Seasonal Firsts

It's been rainy and sunny throughout the day - torrential downpours then bright blue skies. We just a quick visit to the plot this afternoon to pick some food for a couple of dinners and to make some soup for lunches.
I was going to make cream of onion soup but once I got to the allotment I opted for my old favourite carrot and coriander as it meant I didn't have to buy any extra ingredients. This will be the first I've made from this season's carrots, so I picked 3 biggish ones, a nice big onion and some coriander leaves - the coriander has well and truly gone to seed so the leaves aren't really suitable though their smell is very strong.

Coriander, carrots, onion, french beans, courgette, broad beans & runners

We picked the first of our runners; only a handful, we're going to have mixed beans with our Quorn fillets and chivey-Kestrel mash tonight - something has been getting into the dwarf french beans, nibbling through the pods but not doing much damage.

We managed to get away before the next downpour started.

Sunshine and Showers

We had a nice couple of hours on the plot this morning - pretty warm and sunny but the wind was rather strong. Everything had grown a lot over the last 3 days! The sweet peas are looking very pretty and there are some runner beans growing long!

We pulled some potatoes:
The kestrel plant looked a bit sickly and clearly wasn't happy. We got 3 reasonably sized tubers (400g) from it, but the blight had got down into one of the tubers  :-(
The Chopin plant was the one that I had pilfered from before, but still got two lovely big healthy looking tubers (500g).
The Red Duke of York plant wasn't very happy looking but produced a fine harvest of lovely red spuds (1.3kg). It's been such a wet year, the tubers were caked in hard mud. It's hard to learn much about the different varieties this year, but Chopin really do seem to have been particularly successful... (hope I haven't spoken too soon!)

There are 4 Courgettes in the plant-uh-oh it's started :-) A couple of the sweetcorn have the male flower developing - the plants are very short though.

The kohl rabi has germinated and more of the broad beans needed cloching. I also had to cloche some parsley which I planted out last week - something has been nibbling it. We saw a tiny little froglet hopping about so hopefully he'll stay near our plot - he was smaller than the one we saw previously (only about 3cm big - aw!)

Took the netting off the parsnips as they were getting rather cramped.

We did some weeding, dead-heading and turned the compost before having to dash off because the light pitter-patter of rain turned into a torrential downpour. And look at the crowd we found in the communal shed!  :-)

Tony, Gill, Geoff and Kerry, with Jane & Derek hidden

Mmmm, lunch

With the few slices of beetroot which were left over I had a lovely lunch; with homegrown chard (red and yellow veins), spring onions, radish, lettuce and GranoVita vegetarian pepperoni - lovely!

Pickled Beetroot

Jamie prepared and pickled the beetroot today. We always bake them wrapped in foil, with the stems still attached to prevent bleeding; this keeps as much flavour in the beet as possible.
After an hour and a half at 190° they're ready and need removing from their skins. It usually slides off pretty easily but can get a bit messy!

25g of sugar was dissolved into 350ml of slightly heated Aspall Classic Red Wine vinegar. After the beets have cooled we like to cut them with the ridge slicer and Jamie packed them into the sterilised jar and covered them with the vinegar.

 There! Ready for Christmas!

It's August already!

What on earth has happened to the year? Can't believe it's August already - having said that, the weather is feeling a bit autumnal in the mornings :-(

We popped up the plot in the evening just to pick a couple of beets for Jamie to pickle. The beets are Moneta - a monogerm variety so only one beet per seed. The skin is very dark, which we think is due to the peaty-mix that we put in the raised bed where these were plucked from. Jamie found them to be much sweeter than ones grown in the normal earth last year, so should be perfect for pickling in red wine vinegar (should be able to post some details once Jamie has done the work tomorrow!)

I picked a few bits of salad - all the lettuces in the cloches have gone to seed but some of the leaves are still edible and I chop the chard leaves up to use as salad leaf too. Also (a bit cheeky) someone had left some lettuces for planting on the freebies table - I took a few of them to eat too ;-)

The squashes as expanding but the next two courgettes aren't quite big enough for picking just yet. It's rained today and yesterday so not much watering except for the tomatoes and the cucumber. Blight is pretty much all over the site. Lots of us have chopped the haulms down - we've only done our first earlies but will have to keep an eye on the other varieties too. We put bottle-cloche protection over the broad beans which have just sprouted; but no sign of the kohl rabi or carrots yet...

Then we had a long chat with Malcolm, discussed pickling and the Olympics, among other things, then went home while it was still light and not raining.