Autumn Leaves

Halloween tomorrow and the clocks have returned to Greenwich Mean Time so we got an extra hour in bed. We’ve spent a couple of hours concentrating this afternoon… carving pumpkins is a serious business 🤭

Only one of those is home-grown this year but we have to have one each; one for the plot and one for home. I’ve had a 4-day weekend which has been great. We had a lovely walk at Bowdown Woods in Newbury on Friday. It was warm and sunny. I was hoping to find some fly agarics but they were all past their best, nibbled or booted.

I photographed this little lone mushroom at the allotment. I’m not sure what variety it is, it’s looked like that all weekend. I’ll see if it changes over the next few days, if it isn’t completely eaten.

At the weekend the temperatures reached 21° so we were in tee shirts on the allotment. I wonder if this is weather we’re going to get used to for future years. The weeds are loving it, especially with rainy mornings and sunny afternoons. The garlic has germinated already, in just 4 weeks - that’s fast, I normally find it quite slow to germinate, which is why we’ve ended up with two plantings some previous years!

Jamie sowed the broad beans yesterday. Aquadulce Claudia We don’t want them to grow too quickly this side of Christmas but we wanted to get them sown before the really cold weather arrives… if it does arrive. The little cloches are for mouse protection.

They’re far enough apart so we can put net cloches over once they’ve germinated.

I cleared the raised bed. I’m planning on it being a herb bed from next year. That’s lettuce at the end of the bed. Slugs have avoided it so far - famous last words; they ruined my Chinese cabbage ☹️

Ivan showed me how to trim back the bearded iris where a fungal disease has damaged the leaves. They’re sprouting new plants around the crown. That’s spread a lot since it was planted last year; the corms need 7hours of sunshine a day to be happy and flower.

Talking of Ivan, he gave us some of his dried peppers. They’re not chilli, so I look forward to adding them to some dishes over the next few months. And our peppers in the polytunnel are finally changing colour! They’re yellow at the moment.

This was a meal we had in the week - mostly home-grown (apart from the plant-based steak strips) including some of our Salad Blue potatoes, roughly chopped and roasted.

Have a fun and spooky Halloween, here are a few more pics from our Autumn woodland walk. The song title is provided by the Goo Goo Dolls.

Death of Democracy

Look at those interesting clouds as we left the allotment Sunday afternoon -  I zoomed in on my phone which is why the foreground looks a bit weird. We got home just before a storm hit, with a bit of thunder and lightning. Last week was rainy with more than 30mm being measured, but it’s remained warm and on Sunday it was 17°.

It was a clearing weekend. On Saturday I cleared the sweetcorn plot, although the already-full compost bins need to shrink a bit before that lot can be added - it shouldn't take long especially if it stays warm. On Sunday we cleared the flower bed. The zinnia, cosmos, marigolds, chrysanthemum, lobelia and plenty of weeds were taken home for the Council green bin collection. The flower bed now has several perennial plants which should spread by next year and gaps can be filled with annuals, including a million nigella seedlings! The concern with perennials is that the weeds (I'm thinking of bindweed) can take hold and are more difficult to clear, but we'll try to keep them under control in the meantime.

Fellow plotholder, Aimee, is resigning her plot at the end of the year so she was offering her flower plants to people - in case the new plotholder decided to just dump them. I accepted a dianthus Doris, which is a lovely pink and has that pretty blue-green foliage, and this delphinium which has managed to avoid the frost. It has a silver/grey tint to it which the camera hasn't quite managed to pick up. I'm not sure what variety it is, but it's very beautiful.

Talking of beautiful flowers, some of Ivan’s irises have had a new flush of blooms. I love this one, what a fabulous colour!

That damp photo was taken the same morning that the Sun popped out for two minutes and bathed the site in this golden dawn light. Obviously the photo doesn’t do it justice - they rarely do!

The trees and hedgerow are looking amazing in their Autumn colour and the spindleberry (Euonymus europaeus) is showing off its inner seed - I so love those colours together! We have several spindle trees growing along our allotment site hedge and the leaves turn a fabulous red in Autumn.

Jamie pulled the last of our Salad Blue potatoes yesterday. He has plans for our Halloween meal next week. There were plenty of tubers; they’re rather scabby but seem to have escaped slug damage- unlike half of the remaining beetroot. I’m assuming that’s what has caused this damage though the pests I found at the crime scene were wood lice - surely not…

Thank goodness some have escaped this massacre so I still have some to eat! I pulled a parsnip - luckily I wasn’t expecting a prize winner 😄 but there’s enough flesh there for my needs. The Spring onions are still good and very pungent!

And this is what the beetroot (not the ones in the photo!), parsnip and spring onions became - served with a beanburger and fried chard.

I started with clouds and I’ll finish with clouds, this time early morning clouds with a sliver of a moon. Such amazing colours - when I saw it I thought 'someone could easily paint that, not me though'. It's a shame but I know my skillset and art isn't included!

And now, on the day we welcome our third Prime Minister in 2 months ... An excuse to share one of my favourite songs by Kula Shaker. Possibly the only good thing about having a historically appalling period of Government, although it should mean there will be a general election soon to actually let the people decide who represents us.

And It's Still Alright

I made these very tasty carrot and bean burgers on Saturday. I used this recipe for my dried borlotti and runner beans from last year and fresh carrot and shallots. Our shallots actually turned out better than we initially thought, so we’ve been using them instead of onions for a few weeks now. I used a little turmeric and cumin rather than coriander and cumin. I didn’t bother adding the flour, they held together well.

Now that we’re halfway through October we’ve not been visiting the plot every morning, it just depends if we need to pick anything, water the tomatoes and peppers or close down the polytunnel. Thursday morning we were swathed in a thick fog - thank goodness for no commute!

Two days before that we had a proper frost and another day to be grateful for working from home. We had to scrape ice off the car and just look at the grass on site. The lowest temperature in the zipped down polytunnel had been -2.8°

That finished off the zinnias and most other things which weren't in sheltered areas on the plot. We noticed that the hedge offered protection from frost as did Ivan's grapevine.

We've almost managed to eat all the sweetcorn this year - probably just one reasonable one left on the plants for this week. And we're taking Crimson Plum tomatoes home as they ripen (or get close). The Lizzano outdoor tomato got frosted so no more tiny toms from that bush - it's yield has been a bit disappointing this year with some of the tomatoes being the size of blackcurrants and a lot splitting - obviously the weather is getting the blame for that as it usually produces delicious cherry tomatoes.

The Love-Lies-Bleeding has also not enjoyed getting so cold. I was thinking of harvesting some of the 'grain' but I don't think I will now - I'll leave it for the birds, though I haven't seen anyone enjoying it so far.

One plant that hasn't been upset by the frost is our cavolo nero. I've seen it looking good in the frost on other people's plots in previous years. The white fly are crazy on site and you just have to touch any brassica leaf to be surrounded by the tiny moths. It seems that they are frost-resistant too.

I stripped a few leaves off yesterday and after much shaking to rid it of whitefly and a good wash I blanched it then stir fried it for a bit with olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. It was a delicious addition to my all-home-grown meal last night. I can see that it's far superiour to chard... It doesn't appear to have been affected by caterpillars/slugs so I wonder if it can be successfully grown outside of the netting - I see a few people on site have done this, I shall have to inspect their leaves!

Yesterday was warm when we visited in the afternoon. As with most visits now it was mostly about tidying. Jamie did some strimming, weeding and clearing the zinnia from the raised bed while I did a bit of digging. I do enjoy digging. Look how dry the earth is, we've had some rain but it disappears quickly. We haven't worked out our plan for next year so we're not sure what's going in this plot in front of the broad beans, but I wanted to clear all the grass and other weeds that were threatening a take-over, as you can see from around the Love-Lies-Bleeding. I couldn't bring myself to pull up the self-seeded broad beans and one of them has flowers on.

In the week Jamie bought me a celeriac and chestnuts to make soup. Unfortunately we had two apples left over and seeing this recipe, I thought I may as well use them up. The apple made it far too sweet for my taste and rather ruined what would have been a delicious soup 😒
My friend from work suggested adding chilli to detract from the sweetness. It worked, to a certain extent ...

So, another weekend passes in a blink of an eye 😔 Back to work, oh, I'm already here! Have a good week all and enjoy the song title provided by Nathanial Rateliff, because the year may be flying by but, no matter what's going on in this mad country we're currently living in, so far, it's still alright...

Round Here

Our allotment planet! I do love these 'little planet' style photos and I found instructions on this site. I thought you needed a special bit of kit to make these images. You must have seen them before, there are some amazing images on-line. I find them very pleasing 😌

Here are some other things that have pleased me over the last week.

Like that beautiful clear blue sky on Saturday and a robin singing his little heart out in the ash tree by our plot.

A trug full of veg, including my tiny butternut squash and some baby patty pans, for delicious garlic-roasted vegetables, which covered one evening meal and two lunches.

Opening the curtains to a beautiful sunny October daybreak so Jamie and I could have a plot barbecue with sweetcorn straight from the plant (sorry I dropped yours in the ash, Jamie).

Seeing the bright pink spindle berries in the allotment hedge, knowing that their next phase is to reveal their amazing orange fruits.

And, did I mention this little chap serenading us all afternoon?

Remembering to zip down the polytunnel so our tomatoes and peppers didn’t get nipped by the frost on Saturday night, it sank to -0.5° and hit plants outside the polytunnel, though not the everything - surely these are the last of the courgettes?! That pleases Jamie 🤭

Pulling a single Sarpo Mira plant on Sunday and getting all these great spuds.

Enjoying fiery Autumn skies as sunrise and sunset get closer together. 

Oh, and did I mention the robin and that blue sky? We sat for hours just soaking up the rays while we contemplated doing some deadheading (pointless, the frost got them the next day) or weeding. And Ivan came to join us for a chat about his wine-making - his first batch of wine from his allotment grape vine is in preparation!

And yesterday I found that Little Planet tutorial which turned this panorama into that tiny world.

It's just converted using a bit of image manipulation. Here's the 'world' from a different angle.

I hope you find some cheer in your world, have a good week. Song title provided by the excellent Counting Crows.

Golden Skans

I made the rosehip jelly - it was a bit of a palaver to be honest. Two little jars of gold - they look great, but I think they may just be super-sweet and maybe not worth the effort. We’ll find out in a couple of months… I used this recipe from LarderLove. We ended up having to buy the apples and then today someone has left bagfuls of crab apples on the freebies shelf - they would have been perfect for it. 🙄

I only had 250g of rosehips so used about 500g apples and 250g sugar plus a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice. I filtered it through coffee filter bags (I didn’t want to risk getting the itchy hairs in the jelly- yuk!) The juice was cloudy throughout the process so I was pleased when it went clear during the final part of boiling the juice with the sugar. All that sugar!

I picked the last of the squash as the temperature was forecast to fall last week. It did and reached 0.6°. I’m sorry that we only got those two Honeyboat squash, they’re usually one of my favourite squash varieties. The peppers have been delicious fried up on cheese toastie-lunches and there are plans to eat the remaining ones this week. They had to be picked because I snapped a branch off the plant by mistake. There are probably another 8 big ones that we’re still hoping will go red on the plant.

And finally the tomatoes are going red in (what’s now) the squash store. The cold nights have gone for the timebeing and we’ve had some good heavy showers. The sweetcorn is delicious but the pollination is a bit hit and miss as you can see.

We had a lovely few hours on a mostly-sunny 17° site this afternoon. My Czechmate Wight garlic arrived from DT Browns yesterday, so I planted it out. It’s a hardneck variety so hopefully we’ll get garlic scapes to eat ahead of the bulbs - two harvests from one planting 🙂

The two bulbs gave us 31 cloves! They’re on Plot3 by the leeks, in front of the squash tunnel. I’ve planted some of them a bit deeper this year, in the hope for bigger bulbs.

The squash tunnel is useful for storing the canes off the ground over Winter and we’re thinking we’ll grow our beans up the tunnel next year and have the squash elsewhere for a year.

The slugs have arrived with the rain and have found my Chinese cabbage, which is annoying! They don’t seem so keen on the pak choi so far. Jamie’s lettuce are still tiny but should provide us with a bit of salad in a few weeks if they don’t get decimated…

The chard was looking good in the sunshine. I’ll be having some more of that made into ‘crispy seaweed’, it’s my preferred way to eat chard now that the leaves are bigger.

You may remember the ugly warty Desiree potatoes from my last post. We’re pleased to report that they made delicious mashed potato and we’ll be having more tonight. We expect to have a few more courgettes this week and I’m hoping to have some roast veggies, including the smallest butternut squash - unless the courgettes get bigger than expected!

The zinnia and other flowers are still looking okay and still need deadheading, but windy weather in the week caused a bit of damage, so I have a bunch of flowers beside me. The Love-Lies-Bleeding is going to drop everywhere I think.

So that’s another weekend over, another new month begins and we had another COVID jab last week - my 6th one… I hope you can all have a good week. Here’s a great song by the Klaxons with ‘golden’ in the title, but don’t ask me what ‘skans ’ are, perhaps ‘scams’ is more apt in England at the moment.