More Sowings

I love this time of year: the sun starts shining, seeds start sprouting, I try to keep up with digging, the sowings and potting on and planting out ....

Lots of seeds are sprouting in the greenhouse - all the cauliflowers have started, some spinach, a couple of cucumbers etc.

This weekend we've sown:
8 Tomato Golden Sunrise
8 Tomato White Cherry
8 Tomato Roma

8 Tomato Harbinger
8 Tomato Pomodoro
8 Tomato Tigrella

19 Sweetcorn Sweet Bounty

8 Pak Choi Rubi
8 Lettuce Mixed Salad Leaves
4 Aubergine Black Beauty

4 Pepper Hot Caribbean Blend
4 Pepper Heatwave
4 Pepper Inferno
4 Chilli Cayenne
4 Chilli Hot Stuff
4 Chilli Twightlight

Large pot Leek Bandit
2 large pots Leek Musselburgh

1 half size seed tray Lambs Lettuce

Small trough Beetroot Boltardy

Large trough Carrot Chantenay Red
Small trough Carrot Purple Haze
Small trough Carrot Charlemagne
2 small troughs Carrot Autumn King 2

24 Red Cabbage Kalibos

8 Cauliflower Violetta
16 Cauliflower All Year Round

24 Kale Dwarf Green Curled

4 Sweet Pepper Jumbo
20 Sweet Pepper WorldBeater

1 Ginger root into an 8inch pot

Phew!

Rhubarb & Ginger Jam

Having sorted the chest freezer out, decided it was time to crack on and use up some of the fruit. Rhubarb and ginger jam sounded good to me!

2lb rhubarb, chopped

2lb sugar

juice of 2 lemons

40g ginger

Makes 3 jars.

OK, so I've mixed Imperial and metric measurements. I'm useless with metric measurements. We found some frozen ginger in Sainsburys, and it's conveniently squished into 20g blocks, so used two of those, and it's easier to simply use the known metric weights than try and convert them.

Anyway, to make the jam, we put the chopped rhubarb and the sugar into a bowl and left it overnight for the rhubarb juices to absorb the sugar. All the recipes we looked at said to do this, but some for 2 hours, some for 24 hours. I decided overnight was enough, and gave it a stir before bed. I gave it another stir first thing in the morning, by which time, the rhubarb was in a lovely sugary syrup.

I then put some jam jars in the dishwasher and when that finished, put them in the oven at gas mark 1 to keep them hot - putting hot jam into a cold jam jar isn't a good idea (apparently!).

I then put the jam on the heat, bringing it to a boil. I added the ginger and lemon juice while it was heating up. I haven't yet found out how much juice is in one lemon, so I just poured a few tablespoons of Jif lemon juice in.

After about 20 minutes, I tested if it had reached the setting point by dropping a small blob of jam onto a cold saucer and testing if it wrinkled when pushed. It didn't seem to wrinkle easily, so kept the jam on the gas a bit longer. I tested again, but still wasn't sure, so I took a chance and stopped the boiling, and poured the jam into the hot jam jars and put the lids on.

When it had cooled down, I tried the jam - it was a bit too thick, but ok. Maybe too much lemon juice? It wasn't as gingery as I'd hoped for, so might double the ginger next time.