The Christmas Song

Christmas spirits are running high now! 

Hungerford has held its annual Extravaganza - we nipped out to see part of the parade; it was a rather damp evening but the Christmas lights are pretty and the people were happy and cheerful.

I’m working on Monday and Christmas Eve but I’m really not expecting it to be busy and this is the view over my PC screen so it could be much worse ☺️ And then work stops until the new year - yay! We’ll have to nip up the allotment for some sprouts for at least one of the big meals but then we won’t have to move much - unless we want to 🥳

Over the last week we’ve met and exchanged presents with various family members, received some lovely cards and have wished a few people a Happy Christmas in town. The last couple of days have been frosty so wrapping up in hats and scarves adds to the atmosphere and it’s so dark with barely any sunshine and today being the shortest day.

Merry Christmas! Hope you have fun and/or relaxation, as you wish 😘 

Enjoy this song by Gregorian. See you on the other side 🎄

December

Well, that was quick! Now it’s December! It’s still wet, not sure it’s ever going to dry up! There are self-formed ponds on the site where we’ve never seen water-logging before. (Not our plot, yet)

We’ve only been to the plot for very brief visits over the last week. The robin is always. pleased to see us bringing his breakfast of mealworms. And there are carrion crows, magpies and a male pheasant with three females - not sure if they’re last year’s offspring, but they’re safer on our site than in the fields where we can hear shooting 😠

We’ve had a couple of very clear, frosty early morning visits. It is worth getting up early on these clear days - whatever the season!

The temperature was down to -4° on Thursday morning. The teasels really do look great. 

Some of the remaining plants look so pretty with their coating of frost.

Others less so! Our leeks and garlic should be able to survive this though.

Curly parsley is quite resilient but this may have been too cold for it to pull through. The different types of frost are interesting, aren’t they?

I’m not sure whether frosting increases the flavour of brassica anymore - I expect they’re bred to be tasty, but the sprouts were frozen on the stems under this leafy top.

It was a lovely early morning visit, but brrrr I was happy to get back home to get back to work! It made a nice change to have a sunny outlook even though I had to pull the curtains because the Sun is so low it reflects on my computer screen! But today I’m on leave - yay! Here are Earth, Wind and Fire to dance around to.

Cars Hiss by My Window

Sue Garratt wrote on her November blogpost that there hadn’t been “any weather” which was certainly true for the first couple of weeks of November with really gloomy dull days - no rain, no Sun and no wind.

It was unseasonably mild though so we enjoyed a Sunday night (it feels like night at 5pm now) picnic - the cat found the crisps 😄

The next Sunday we enjoyed some sunshine at Newbury’s Vegan market - mmm, that Vegan Street Diner hot dog is so delicious!

This last week has made up for the earlier lack of weather. We had snow flurries on Tuesday, barely settling, but pretty to look out at.

Wednesday brought a severe frost which took out the last of the delicate plants. I had to take the photo through the fence as the gate was frozen shut during our morning visit!

So very cold, brrr. Down to -4° in the polytunnel. And this ice was taken out of the birdbath on Friday morning.

And today the weather is torrential rain and windy as we feel the edge of Storm Bert. It really isn’t an allotment day but we’re having our windows replaced so we thought we’d leave the fitter to get on with it.

We have a skip on-site for the, now postponed, Work Party tomorrow so we’ve been clearing junk from our rather overgrown storage <ahem> wildlife area…

That’s where the great tits nested last year, so we won’t clear it completely (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). But we’ve cleared some crates which were completely overgrown with ivy and a snail hotel. We’ve seen mice around there too which may be helping reduce the snail population.

It’s a rather colourless world now but the spindleberry was looking beautiful; such great looking berries.

And some rather exciting news - I won a book from Real Seeds! I often buy squash and bean seeds from the company that sells seeds that are sometimes a little bit different from usual suppliers.

So the song for today is provided by The Doors. The cars are hissing more quietly now! Enjoy!

November has Come

We had another picnicker join us on Sunday. The draw of the chimnea’s heat was too good to miss for the allotment cat. He was happy sitting on the bench with Ivan and me, but then Linda stood up and she lost her seat, which happened to be slightly closer to the fire 😀 What we discovered, as we cleared up for the evening, was that he’d killed a rat just behind us! At least he didn't plonk it down in front of us and put us off our cheese and wine. Last weekend we enjoyed roasted (charred) chestnuts which Ivan had foraged - delish!

We’ve finally had a few dry days though the weather has been extremely dull; we’ve been living in a cloud for at least a week. But it’s mild and I’ve only just picked the last of our outdoor tomatoes!

The tomatoes have been included in most of our lunches and were part of this delicious halloumi meal, with garlic, cavolo nero and peppers from the plot.

We've been able to clear some areas of the plots because it's been dry. I cleared up the radishes and bean plants which were surrounding the chard. And I found one borlotti bean plant - trailing along the ground 😅 I knew I'd sown some seeds somewhere and that explains why I had dwarf plants growing 'up' the tunnel 😏 I've saved some bean pods for drying but not sure if they'll be suitable for storage as they've got so wet. The yellow pods are Yin Yang beans.

The main reason for writing this post is to record that we've sown our broad beans Aquadulce. As usual they have their little cloche covers to offer some protection from mice/squirrels and maybe weather. They're planted into the soil below the mulch and, all being well, will be harvested next April/May.

The purple sprouting brocolli and brussels sprouts are the only other thing (apart from weeds) growing on that plot now. The PSB isn't looking too great but, dare I say, the little sprouts are looking pretty good...

I've completely filled our three dalek composters, but there are masses of worms, slugs and other beasties to help it degrade quite quickly. This is a Leopard Slug - amazing pattern - a good guy who deals with compost and also deals with other slugs...

On that note, I need to start work. Halloween provided us with a little celebration and the plot now has two pumpkin heads on sticks - perhaps the squirrels will get to them, but they should be out of reach of the hedgehog. Apparently pumpkins aren't good for them.

But now it's November and The Gorrilaz provide the title song.

My Time

We’ve had a delivery from Apsley Farms. It’s basically a by-product of the organic process to produce bio-gas from arable crops. The history is an interesting read. It’s quite expensive but hopefully worthwhile, especially on some of our not-so-good soil.

I’m using it as a weed suppressant around the tiny fruit trees. There’s an area left clear around each tree. I’m not expecting it to kill the bindweed but my regular hoeing of the area does appear to have helped suppress it already to some extent… well, we’ll see…

We’ve also covered the area where our broad beans will be planted next month. The area has already been dug and conditioned with lime. It’s spread about 10cm deep. And there’s some left over which we’ll use in Spring. It smells quite strong of ammonia initially, like Guinea pig bedding, but not any more.

I took one of the Festival squashes home and had it roasted with tofu, tomatoes, garlic and chard. It's tastier than the butternut I had the other day - can't eat the skin on this squash though.

The song title is provided by Royal Deluxe and is to commemorate getting some time back as I've stepped down from the HAHA Committee. It's kind of a shame, I've enjoyed it for the last 10+ years but it's taken a bit of a turn so I'll take the opportunity to have more time on our plots rather than thinking about or doing HAHA admin and site management.

Blurry

We definitely needed the chiminea last Sunday as the temperature wasn’t great before we started our picnic (some call it a wine club, whatever, it’s a lot of fun!).

It was too cloudy for any star gazing that evening but Jamie and I went up after work on Thursday; the one night with clear skies, hoping to see the Comet A3. With Sunset at about 6:00pm and a good western sky view we thought we’d be lucky.

Unfortunately we’ll have to wait another few thousand years to see that one, but we did have a lovely evening nonetheless.

We enjoyed the most amazing Super Moon - so beautiful emerging from a cloud.

And the bats were extremely active.

And very difficult to photograph! They were flitting about really close to us.

The ginger cat was hanging round, but wasn’t interested. Either they were too quick for him or possibly he was too full after catching a mouse in front of us, running away when I tried to stop him and then gobbling part of the mouse when I caught up with him - what a naughty boy!

So, you can see it’s been an exciting week 😊 and also my new pasta spoon arrived - perfect for gnocchi too. We’re trying to get through all the tomatoes which are going red quite quickly in the polytunnel and certainly once we bring them home. Peppers, garlic and cavolo Nero or chard are also included in my meals and I roasted one of the small butternut squashes. The meals were tasty but the squash wasn’t as sweet as I expected.

So that’s it for now. The Sun is shining so we need to make the most of it. No chiminea required today; it’s 15° Woohoo!

Put your feet up and enjoy this title song by Puddle of Mudd in honour of my bat and moon photos!

These Days

There’s a spot of colour from when we had some welcome sunshine on Saturday afternoon. That little robin is full of song at the moment. Perhaps like us he was relieved that the rain had stopped! October has continued the extremely wet theme of this Autumn. The ground doesn’t get a chance to dry out between torrential rain or drizzle so it’s difficult to do any clearing.

We’ve also had a couple of frosty nights with temperatures dipping below freezing but some flowers are surviving. My little hazel tree’s leaves are changing colour and there are some buds - Ooh, I wonder if it’ll produce catkins this year 🤞

Our sunflowers are looking less happy and sadly the seedheads have gone mouldy so maybe not ideal for birds to eat.

The birds have been enjoying the teasels though they’ve missed a few seeds on this one - I had to remind myself of what the word for this is - VIVIPARY.

The Wildlife Plot is looking extremely overgrown and, until the most recent frost, it was literally buzzing with activity. There were loads of bees and other insects and Jamie saw a little vole in one of the woodpiles. 

This daddy long legs had found a nice soft new teasel head to warm up on. The grass was full of these crane flies last week; reminded me of filling my desk up with them at primary school - I’m not sure why I did that 🤨

I’ve had fleece protecting my butternut squash but yesterday I decided to pick them now that the foliage has died back. I’m glad the slugs and snails all picked on just the one fruit!

And left the others untouched - they’re very small but just right for individual meals.

We’re still picking tomatoes if they show any coloured blush and they soon ripen at home. The peppers we pick as we need them because they’re in the polytunnel which we’ve been zipping up on the cold nights.

The Halloween peppers are tasty and orange ones were part of this halloumi meal, along with our last sweetcorn, potatoes and some parsley.

We were pleased to see that our garlic didn’t drown and a few green shoots have appeared - that’s about 3 weeks since the cloves were planted. And we’ve spotted some fungi appearing on the plot -  I’m not sure of the type; it may be there because of the manured soil.

I’m pleased to say it hasn’t rained yet today (Sunday) but these days our bodies are moving much slower than the clock so it’ll be an afternoon plot visit. The song title is provided by Nico.