Tag Archives: nature

Potatoes grow fruit that look like tomatoes – who knew?

Posted in Gardening/Permaculture, Simple Life by

You learn something new every day. At the veg social enterprise I’m involved in, all the potato plants have long since died, but they’ve left these funny looking little fruits behind. Apparently it’s rare, but potato flowers will become fruit in the right conditions. The little fruits contain seeds that can be harvested and stored like tomatoes, and sown the next year. This will produce lots of new varieties of potatoes. Whatever you do don’t eat the fruit – they’re poisonous!

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I’m going to try it out next year. Have you ever done this? Let me know how it went. I’ve also got some beans stored, and apparently they’ll develop into new varieties too. Waste not, want not, n all that.

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Picking brambles: freely available fruit

Posted in Recipes, Simple Life by

I notice that fruit on the bramble that’s happily set root in my garden is about to ripen. Free fruit, with absolutely no effort to me. Great. No way is it a weed.

I’ll have lots more too, soon. Near where I live, there is a great big quarry, which has been overrun by brambles. Remarkably last year, two weeks after they started to ripen, there was still an abundance of blackberries to pick. I had seen a few Polish guys having a go, and many of the good berries were out of my reach. But there were still plenty to be had, and they are totally free.

I picked 1kg of brambles in total. I froze about a quarter of these, made another quarter into a smoothie, and have made apple and blackberry jam with the rest. I’ll put up the recipes at some point. This year I’d like to make blackberry cordial, too. The latter two are a great way to reuse jam jars and bottles, part of my quest to have no waste.

You’ve got to watch out for the creepy crawlies, and give the fruit a good wash. I avoided all brambles that were lower than the height of a dog, even if they were particularly plump… for obvious reasons.

It did make my hands go purple, but the dog loved prowling around while I was busy!