Orto di Casa Cecconi

My first allotment, and then one thing leading to another…

L’orto di Casa Cecconi Plants Recipes Me & Kew One Year at Wisley

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  • Preserving

    aJuly is the time of endless bounty of soft fruits. This year it was raspberry first, followed by gooseberry and redcurrant is just coming now. Pound after pound of raspberry for dessert were getting a bit too much, so I have frozen some for later on (trick to keep them whole I discovered is to…

  • The warmest, sunniest harvest day ever

    It is the first time since I have had the allotment that I can pick onions and garlic and leave them in the sun to dry. The crop is not massive, so it’s unlikely I will be self-sufficient in garlic as I had planned. I must have left it too long in the ground, as the…

  • Raspberries and foxes

    4 pounds’ raspberries in two days: that’s a proper gluttony! My husband made a tasty sauce (with flour and vinegar) for our chicken tonight and I am trying to freeze some individually… It took ages to pick them, and while I was inspecting the last few plants last nigh around 10 I saw the fox I…

  • Waiting for the Eurostar…

    … to go home and see what’s happened to the allotment over four hot days without my care – hopefully we have had some rain in the night as forecasted, but i’m especially worried for the greenhouse. If they have not wilted, though, I would expect plants will have grown massively! Speed of growth is…

  • Strawberry spinach

    Chenopodium capitatum, of the family of weed goosefoot and the seed quinoa, is a pretty little plant that produces edible leaves (to be eaten as spinach – cooked, or raw but in moderation) and red berries at each leaf node, which American Indians used as a dye, and when ripe should taste like wild strawberries.…

  • GO experiments update

    The salad cardboard collars are regaining ground as slugs have annihilated one unprotected head. Tree spinach have got leafminers, though. — Although I had to spend the last two evenings behind a watering hose (which you know I hate) the heat has pushed all the crops and last night I had salad made with my…

  • How I came to make elderflower cordial

    Wood pigeons like to land on the gooseberry bush, all staked and netted as it is, in search of fruit, but they only manage to break branches and make all the berries fall on the ground. I recovered a good bowl-full, but they are too hard to eat yet and too few for jam-making, so…

About Me

M.Paola M.Paola, that’s me

I got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started gI got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started growing my own food. Learning as I went along was not enough, so I studied horticulture. Faced with the horticultural warfare, I became a conscientious objector: I use no chemicals and support organic principles and regulations.

Brexit gave me a new life in the Netherlands, three new plots by a nature reserve and an MSc in sustainable food systems.

I write in my personal capacity and, as a language perfectionist and a non native speaker, I keep reviewing my entries’ text for clarity.

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