The Soul Patch Blog: September 2012

Chutney Day!

Lydia's lovely brother and my wonderful brother in law who is a chef at one of our local restaurants 'The Church Street Townhouse' let us in on his tips for making three different types of chutney out of what we had left over from our season this year. A great oppourtunity to make up batches of what you have left or a glut of and best of all keeps for ages!

Here is Jamie and the Head chef at the Townhouse Nick Rowberry cooking at the

Stratford-Upon-Avon food festival last weekend ;)

Our Heirloom tomatoes were not all that great this season, i dont think many people have had large crops this year from what i have seen and it all seemed very late but we did have a few so we have kept all the seeds and are going for a bumper crop next year (isnt it always about next year!)

Diced and sliced

Jamie and his lovely girlfriend Natalie helping out with the onions that made us all cry!

Saving the seeds

We decided in the end to make two chutneys and a jam, we ended up with a red onion and balsamic chutney, an apple and spice and all things nice and a heirloom tomato and apache chili jam that is pretty spicy but so so tasty! We are hoping that by doing little trials like these we can eventually start selling from our farm shop once our recipes have become perfected, in the meantime i will be chomping at the bit waiting before christmas to come so we can crack out the cheese and biscuits!

Soul Patch Summer Blog

First of all apologies for being off the radar on the old blog, it only dawned on me the other day how long it was since i checked in and that was at the beginning of our first season!

Well if we could have started a new business in any year and with us being us it would have had to be the year we saw the driest winter, the coldest and wettest summer in a hundred years, and all of the usual steps to growing we were so keen to use that we had spent all winter learning did not apply as no one had ever seen a season like it. We were featured in the Stratford Herald which helped out a lot with new customers and a lot of people came down to the Soul Patch shows after reading about our venture.

Our picture in the Herald

We did it though, and although it was far from perfect we were able to do everything we set out to do and sell almost everything we grew which certainly was not bad for a new business in its first year and on a steep learning curve.
As an unexpected twist we managed to develop a great relationship with our favorite local restaurant No.9 on Church Street supplying them with our Elephant garlic, which Wayne designed a lamb dish around for the national chef awards and it went on to stay on the menu :)

Elephant Garlic 2012

Our sage flowers this year

It would seem everytime i write on here about finally securing somewhere for our business to grow it has gone terribly wrong and it has not worked out. One thing that we really didnt count on when we first started was that land to let is rarer than del boy paying the taxman! After 5 dissapointments we were forced to go a bit further than stratford and have landed on Mickleton as our home on a piece of land known locally for the last 30 odd years as Raspberry corner. It is just under an acre and has been either allotments since the 14th century and later being used to grow an abundance of raspberries with a farm shop on site. It is just between Mickleton and Weston Sub-Edge on the Broadway road and is a busy old road for passing traffic!

We also had the great honour of being asked to do the flowers for the the Dirty Duck pub in Stratford this year and as they are one of the most well known pubs in our town we recieved so many compliments and other new business from new customers who had seen our display and were all keen to get the same look!

Jubilee Flower display Dirty Duck 2012

Just one of our beautiful baskets sold this year!

So with our new piece of land being 10 miles away from where we are living at the moment and now knowing how much our plants need looking after we have decided it would be for the best to make a move that way and towards the sensational cotswolds. Us being us we thought it would be a great idea to go for a camping weekend and have a look around the villages and do some 'research' on the best villages with the best pubs! We also found our way to the Cotswold wildlife park and had a look around some beautiful gardens and sown meadows and very much look forward to moving out that way when a few more things are sorted out :)