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.