World in Motion

Another bonus for home-working. We visited the allotment for an early lunch and, although it was mostly cloudy, we saw the partial solar eclipse. In fact, the cloud helped with the photo.

I do enjoy an astronomical phenomenon!

It’s been a warm, moving on to hot, week and the weekend has been positively sweltering. We’ve spent lots of hours on the allotment and our runner beans are finally in the ground.

Those are Borlotti. Jamie has added wind protection round the Scarlet Empire as they’re a bit susceptible at the front of the plot, at least until they’ve got a hold on the poles.

The courgettes are freed from their mesh protection and seem to be happy. And, so far, all my squashes are intact. The plots are needing a lot of water at the moment, with no rain for a while.

It’s too hot for some of the seeds we sowed last week. The purple sprouting broccoli germinated, but succumbed to the heat yesterday and had collapsed. We’ll re-sow at home. Our peppers have been growing on at home for a while but they’re in the (tidy) polytunnel now in growing bags: Chelsea, Milena and Denver grafted plants.

Harvests are just starting - pretty meagre helpings but for lunch I had a nice salad with cold blanched broad beans, mangetout, salad leaf and chives and we’ve had a few strawberries. We’re hoping for more broad beans later this week. There they are… nearly ready.

The rhubarb has rather collapsed, not sure whether it’s the heat or because it’s so huge. We’re looking forward to this rhubarb and strawberry mixture with ice cream for puddings - it looks prettier before it’s fully cooked and smells amazing.

You may have noticed the England flag is in position - for Euro2020, postponed from last year. We do love a footie tournament and England won against Croatia this afternoon so we’re off to a good start 👏. So the song is one of the best football songs ever, by New Order and has a spurious link to the eclipse too 😊

A Smile over the Allotment

We got up the plot at about 8am to set up the cameras and wait for the eclipse, which was due to start at 8:25 with the maximum coverage (about 87% for us) about an hour later. It was cloudy...and although very pleasant - listening to the birds, drinking coffee and eating hot cross buns - we did actually want to see some celestial activity!

Then, the clouds thinned and there it was! Very exciting! That was at about 9:20.

The clouds continued to get in the way, but were thin enough that we could see the shining crescent and a lot of the time we didn't need our eclipse glasses - this is at maximum coverage.

It definitely went significantly colder and dimmer. The birds went quiet and we saw more sitting in the trees so presumably they were roosting. A great experience!

From then on, the clouds thinned until it turned into a glorious sunny morning. For the next hour we kept our special eclipse viewing glasses on hand to watch the moon's shadow slowly move away from the sun.

We walked home feeling very pleased to have seen such a good show! And found our onion sets have been delivered! Then, later on, our Tenerife potatoes were delivered! What an excellent Spring equinox!