) whizz up your tomatillo fruits in a blender to separate
 the seeds from the flesh; 2) Add water to the tomatillo pulp - the 
seeds will sink to the bottom of the jug; 
Bottom left: 3) Sieve the contents of the jug; 4) spread the seeds out on a plate to dry.

First, choose the fruits you wish to select seed from. These should be fully ripe, large, prime specimens. Remove the outer husk so that you are left with what looks like a green tomato. You need to separate the seeds from the flesh and the best way to do this is to give them a quick whizz in a blender (top left, above). This seems quite counter-intuitive, but it is effective and won't grind up the seeds themselves. If you have a pulse function on the machine, use this to ensure that the fruits get only a brief blitz.

Next, scrape the tomatillo pulp into a jug and cover with cold water (top right). Give the mixture a quick stir. The seeds will sink to the bottom leaving the pureed flesh at the top. You can skim this off and rinse the seeds through a sieve until all the flesh has been removed and you are left with the seeds in clear water.

Drain the contents of the jug through a fine sieve (bottom left) so that you are now left with just the seeds. These should be left at room temperature to dry out: spread them on a plain plate or similar non-absorbent surface (bottom right). DON'T be tempted to spread them on kitchen towel or a tea towel or anything similar: the seeds will adhere to the absorbent surface and you won't be able to pick them off again.

The seeds should be dry in 2-3 days. Transfer them carefully to a paper bag or envelope, label with the variety and the date, then seal and store somewhere cool and dry.

Tomatillo plants won't withstand frost, so you will need to start the seeds off indoors in spring. I usually sow mine in March, either in modules or two to a 9cm pot. They will take around 7-10 days to germinate and can be potted on before being planted out once all danger of frost is past.

I have grown tomatillos in the open ground and also in large deep pots, but it is definitely better to grow them outside. They're not self-fertile and rely on pollinating insects, so you need more than one plant, and bees and the like must be able to access them - which might be as simple as leaving the greenhouse door open, although they seem to like London summers well enough. The open ground plants do grow more bushy and produce higher yields of fruit, but the difference is not so great as to make the pots markedly inferior.

Tomatillo plant in high summer showing both flowers and ripening fruits.

Tomatillos - back from the dead

These photos show my tomatillo plants in rude health. Bushy, leafy, weighed down with little green lanterns which house the fruit, it's hard to believe that back at the end of April I was convinced the plants were dead.

I'd sown them at the very beginning of March, earlier than usual because last year they had needed a really long season to get going. By the second week of April the plants were rocketing away and had outgrown their 3-inch pots, the weather was warm and I planted them out in a newly-made raised bed. Of course, whatever the daytime temperatures, the nights were still cold and it was soon clear that I'd planted them out far too early. The three tomatillo plants (yes, there are only three plants in the bed) stopped growing and just looked spindly and unhappy.

I took pity on them and popped a homemade bottle cloche over each plant: take a 2-litre plastic water bottle, cut off the bottom, then cut off the neck where it begins to narrow so you are left with a long straight cylinder of clear plastic. That cheered them up a bit and they started growing again so that by the end of April there was foliage spilling over the top of the bottle cloches.

And then we had an overnight frost. I came up to the allotment to find my happy tomatillo plants had been reduced to green stems draped with withered, browning leaves. For a week, I left them, hoping they might recover, but nothing happened. Eventually I decided I would just have to start all over again with them and lifted the bottle cloche protecting the middle plant in order to pull the plant up, only to find that within the confines of the plastic bottle protector, there were indeed new leaves just beginning to sprout. It was only the tips of the plants, exposed to the below-freezing temperatures, which had died. I cut these dead leaves and stems away completely, replaced the cloche and went back to waiting.

After that the regrowth was fast and the plants are also even bushier than usual. They've taken over the bed, elbowing out the cucamelons behind them and hogging all the available light. So it appears that a rigorous prune early in the growing season might be beneficial to them although it seems like a rather risky procedure to carry out in springtime.

Untried, untested - this year's new veg

I have my favourites in the kitchen garden, the crops I can’t imagine being without. I can’t imagine tiring of first early Lady Christl potatoes, or the candy-striped Chioggia beetroot, sugar snap peas, cavolo nero or Berrettina Piacentina squash or Sungold and Black Russian tomatoes.

But in other areas I am a lot more fickle. Quite deliberately I look for new veg and new varieties to try each year. It’s part of why I took on the allotment and the luxury of space for experimentation. Last year, I successfully grew ginger (indoors), physalis and sweet onions for the first time and was correspondingly unsuccessful with celeriac; the year before I had a complete 'mare with salsify.

This year’s newbies show a bias towards the new world. It’s partly intentional as I’m developing a Secret Garden Club workshop based on the food from the Americas, so some of the new produce is being grown for harvesting and tasting for the meet-up on September 1st (more info and ticket details here).

Mouse melon, or cucamelon (Melothria scabra)

These very attractive fruits look like stripey grapes and taste, apparently, of cucumber dipped in lime juice. We’re going to grow these in the Secret Garden this year – according to the supplier Suttons Seeds, the plants will climb vigorously, so we’re going to train these up a wigwam made of willow canes and hopefully we’ll be harvesting the fruit from July.

Melon pear

Or Solanum muricantum to avoid potential confusion. I first encountered these fruits which both look and taste like a cross between a  melon and a cucumber about 20 years ago in Chile, where they are called pepinos dulces. I’ve often wished I’d brought some seeds home as the climate in southern Chile isn’t so very different from the climate in northern London, and have been keeping a look out for them ever since. This year I found them in Thompson and Morgan’s catalogue. This is another one to grow indoors, cautiously, to start with and to see if the conditions warrant taking them outside into a sunny sheltered spot – my patio, in this instance.

Sweet potatoes

Although really a sub-tropical plant, cultivars of sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas , so related to the morning glory) are being bred to better withstand our cool wet summers. This year I’ve ordered some plug plants of the variety Beauregard to grow in a sheltered spot in the Secret Garden – the supplier, Suttons, claims that this is a better option than the more conventional sweet potato ‘slips’, or cuttings. They’ll need as much warmth as possible, so I’ll cover the ground the black plastic and plant them out through holes cut into it in late spring and cover with a Victorian-style bell cloche. Then we’ll see how the summer goes from there. If it’s anything like last year they’ll stay under cover. And even if they don’t provide much in the way of edible tubers, the young leaves and shoots are apparently also edible and can be cooked like spinach.

Tomato Black Cherry

There are so many tomatoes to choose from that it’s worth trying some new varieties every so often. I’m in a bit of a rut with tomatoes at the moment: Red Alert for early ripening, Brandywine and Marmande for cooking and making passata, Black Russian for flavour; Sungold for eating straight from the plant … Black Cherry looks as it would make a fabulously striking addition to a mixed salad bowl, like a Goth version of Gardener’s Delight. Available from Heirloom Tomatoes and others.

Pak choi Rubi

I can grow great pak choi under cover right at the start of the season, sowing in February or March to harvest in April and May, when, let’s face it, you’re not harvesting much else. After that, I find the slugs and the flea beetles get them, however much I try to prevent it, and also by May/June, lots of other summer vegetables are demanding attention. So pak choi is an early spring crop for me, and the more of it I can raise in that short space of time, the better. With this red version from Nicky's Nursery, I’m looking for a deeper, mustier flavour than the bright spring green of the conventional variety.

After our fantastic results with tomatillos in the Secret Garden last year, I’m going to try these on my rather more exposed allotment, where I’m also going to grow a couple of Szechuan pepper plants this year – more on this they're ready to go out into the ground. We’re also hoping to plant some witloof chicory for forcing in the Secret Garden later this year and I’ll blog more about that on the Secret Garden Club website once we’ve got going with that.

 

  

Get Cape Gooseberries. Grow Cape Gooseberries. Fly

I was given some physalis seeds at the beginning of the year. Physalis is one of those fruits I buy occasionally and then never know what to do with them. They look little a small orange tomato, wrapped in a papery case, and I find it very hard to describe the taste - sweet and fruity with a tart note is about as much as I can manage. I didn't feel they would be very appetising cooked. I also wasn't sure why I might want them: physalis plants spring up self-seeded every year, germinating from the kitchen compost. 

So we buy them occasionally from the supermarket and snack on them. A few overripe ones get thrown in the compost and it is presumably these whose seeds germinate later on the allotment - often intermingled with some enterprising tomato plants which self-seed the same way. These 'volunteer' plants never seem to set fruit (the self-seeded tomatoes never seem to get blight, either).

Physalis are related - fairly closely - to tomatillos, and also to tomatoes and aubergines. They're part of the botancial family Solanaceae. Solanaceae is the nightshade family, but don't let that put you off. They're also known as Cape Gooseberries, groundcherries, Chinese Lanterns (usually the more non-edible varieties, grown for the lantern-like seed cases) and improbably enough, golden strawberries.

The one you'll most often see in British gardens is Physalis alkekengi, which is hardy in winter and bears the bright orangey-red lanterns. 

The name Cape Gooseberry is often associated with the edible plant, Physalis peruviana - the 'cape' in this instance isn't a geographical cape harking back to the plant's origin, but the item of clothing, referring to the case which covers the fruit. They grow in sub-tropical and temperate climes, and, I have discovered this year, in a cold wet summer in London. I thought it might be interesting to grow some physalis on purpose and see just how many fruit we could raise. We were also growing tomatillos at the Secret Garden Club and I wanted to make a comparison between two such close relatives. 

I treated the physalis seeds as if they were tomatoes or aubergines: sowing them (a bit late) at the beginning of March, two to a small pot under a cloche, and leaving them to germinate indoors in warmth. The seedlings were up two weeks later, and grew quickly in their pots, uncovered, on a sunny windowsill - see above.

By the beginning of June, they looked as though they might need staking in their pots. I also desperately needed the windowsill space to bring on the pumpkin seedlings and so, despite the fact that it was pouring with rain every day, out the physalis had to go, transplanted to a sheltered, south-facing bed on the allotment (left).                                                                                                                    They grew on vigorously despite the inclement conditions, and yes, by July they did need staking. They also came into flower, the flowers closely resembling those of tomatillos. In fact the general growth habit of physalis and tomatillos are similar, although the physalis are sturdier. The tomatillo plants were almost flamingo-like with their long spindly stems supporting multiple branches. The downy heart-shaped leaves of the physalis are a darker green and wider than those of the tomatillo. 

Physalis flowers: much of the foliage shown here is actually of the neighbouring
comfrey plant. You can also see several immature green fruits developing.

The fruit starts developing inside the green cases in July/August. If you gently squish the green teardrop-shaped lanterns between your thumb and forefinger you can feel the fruit, at first just the size of a pea, then growing bigger and bigger. Unlike the tomatillo, they don't split the casing, but when the husk turns brown from green, the fruit inside is ripe.

An unripe physalis fruit in the foreground, with one ripening behind it.

Trying out the first ripe fruits, the taste was a revelation. Having never eaten a physalis that hadn't spent most of its days in a supermarket before, I was unprepared for any complexity or depth of flavour. But that ill-defined fruity-and-a-bit-tart is so much rounder and syrupy - and yet still with a threat of tartness. Now I can see why you might want to make jams or jellies (and definitely a pavlova) from them. If all physalis tasted like this, we'd do so, so much more with them.