Painkiller

After a busy working week it was great to have two days entirely laptop-free and to be out in the fresh air. I'm looking forward to early morning pre-work plot visits, but not quite at that stage yet!

Saturday was very windy with Storm Otto passing by to the north of us. It was grey and damp but it wasn’t cold or maybe that was because we were trench-digging. We managed to finish off the bean tunnel preparation which we started last weekend.

I did some clearing on the HAHA wildlife plot including cutting back the buddleja and mallow. I didn't want to clear all of the dead groundcover as we're due a coldspell so the wildlife needs some protection, but there are some unwanted weeds on there that need clearing otherwise they'll take over.

Now that I've cut back the old flag iris leaves I can see new growth in the bog garden. A few bulbs are emerging and perhaps with a bit more light there will be some flowers next weekend.
Meanwhile, Jamie weeded the brassica cage on Plot3. I had the last of the Cavolo Nero with a gnocchi meal at the weekend, but we're still waiting for Purple Sprouting Broccoli harvests - we were tucking into it in January last year.

You can see by my shadow that that photo was taken on Sunday which was a marvellous sunny day. Such a contrast to the day before - Otto must have blown all the clouds away!

The hedgerow was full of birds with 3 robins competing for our mealworms along with the obligatory magpies, dunnocks, long-tailed tits, a male bullfinch. Kites, gulls and buzzards were overhead.

Such a beautiful blue sky and lots of plotholders turned out to make the most of it. We were all pleased and amazed at how warm it was for a February day and so welcome on a weekend! It's good to see areas of plots looking loved and ready for a new year of growing.

That's the flower garden in front of our bench. It has a few perennials just beginning to show fresh growth and the ever-present nigella seedlings. There are bulbs growing in most of those pots but only one tiny iris flower on show at present. The Christmas rose Hellebore that my sister gave me is still full of flower at home though and there are plenty of snowdrops around, just not on our plots!

I’m very happy to see that my Egyptian onions have sprouted in the polytunnel. I hope a slug doesn't discover them, they're only tiny at the moment.

The last bit of clearing and digging that I did was round our rhubarb - we should have split it before now. I hope that's my last year of saying that and we actually do it! It's not budding yet but we'll give it some manure and that may get it started. At least it's free of nigella and weeds for a while.

After a few more chats with plotholders we took our aching bodies home. What a lovely weekend. Not exactly relaxing, but very welcome work - ooh my legs! Hence the song provided by Turin Brakes - enjoy.

Different World

On Saturday we decided the time had come to deal with our dalek compost bins on Plot3. Three of them have been composting away for at least two years with new material being added on top but no stirring - it’s quite awkward to get in to mix the contents.

I will try to stir it a bit more in future, there were definite layers of wet and dry which could have broken down more with a bit of human intervention.

The worms, woodlice, slugs and centipedes had done a pretty good job though. Compost worms always look so lovely and clean.

The un-composted contents were moved on to a spare compost, along with the worms, as starters for the next lot of compost. We managed to extract the lovely newly created soil through the little door at the bottom for a bit of sorting - how did all that plastic get in there?!

So as the sun was going down on Saturday (5:15) we left the plot with 3 compost bins ready and waiting for re-filling and 10 bags of humus-rich soil to go in the bottom of the bean trenches. Aah, home-produced compost is very satisfying.

That meant that Sunday was trench-digging day. The squash tunnel is becoming a bean tunnel this year. Digging trenches is such hard work, especially after a few lazy Winter months of barely moving - we took it in turns to dig! The Sun didn't show, which was probably a good thing, but the birds were full of song around us.

We only managed one trench, the other side can wait till next weekend. Does it look like it's getting thinner at the other end..? Hmm, must be something to do with perspective *ahem*

On the breaks between digging we weeded the garlic and leek plot - the leeks are very poor; there are only a few there which are any good unfortunately.

The garlic looks ok so far, but they've got a good few months more to grow so I won't count my chickens!

Talking of chicken, well, definitely not chicken actually "What the cluck" - I prefer to call it 'Cluck' - a plant-based alternative to chicken. I enjoyed two meals at the weekend using Cluck and chestnuts.

Cluck is too chicken-y for Jamie so he has plant-based burgers, which I find too beef-y! I added teriyaki sauce along with our home-grown cavalo nero in the top meal - delicious.

And this second one includes onions and a parsley sauce - Jamie didn't know what he was missing out on 😏 This is served with Sticky Rice which is so white you can hardly see it. I love it - 1 minute in the microwave, perfect.

A final close-up of a potato chit - they're so alien aren't they? They do amuse me 😊 and a segway to this song by Iron Maiden.

Celebrate

January sped by and on the non-rainy evenings we enjoyed some amazing skies. The red stripes of this one were so much more dramatic than the photo shows - so beautiful. January offered us two excuses for celebration. Burns Night provided us with a delicious Stahly's veggie haggis and Jamie's version of neeps & tatties, followed by a Scottish film (this year, Shallow Grave).

Then the Lunar New Year, welcoming the year of the Rabbit, meant we could have a tasty mix of pan-Asian (I don't think we can claim it was chinese) fare, including these Itsu bao buns which are the most delicious! Followed by Chinese film Lian Bian (King of Masks).

Perhaps that's why the usually longest month of the year disappeared in the blink of an eye and now we're into February. It's started mild and not too wet so we've had two weekends of some allotment work. Jamie cleared the strawberry bed which has been entirely swamped by bindweed over the last couple of years. We're going to grow the strawberries in growbags this year in the hope that we can recover the area underneath. And I planted up the Egyptian onions (aka tree onions, walking onions) - look how tiny they are!

I should have planted them on arrival but the weather was too cold and unfortunately some of the bulblets were past their best - I hope I at least get a few to grow. I found out about them in a book I received at Christmas from my nephew - it's a little set of old Gardeners Companion books by Dr Shewell-Cooper (I can't help reading it in a Mr Cholmondley-Warner voice, from Harry Enfield 😃). I've also found this useful advice online from the LovelyGreens blog.

The last weekend in January meant it was the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch weekend. Unfortunately the Sunday wasn't a sunny day and the birds weren't very active, but we saw a few. All of these are regulars at the moment and there are actually 3 robins who are getting very aggressive with each other.

At the weekend the weather was quite reasonable, especially in the Sun, and like many other plotholders we decided the time had come to do a bit of ground preparation. Most of the beds look like this... weeds and lots of grass growth. The wet weather has made it easy to pull most of those weeds though and after a couple of hours both days we now have a cleared potato plot with sulphur sprinkled and dug in.

Aaah, freshly cleared earth is such a happy sight! We seem to have created a cliff at one end of the plot - I'm sure that'll settle a bit 😆

It was lovely talking to some of our new plotholders and old ones who we haven't seen since before Christmas. Ivan gave us a couple of plants for our flower bed - an iris (obviously) and phlox. They'll wait a bit before going out as we're expecting another cold snap.

We had some nuts left over from Christmas so I made this nut loaf - this is my version, adapted slightly from this one online. In fact my hairdresser mentioned it a few months ago - nuts, cheese and wine, how could I resist?

It made a big loaf and we had it for dinner 3 nights in a row. I really liked it, very tasty - hot or cold. As with most nut loaves, it refused to hold together but I would make it again (maybe half the size though!)

It's frosty this morning and once again I am pleased I don't have to go and scrape the car before driving to work. Plus I have a short week which is always a bonus! Have a good week all and enjoy this song by Pitbull - this post has a lot of celebration in it so it seems appropriate.