Homegrown

Some supermarket bought flowers - local grown Norfolk asters .
                              I can never resist the beautiful pink colour.                                 

.... and some homegrown flowers. This hydrangea was a beautiful purple colour when I bought it from the local nursery a few years ago. Despite being in a pot with ericaceous compost it gradually faded until the flowers were almost green. Last year I planted it in the flower bed and this is the result.

 I rather like the two tone colour.

And more homegrown fruit from the allotment; the first of the plums.
This is just a fraction of what is a bumper crop.
There is nothing quite like the taste of a warm, ripe plum eaten straight from the tree.

The crop is so heavy that some of the branches are dragging on the floor. The tree, although dwarf, has grown so well that I think mr digandweed will have to attack it with his pruning saw in the next week or two!

I decided to make ice cream with some of the plums and in doing so discovered two things:
1. Ice cream is very tricky to photograph
2. Our freezer is not very cold.

I followed an easy 'no churn' recipe for plum ice cream from Mary Berry, which you can find here.

As always, I decided to tweak the recipe and added some finely chopped stem ginger (about 1 lump) and a teaspoonful of the syrup, which gave the ice cream a lovely gingery taste.
This was fine by me (as you may know I love anything with ginger) but Mr D complained that it masked the flavour of the plums!!

There are still lots of plums to harvest so I will be back next week possibly with plum jam or chutney or maybe even both!





annjenny x