Mas Que Nada

This post is mostly going to be about food, with the occasional ‘Come on England!’ because I’m so excited that we’ve reached the Euros final!

The broad beans have been serving us well and I made hummus today using the recipe from The Lazy Cat Kitchen. I did add a bit of chilli and used sesame oil, instead of olive oil.

It’s a tasty dip for charcoal crackers. (Neal, if you’re reading this I meant to say that I pinched a bit of your mint. Hope you don’t mind!)

We enjoyed this broad beans dish as part of a tapas meal. So tasty fried with onions and paprika. The red onion makes it look very different from the recipe I used from The Fiery Vegetarian.

Another tapas dish was this bean salad, with last year’s Gigantes beans, peppers, spring onions and tomatoes. Again, it looks completely different from the recipe, but was so delicious. It covered me for an additional 3 lunches too.

As well as broad beans, the courgettes are now coming thick and fast so we had my favourite courgette stuffed with cheese, onion and mixed nuts stuffed courgette for dinner last night.

We went to the allotment this afternoon, it was cool, grey but at least dry after some torrential rain yesterday. Jamie fed all the plants and I mostly played about with our new camera. It’s an Olympus Tough TG6 and look how tough… This is how you wash it!!

It’s a good handy-sized camera and is particularly good for macro shots. These are two microscope mode shots of a pumpkin flower. So far, so good.

Some of this year’s garlic had fallen over so I pulled it early and it’s dried off nicely so they went home.

I pulled the rest of the garlic today and have hung it in the polytunnel to dry - it’s quite pungent in there! I don’t know whether it’ll help or add to the amount of insect life we have in there.

So that’s what we’ve been doing to pass the time while waiting for England versus Italy; England’s first time in a final since I was one-week old! COME ON ENGLAND 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 

The fab song title means ‘more than nothing’ or ‘more than everything’ and is by Tony Hatch.

Good Day Sunshine

Look at those feathers! Interesting aren’t they? I never realised that greater (probably) spotted woodpeckers literally have polka dot feathers! Unfortunately there was a pile of them. We have a sparrow hawk which leaves piles of feathers around the site every few days.

Photo courtesy of Ted

Our HAHA chair, Ted, was lucky enough to get this photo of the sparrowhawk with some prey. It was busy protecting its dinner from a red kite overhead so Ted was able to get pretty close. Amazing. We wish it would take out rats rather than our bird life though.

We’ve been enjoying broad beans over the last couple of weeks. They’re so delicious; hot or cold. We’ve had them in these dishes: broad bean & tofu sweet chilli noodles, broad bean & ‘Vivera bacon’ gnocchi, with seitan fillets & mash, covered in parsley sauce and in allotment salads for lunch.

I actually made a cake too - I know, twice in two years - unbelievable! This one was just as a topping on strawberry & rhubarb, instead of doing a crumble. I used this recipe and it was really delicious. We don’t have any vanilla essence so I used a splosh of honey rum instead.

We had a lovely day on the allotment last Saturday. It’s our Hungerford in Bloom judging this weekend so we were doing a lot of weeding. We’re only entering Plot7 and Plot3; Plot8 is still a bit out of control 🙄

Plot3

I made another bottle waterer for the patty pan on Plot7, all the squashes and courgettes have one now, so watering is directed straight to the roots. We chop the base off the bottle, Leave the lid on and burn holes in the lid and in the cone part of the bottle so the water doesn’t pour through too quickly once it’s pushed into the ground. With trailing squash it also helps you remember where the plant’s roots are!

And can you guess what’s going to be appearing on our meal lists quite soon..?

I’m unusually writing this on a Thursday as I have 2 days off work - yay and the sky is blue-ish! We’ve been enjoying the year-late Euros, especially when England beat Germany so we’re on to the quarter finals this weekend.

So, a happy song for you to enjoy, provided by…Paul McCartney. Sing along now 🥳

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 😊

Celebration

Oh yes! Sunday evening was a time to celebrate - England scoring six goals in a World Cup match! OK, so it was Panama and they got one back, but really, it was very exciting. So we went crazy and celebrated on the allotment....

Hahaha, well, we hadn't prepared for a BBQ! But it was a beautiful hot evening to sit and watch the moon rise and the sun sink.

I picked the first of the broad beans - had them in a delicious salad for my lunch.

The plants are being destroyed by blackfly, so we're going to pull the most damaged ones, but I want to harvest a few more beans off them first.

The blackfly seem to halt the growth of the beans, but if they don't get onto the pods until they've grown a bit they don't generally affect the bean - however, they're disgusting to pick!

So, now it's time to singalong with Kool & The Gang.

Footie and Foodie

Unfortunately the flags didn't help England win their first match in Euro 2016, but there's plenty of time and plenty of other matches which will keep us away from the plot over the next 4 weeks.

We had a nice time weeding yesterday and drinking elderflower cordial, which a friend at work gave me as payment for some strawberry plants earlier in the year.

We've planted up most things now so it's pretty much time to sit back and wait for food! Especially if we get the rain that is being forecast. Our squashes and cucumbers will be ready to go out quite soon.. This is the luffah which has started developing more leaves in the greenhouse.

We were being rained on today, but it was just drizzle so we planted out the sweetcorn that had just popped up yesterday - they're tiny. We've protected them with cloches - the magpies (there was a family of 6 hanging round today) are likely to be the biggest problem, once the cobs have formed.

The Tender & True parsnips and the Primo carrots have germinated and hopefully some will survive the slugs - we sowed more than previous years. Only one coriander plant survived so I'll direct-sow some more near the carrots - well, it's traditional, even though our carrots are under enviromesh. My most recent salad sowings have been more successful than earlier sowings, so I should hopefully be eating home-grown salads quite soon...

Strawberries and radishes are our main harvest at the moment. They look pretty, but don't make much of a meal!

I was hoping to get 15 tall sunflowers but only 6 have germinated so far. However with some of the short sunflowers, the area we've planned for them should look pretty.

When the Wind Blows...

...in the right direction we can hear Hungerford Town Football Club from the allotment. I rather like hearing the occasional whoop, whistle and boo! Our Marsh Lane site was the location of the first football ground for Hungerford - those poor players with all our stones! Here's a map from 1898 - from the excellent http://maps.nls.uk/index.html

Today we heard cheers and when we got home we saw that Hungerford had won the play-off and as a result are promoted to the Southern League South, just 5 steps away from the Premier League :) CONGRATULATIONS!!

We actually got to the plot before the rain arrived and Jamie spent time adding lime to Plot3, where the cabbages are going to be grown this year. It may help against the horsetail.. We'll see...

Mangetout seedlings

Then we both ended up sheltering from the rain and gales in the greenhouse. 

The following have now been sowed:

  Radish Rats Tails 

  Apache spring onions

  Little Gem lettuce

  Salad leaf

  Calendula

  Asparagus Pea

  Paris Silverskin onions

  Common Valerian

  Benchmaster runner beans

So that's a mix of flowers and veg. Some are in the greenhouse, some are in raised beds and some are at home under the grow-lamp.

We left in pouring rain. Perhaps May isn't quite as bright as I thought yesterday! But, it is bluebell time! Hooray!

A Lapse in Blogging

A few weeks of not feeling tip-top and now the World Cup aren't helping Plot 7 (or this blog) to look like a happy growing spot :-(

I'm just working on a summary of where we're at, but here's where we're at right now - Come on England!!

Come on England!

Had a few hours on the plot in the sunshine (!) today. As intended, I removed all the brown leaves from the celeriac and weeded throughout.

Spot of weeding before the England match

It had rained so much overnight that it wasn't possible to dig.

Jamie's planning what to do with the compost which will go under the rhubarb. Our compost has rather a lot of roots in which really don't want to break down very quickly so we're going to have to remove them before we can use the compost which is also rather wet and heavy at present - it needs a bit of work... But look how far it's degraded since the last photo!

Stupid Wind!

Quick visit to the plot yesterday afternoon - while the crazy wind was still blowing. Loads of debris from trees over the roads and pavements.
When we got to the plot we saw that our netted sprout cage had blown into the hedge (again!). It seems to be just too tall so catches the wind easily. We've taken it down a level while the sprouts are still small enough to fit. Our potato plants had been blown flat and one had it's stems broken but hopefully there's enough greenery left for it to survive that breakage. And one of our runner beans had snapped, but luckily just above a joint so that should be fine too. We tied the other runners to the bean poles to stop them blowing about so much.
There were a few other casualties around site but nothing too disastrous from what we saw.
Then we put the England flag up for the Euro 2012 championship - COME ON ENGLAND!