First 2024 Batch of Cucumber Relish !

This Sweet & Sour Cucumber Relish has got to be our most popular jar!  Several times this summer we have been asked "Have you got some of your lovely Cucumber Relish?"  It seems that its fame has spread.  

No credit to us for the recipe; we found it in a book years ago, when we were trying out lots of different cucumber varieties and found ourselves with a glut!  We made some relish and liked it, so made some more and found that other folk liked it too.  Now we need to grow LOTS of cucumbers every year to try to keep up with the demand for the relish – as well as selling the really tasty little cucumbers themselves!

After a good start (see our previous post), our cucumbers seemed to go on strike.  Quite a lot of flowers, a few embryo cukes, but then many of them dropped off and only very few became proper cucumbers.  It seems that the pollinating insects were probably on strike, so they had not been visiting our polytunnel very much.

But now, in the last few weeks, there has been a steady buzz of bees in the tunnel, as they have definitely discovered the cucumbers now – and the cucamelons, which are also in good production.  Hopefully lots more cucumbers (and relish) now on the way.

In theory – and according to the recipe – you should leave this relish for 'at least a month' to mature in the jar.  But we know quite a few people (ourselves included) who are not very likely to want to wait that long!

Cucumbers and Tomatoes on the Way !

 We started picking the very first of our lovely little 'Tamra' cucumbers just a few days ago, and have been looking at our tomato plants every day to see when the first one would begin to ripen . . .

Well, today Dave spotted the first signs of ripening on one of the plants, and here it is, our first tomato of 2024 !

Once again, it is the variety 'Stupice' (apparently pronounced 'Stoopeachkay') and, as the Real Seeds website says, "This fantastic 1954 variety from Eastern Europe is the earliest of all our vine tomatoes."  Every year that we have grown it, it has been the first to ripen, so we go on growing it . . .

. . . along with 26 other varieties, a total of 63 plants!  Red ones, yellow ones, orange ones and pink ones.  Different shapes, too – big 'oxhearts' – deeply ribbed ones – small translucent yellow ones – long 'plum' tomatoes, small pear-shaped ones and some really gigantic (and sometimes quite ugly) ones, as well as your more 'normal' round ones, large and small.  Here they all are:
  https://www.blackberrylane.co.uk/PDFs/Tomatoes2024.pdf

And we grow them all because they taste as tomatoes should taste* – really delicious, with that wonderful fresh tangy flavour.  We can hardly wait until we are back to eating our own home-grown tomatoes again, very soon.

And you can join us!  They will be on the pricelist on our website soon.

* John Denver wrote a song about them!  Here's a YouTube link to him singing it . . .