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Fruit
The heatwave basically stopped the tomatoes dead in their tracks; all the trusses abruptly ceased setting halfway along. I'd hoped that they would start again once the night-time temperatures went down to something like normal, but although they continued to flower, subsequent trusses have set either no fruit at all, or only a single fruit on the flower nearest the stem. (I note that my first batch didn't even start to set until mid-August -- this year it's beginning to feel like autumn already!)
In consequence the magazine-tomatoes currently have about one and a half trusses each, which isn't much yield for such big plants. The towel-tomatoes have been doing better, probably because they started flowering earlier and were more advanced by the time the heatwave hit, although, again, of all the profusion of flowers on the last couple of trusses practically nothing has set. They all seem to have pretty much finished flowering, so we now have a month or so left for the fruit to do some actual ripening. They do seem to be quite large fruits for cherry tomatoes... and it's not just the second-generation seed reverting, because the magazine-tomatoes are just as large, if not larger.
My chillis have also been flowering profusely and not setting any fruit; weirdly, only one of the plants was setting, and I thought it might be because it was in relative shade. So I moved one of the other pots two feet to the left to stand beside it, and lo and behold, that does seem to have set its first fruit now (while the others are already a couple of inches long!) The biggest one is still covered in flowers to no apparent result (one of the things that was worrying me was that only the chilli whose flowers were setting seemed to have any actual pollen on its stamens when you brushed them), but has now, I think, successfully set one fruit -- which I hope is a sign that the weather is now right. Again, it doesn't leave a lot of time for the harvest to grow and ripen before outdoor temperatures become too low :-(
The transplants have been an almost complete success, and certainly went a long way to ensuring that the towel-tomatoes survived the heatwave better than their larger cousins. That large pot was definitely a life-saver, and may well be the reason why those three plants seem to have set fruit better than all the others. They didn't seem to suffer at all from transplant shock. The 'rescued' plants removed to make room actually look much happier in their new smaller pot that they did when competing with the corn-chamomile; even the tiny chilli that had apparently failed to grow at all since May is now starting to put on growth, although I shan't get any fruit out of it at this stage. Only one casualty: one of the two Oriental poppies transplanted in bud, which died without ever opening its flower. The other one duly produced a pink poppy, although it was pretty small.
I haven't had a lot of seed from all the coriander that I allowed to flower, so I don't know what happened to it (now lost among other plants). I did get some, probably on a one seed per plant germinated ratio -- certainly not enough to eat, but just about enough to resow next year ;-p
One head of the dill that went to seed is setting quite nicely, but not yet ready to harvest. The rocket seed pods are also surprisingly few for all the flower that it produced, and are mainly still not ripe; I did pick a couple, one of which split open and revealed two or three ripe seeds inside. Again, just about replenishment level if all the seed is viable; last year's did work, although I planted mainly the commercial seed.
On the other hand, I was very surprised that the California poppy seed which I eventually managed to collect with considerable difficulty (every time I visited, most of the seed-pods were either unripe or had already split and spilled their seed, but I eventually got a couple at the right stage to wrap in my handkerchief and take home) germinated quickly and easily, after all my previous struggles! I now have half a dozen seedlings with distinctive double-fronded seed-leaves (like other poppies, only with a pair on each side), and an unexpected late-germinating calendula, which turned up a couple of weeks after I'd given up on the second batch of calendula seed I planted. I did try to harvest some other wildflower seed from a patch I'd noticed, but I don't seem to have got any germination at all out of that.
The first calendula has thrived and been potted-on for a second time, although I have to say I would have assumed it was a forget-me-not if I hadn't been absolutely certain by the very distinctive seed-case that came up attached to one of its leaves! Currently it is making a very healthy plant, although I don't know if it will have time enough to flower before the end of the season.
My Swan River daisies, which I thinned out from three to two, have been growing quite vigorously for some months but have shown no signs of flowering as yet. The mysterious wildflower/weed that germinated in the tray of evening primroses (which are biennials, so now that last year's self-seeded succession have fought it out for dominance two of them are growing into sturdy plants but will not throw up tall flower-spikes until next year) has now reached a height of 40 inches despite growing in an inch of unfertilised soil; weeds really are amazing (just contrast with the wretched chrysanthemums!) It has developed flower-buds, but these are taking their time about opening, so I still don't know what it is ;-D
Meanwhile it is posing another problem to the washing -- I have very little drying space left, and my pillow-cases keep coming back with stains on them from plants they have brushed against...
The chrysanthemums ended up by growing into large plants which are now seriously too big for their pots; the foliage is irritating to handle, they have a faint unpleasant scent, they are a struggle to keep watered and their fleshy stems break very easily. I suspect some of the damage is from squirrels running across; some, of course, is from the pots toppling over in the wind, which they do as soon as they dry out and the weight of the compost is no longer sufficient to keep the plants upright. But the main disappointing thing is that the flowers turned out to be nothing like the cream and brown ones on the packet (variety Eastern Star) but are absolutely identical to the corn-marigolds that self-seed so readily, to the degree that I literally can't be certain which is which when it comes to stray plants. (The flower-buds are different shapes -- corn-marigolds are flatter -- and the foliage when well-fed is fleshier, with more spatulate leaves. But a scrawny stray chrysanthemum with small blooms is indistinguishable from a bright yellow corn-marigold. Which is perhaps not nearly so surprising when you notice that they are both Chrysanthemum segetum...)
I could understand it if these were second-generation chrysanthemums reverting to their wild form, but they were supposed to be tested and domesticated seed! As it is, they are simply very large and greedy corn-marigolds that are far fussier and harder to propagate and grow :-(
At the weekend I made a cycling trip to pick wild plums -- which really are cherry-sized, considerably smaller than my supposed cherry tomatoes! Fifteen miles out and twelve miles back (thanks to not getting lost so much on the return journey); two hours versus ninety minutes' cycling respectively. [Edit: mileage 2832.6] Ten miles an hour average is dependent on going well over 10mph much of the time down flat roads and a well-known route, I'm afraid... and not being tired, having a head-wind, or carrying an additional load of plums in your panniers :-p It may be 'just down the road' by motor vehicle or a brief sprint on the Tour de France, but it just underlines how completely unrealistic it is to do two forty-mile coach journeys in a day, even if using different teams of horses. Modern transport schedules completely iron out the amount of time and effort it takes to get anywhere by ordinary labour.
It seems particularly unlikely that Hertha would make any such attempt when she has a railway connection only a few miles away: it would still have taken me over an hour and three changes to make my own trip by public transport, but the Beauvais to Paris direct service had been in operation for several years by this point. The main argument against putting them all on the train for the putative 'escape from the Opera' is that I don't know that the Compagnie des Chemins de fer du Nord ran an overnight service in the 1880s (English railway companies -- save for the occasional sleeper service -- have never done so, thanks to the shorter distances involved); could you hope to catch a train from Paris-Nord circa 11:30pm and travel out a further sixty to ninety minutes to Beauvais? (Apparently there were only two trains a day on the long-distance route out to Lannion, but Raoul *does* travel overnight, having missed the morning train...) But even if you did have a convenient service available, how would you then get from the station at Beauvais town out to the relatively isolated chateau when no-one was expecting you there? Good luck finding a hire-driver in a provincial town after midnight...
(Of course, the same argument applies to hoping to be able to change horses on a heavy coach -- you could plan to travel through the night using your own vehicle, but you'd have difficulty getting any replacement teams, surely?)
Maybe the parents are conservative enough (and travel with enough luggage) to want to make the trip in their own vehicle, just as they did in the 1840s, but for 'commuter' trips like Hertha's day-trip[s] in to Paris and Raoul's apparently regular journeys to and from 'work' it would seem to make far more sense for them to drive in to Beauvais station and catch the available train service :-(
I picked five pounds of plums -- although it wasn't so much a matter of picking them, as of picking them *up*, since the fruit turned out to be almost all well out of reach (either leaning precariously over the river, or else twenty or thirty feet up in the canopy), and I had to rely on windfalls. Of course a lot of the latter went into the river as well, but I found a conveniently-located bank of ivy on the riverbank that both broke the fall of the fruit and prevented it from rolling straight in ;-) I don't think the red plums were quite ready, though I did find a few, but I got a lot of yellow ones, even though I only took the relatively undamaged windfalls. (The split ones I simply ate on the spot; the bruised or part-rotten ones were useless, especially given their likely state after a return trip in my bicycle panniers...)
Of course they then had to be processed as quickly as possible after my return home... exhausted, at eight p.m.! In the course of the next few days, I made lamb casserole with barbecue plum sauce, plum jam (only a jar and a half, and that consumed almost my whole pot of sugar), baked plums with honey and cinnamon, and German plum cake with streusel -- my initial prompt for the expedition, since the commercial plums I'd bought for my previous attempt turned out to be ridiculously gigantic (the size of navel oranges), while the recipe presumes the use of Zwetschgen, which are small enough to fit under the crumble topping!
I also added some plums inauthentically into a batch of Sicilian caponata, since that's intended to be sweet and sour; I was puzzled at how surprisingly sour all the cooked dishes turned out to be, as I'd been eating the raw fruit quite happily without any sweetening at all! I don't know if it was because only the underripe fruit survived its fall undamaged, or whether the red plums were more sour than the majority yellow -- I was certainly astonished by the deep red colour of the jam, given that most of the fruit that went into it was yellow.
Normally I'd be replenishing my jam supplies, but I can't aford to waste that much sugar, especially given that I don't even like plum jam much ;-p So I've frozen the remainder of the fruit, which I suspect is about half of it. Of course it will come out squishy, but that is probably not an issue for cooking purposes.
I did try to make to make an 'air pie' (Воздушный пирог) using the remnants of the baked plums and a spare egg white, but while it rose beautifully, it simply collapsed into a little puddle of liquid by the time it reached the table (admittedly quite some distance from the kitchen...). I'm not sure if I hadn't cooked it for long enough (the top was getting burnt), hadn't cooked it slowly enough to set, or hadn't added enough sugar or used a thick enough plum puree to give it body. I know soufflé and Yorkshire pudding recipes always collapse, but not quite as badly as that!
I notice that modern Russian recipes (unlike Mrs Molokhovets!) appear to use flour and fat in their ingredients to produce something that is much closer to a soufflé or sponge cake, rather than the meringue-and-fruit-puree combination described in my book...
http://cooking.pyramida.ua/ru/vozdushniy-pirog-s-malinoy.html
In consequence the magazine-tomatoes currently have about one and a half trusses each, which isn't much yield for such big plants. The towel-tomatoes have been doing better, probably because they started flowering earlier and were more advanced by the time the heatwave hit, although, again, of all the profusion of flowers on the last couple of trusses practically nothing has set. They all seem to have pretty much finished flowering, so we now have a month or so left for the fruit to do some actual ripening. They do seem to be quite large fruits for cherry tomatoes... and it's not just the second-generation seed reverting, because the magazine-tomatoes are just as large, if not larger.
My chillis have also been flowering profusely and not setting any fruit; weirdly, only one of the plants was setting, and I thought it might be because it was in relative shade. So I moved one of the other pots two feet to the left to stand beside it, and lo and behold, that does seem to have set its first fruit now (while the others are already a couple of inches long!) The biggest one is still covered in flowers to no apparent result (one of the things that was worrying me was that only the chilli whose flowers were setting seemed to have any actual pollen on its stamens when you brushed them), but has now, I think, successfully set one fruit -- which I hope is a sign that the weather is now right. Again, it doesn't leave a lot of time for the harvest to grow and ripen before outdoor temperatures become too low :-(
The transplants have been an almost complete success, and certainly went a long way to ensuring that the towel-tomatoes survived the heatwave better than their larger cousins. That large pot was definitely a life-saver, and may well be the reason why those three plants seem to have set fruit better than all the others. They didn't seem to suffer at all from transplant shock. The 'rescued' plants removed to make room actually look much happier in their new smaller pot that they did when competing with the corn-chamomile; even the tiny chilli that had apparently failed to grow at all since May is now starting to put on growth, although I shan't get any fruit out of it at this stage. Only one casualty: one of the two Oriental poppies transplanted in bud, which died without ever opening its flower. The other one duly produced a pink poppy, although it was pretty small.
I haven't had a lot of seed from all the coriander that I allowed to flower, so I don't know what happened to it (now lost among other plants). I did get some, probably on a one seed per plant germinated ratio -- certainly not enough to eat, but just about enough to resow next year ;-p
One head of the dill that went to seed is setting quite nicely, but not yet ready to harvest. The rocket seed pods are also surprisingly few for all the flower that it produced, and are mainly still not ripe; I did pick a couple, one of which split open and revealed two or three ripe seeds inside. Again, just about replenishment level if all the seed is viable; last year's did work, although I planted mainly the commercial seed.
On the other hand, I was very surprised that the California poppy seed which I eventually managed to collect with considerable difficulty (every time I visited, most of the seed-pods were either unripe or had already split and spilled their seed, but I eventually got a couple at the right stage to wrap in my handkerchief and take home) germinated quickly and easily, after all my previous struggles! I now have half a dozen seedlings with distinctive double-fronded seed-leaves (like other poppies, only with a pair on each side), and an unexpected late-germinating calendula, which turned up a couple of weeks after I'd given up on the second batch of calendula seed I planted. I did try to harvest some other wildflower seed from a patch I'd noticed, but I don't seem to have got any germination at all out of that.
The first calendula has thrived and been potted-on for a second time, although I have to say I would have assumed it was a forget-me-not if I hadn't been absolutely certain by the very distinctive seed-case that came up attached to one of its leaves! Currently it is making a very healthy plant, although I don't know if it will have time enough to flower before the end of the season.
My Swan River daisies, which I thinned out from three to two, have been growing quite vigorously for some months but have shown no signs of flowering as yet. The mysterious wildflower/weed that germinated in the tray of evening primroses (which are biennials, so now that last year's self-seeded succession have fought it out for dominance two of them are growing into sturdy plants but will not throw up tall flower-spikes until next year) has now reached a height of 40 inches despite growing in an inch of unfertilised soil; weeds really are amazing (just contrast with the wretched chrysanthemums!) It has developed flower-buds, but these are taking their time about opening, so I still don't know what it is ;-D
Meanwhile it is posing another problem to the washing -- I have very little drying space left, and my pillow-cases keep coming back with stains on them from plants they have brushed against...
The chrysanthemums ended up by growing into large plants which are now seriously too big for their pots; the foliage is irritating to handle, they have a faint unpleasant scent, they are a struggle to keep watered and their fleshy stems break very easily. I suspect some of the damage is from squirrels running across; some, of course, is from the pots toppling over in the wind, which they do as soon as they dry out and the weight of the compost is no longer sufficient to keep the plants upright. But the main disappointing thing is that the flowers turned out to be nothing like the cream and brown ones on the packet (variety Eastern Star) but are absolutely identical to the corn-marigolds that self-seed so readily, to the degree that I literally can't be certain which is which when it comes to stray plants. (The flower-buds are different shapes -- corn-marigolds are flatter -- and the foliage when well-fed is fleshier, with more spatulate leaves. But a scrawny stray chrysanthemum with small blooms is indistinguishable from a bright yellow corn-marigold. Which is perhaps not nearly so surprising when you notice that they are both Chrysanthemum segetum...)
I could understand it if these were second-generation chrysanthemums reverting to their wild form, but they were supposed to be tested and domesticated seed! As it is, they are simply very large and greedy corn-marigolds that are far fussier and harder to propagate and grow :-(
At the weekend I made a cycling trip to pick wild plums -- which really are cherry-sized, considerably smaller than my supposed cherry tomatoes! Fifteen miles out and twelve miles back (thanks to not getting lost so much on the return journey); two hours versus ninety minutes' cycling respectively. [Edit: mileage 2832.6] Ten miles an hour average is dependent on going well over 10mph much of the time down flat roads and a well-known route, I'm afraid... and not being tired, having a head-wind, or carrying an additional load of plums in your panniers :-p It may be 'just down the road' by motor vehicle or a brief sprint on the Tour de France, but it just underlines how completely unrealistic it is to do two forty-mile coach journeys in a day, even if using different teams of horses. Modern transport schedules completely iron out the amount of time and effort it takes to get anywhere by ordinary labour.
It seems particularly unlikely that Hertha would make any such attempt when she has a railway connection only a few miles away: it would still have taken me over an hour and three changes to make my own trip by public transport, but the Beauvais to Paris direct service had been in operation for several years by this point. The main argument against putting them all on the train for the putative 'escape from the Opera' is that I don't know that the Compagnie des Chemins de fer du Nord ran an overnight service in the 1880s (English railway companies -- save for the occasional sleeper service -- have never done so, thanks to the shorter distances involved); could you hope to catch a train from Paris-Nord circa 11:30pm and travel out a further sixty to ninety minutes to Beauvais? (Apparently there were only two trains a day on the long-distance route out to Lannion, but Raoul *does* travel overnight, having missed the morning train...) But even if you did have a convenient service available, how would you then get from the station at Beauvais town out to the relatively isolated chateau when no-one was expecting you there? Good luck finding a hire-driver in a provincial town after midnight...
(Of course, the same argument applies to hoping to be able to change horses on a heavy coach -- you could plan to travel through the night using your own vehicle, but you'd have difficulty getting any replacement teams, surely?)
Maybe the parents are conservative enough (and travel with enough luggage) to want to make the trip in their own vehicle, just as they did in the 1840s, but for 'commuter' trips like Hertha's day-trip[s] in to Paris and Raoul's apparently regular journeys to and from 'work' it would seem to make far more sense for them to drive in to Beauvais station and catch the available train service :-(
I picked five pounds of plums -- although it wasn't so much a matter of picking them, as of picking them *up*, since the fruit turned out to be almost all well out of reach (either leaning precariously over the river, or else twenty or thirty feet up in the canopy), and I had to rely on windfalls. Of course a lot of the latter went into the river as well, but I found a conveniently-located bank of ivy on the riverbank that both broke the fall of the fruit and prevented it from rolling straight in ;-) I don't think the red plums were quite ready, though I did find a few, but I got a lot of yellow ones, even though I only took the relatively undamaged windfalls. (The split ones I simply ate on the spot; the bruised or part-rotten ones were useless, especially given their likely state after a return trip in my bicycle panniers...)
Of course they then had to be processed as quickly as possible after my return home... exhausted, at eight p.m.! In the course of the next few days, I made lamb casserole with barbecue plum sauce, plum jam (only a jar and a half, and that consumed almost my whole pot of sugar), baked plums with honey and cinnamon, and German plum cake with streusel -- my initial prompt for the expedition, since the commercial plums I'd bought for my previous attempt turned out to be ridiculously gigantic (the size of navel oranges), while the recipe presumes the use of Zwetschgen, which are small enough to fit under the crumble topping!
I also added some plums inauthentically into a batch of Sicilian caponata, since that's intended to be sweet and sour; I was puzzled at how surprisingly sour all the cooked dishes turned out to be, as I'd been eating the raw fruit quite happily without any sweetening at all! I don't know if it was because only the underripe fruit survived its fall undamaged, or whether the red plums were more sour than the majority yellow -- I was certainly astonished by the deep red colour of the jam, given that most of the fruit that went into it was yellow.
Normally I'd be replenishing my jam supplies, but I can't aford to waste that much sugar, especially given that I don't even like plum jam much ;-p So I've frozen the remainder of the fruit, which I suspect is about half of it. Of course it will come out squishy, but that is probably not an issue for cooking purposes.
I did try to make to make an 'air pie' (Воздушный пирог) using the remnants of the baked plums and a spare egg white, but while it rose beautifully, it simply collapsed into a little puddle of liquid by the time it reached the table (admittedly quite some distance from the kitchen...). I'm not sure if I hadn't cooked it for long enough (the top was getting burnt), hadn't cooked it slowly enough to set, or hadn't added enough sugar or used a thick enough plum puree to give it body. I know soufflé and Yorkshire pudding recipes always collapse, but not quite as badly as that!
I notice that modern Russian recipes (unlike Mrs Molokhovets!) appear to use flour and fat in their ingredients to produce something that is much closer to a soufflé or sponge cake, rather than the meringue-and-fruit-puree combination described in my book...
http://cooking.pyramida.ua/ru/vozdushniy-pirog-s-malinoy.html
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Your description of the air pie collapsing gave me war flashbacks of my attempts to make meringues. :D I ended up with tasty and crispy flat cookies.
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I don't think I've ever seen yellow plums (mirabelles) on sale commercially, although they're quite common in the wild. (Apparently even commercially-grown ones are just as small -- not much bigger than wild damsons -- which may have something to do with it!)
Plum sauce is a good idea; the barbecue sauce recipe was a scrapbook recipe that I found on the Internet as a means of eating up an earlier glut of plums several years ago, but we had a giant chest freezer full of the things then!
The air pie reminded me more of my attempts at whipping 'aquafaba', though I've never been all that successful with meringues either. Apparently if they ooze it's a sign that you cooked them in too hot an oven, such that the outsides start to burn before the insides are actually set; I'm not sure an air pie is supposed to set, though, and the recipe does specify a hot oven...
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