Spirit in the Sky

We had an afternoon at Longleat on Saturday - it was so lovely sitting in the Sun watching the air displays that we didn’t go and see any of the animals 🙄 

The Glow

We stayed for the evening fireworks and hot air balloon glow. We really enjoyed it and we were lucky with the weather staying dry for the day.

Unfortunately it was too windy to see the sky filled with hot air balloons, which was why I’d originally booked the tickets for the ‘Icons of the sky’ event, but the planes were more pleasing than I’d expected. This enormous battery balloon was proving difficult to handle at ground level.

I don’t remember all the planes but they all spent time doing displays with some amazing looping, zooming, twisting and diving. My camera couldn’t handle the speed of most of them so no photos of spitfires, gyrocopters or mustangs (if that’s a plane).

Here are a few pics.

Tiger moth bi-planes

Motorised gliders doing aerobatics

I really enjoyed seeing the parachutists come down from a Dornier bomber. Perfect landings by all!

My favourites were these motorised gliders covered in lights taking to the skies after sunset to do their aerobatics to music whilst shooting fireworks at each other - it was amazing! My photos don’t quite capture the excitement! But I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for another display by Airborne Pyrotechnics.

Between the flights there were other things to entertain like drummers, food and these, err, robot-rabbit-girls. Not something you see every day!

Anyway, back to reality. 

Before our day out I finally got the leeks planted after some decent rainfall for a couple of days. I couldn’t find a suitable pole to make holes so just dug them in order for the leeks to be ‘puddled in’.

I took the dried dwarf beans home and podded them. They were bought as plants so we didn’t know the variety. I was expecting to see white beans so looked them up. They seem to be Tendergreen dwarf French beans. They were tasty so I’m saving them to sow next year as they’re supposedly more suitable as green beans than for drying. The reddish beans were a few Jacob’s Cattle - I’ve added them to the storage pot I already have of them. It wasn’t a good year for our beans.

I’m hoping to eat our first peppers this week - this one is huge, but still has a bit more reddening to do…

It looks like it’ll be dry today and it’s warm so I hope to get to the allotment later though time is moving faster than me. I’ll leave you with this fabulous Norman Greenbaum song - haven’t heard this for so long. Enjoy!

Oh, What a Night

I’m happy (Jamie less so!) that courgettes are on the menu - still managing to pick small at the moment - along with shallots and our first two tiny tomatoes.

Other tomatoes are reddening now following that Rubylicious example.

Also in the polytunnel, tiny baby peppers have started to form and the aubergine has some surprisingly spiky flowers, which will hopefully produce a few fruits.

The hollyhocks are looking lovely towering over our weedy Plot8. They don’t mind the lack of water, but the weeds are helping to keep the soil damp on that plot

I really love this pale pink flower, but there are also some deep purple ones.

We've just entered our third heatwave of the year - our poor plants are gasping, as am I trying to water everything, but even watering at the roots isn’t really providing enough for happy plants.  

Look at that 😔 Not the lush growth we hope to see at this time of year and the potato haulms are definitely looking past their best - we’re rather concerned whether there will actually be any tubers in that dry soil. We’ve sown a few dwarf beans (Purple teepee) in that front area and I re-planted some lettuce seedlings but I think they may have frazzled. And we finally planted our mini-cucumber out - that’s in a big pot on Plot3 to grow up the bean tunnel.

In between watering it’s nice to sit and watch the bees and plentiful butterflies.

We’ve had another session on the roundabout. Unfortunately our previous work encouraged dormant borage seeds to grow. Normally I’d like a borage-covered roundabout but it was swamping all the perennials so 5 of us spent a few hours carefully pulling out all the borage seedlings - such a shame really.

The ground is rather bare again and would also benefit from a downpour but hopefully the regular watering (thanks to Nia and Kate) will be enough to encourage more flowers. The Britain in Bloom judging is imminent but surely they’ll take the weather into account… and it’s only the second year that Hungerford has been involved.

I really like the Bug Hotel sign that the team have made at the entrance to Hungerford.

Anyway, I really must get up the plot to water before it gets too hot again, it’s meant to reach 29° today. But before I go…

The Mexico v England World Cup match was delayed by an hour - to 2am on Monday (yesterday) morning. It was so worth being awake for. After England took a somewhat unexpected 2-goal lead in the first half, the rest of the match was as stressful as any other England match, particularly after England were down to 10 men. Both teams had penalties and at 2-3 after 60 minutes England heroically defended our goal for the remainder of the game, which included 11 agonising minutes of ‘stoppage time’. Ohhh, the relief and joy when the final whistle blew and England are through to the quarter finals 🥳 Such an amazing match 👏👏🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

And that is the perfect opportunity for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, with a little poetic licence for the title - December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night).

Changes

Here we are in June and some real rain arrived yesterday.

We were enjoying coffee in the polytunnel watching the plants enjoying the rain. In between some torrential downpours I managed to plant out the dwarf purple Mistik French beans which germinated at home in a week and direct sowed a row of these Jacob’s Cattle Drying dwarf beans.

We have three wigwams of climbing beans: Scarlet Empire runners, Greek Gigantes and Lamon Borlotto, which have been difficult to germinate this year. I’ve attempted to direct sow a few to fill a couple of gaps but may only have four plants.

We started the month with a plot barbecue for Jamie’s birthday. We had to delay it for a day so we could sit and enjoy sunshine rather than hide from the wind - May has been such a windy month. It was a really lovely day and Ivan joined us for a while too. 

Our first broad beans were included in the salad. We’ve picked another lot for dinner tonight; blackfly are out in numbers so we have resorted to spraying as we haven’t seen any ladybird larvae yet.

Plot7 still has an area that could be planted up, but I’m not sure it’ll happen unless I buy some plants and maintain my method this year of <ahem> casual no-dig! At least the front quarter should fill out with parsnips, nasturtiums, radishes, asparagus pea, a sad courgette and the dwarf beans.

The leeks have been left to flower and look quite interesting like penguins looking skyward, but are taking a long time to bloom. That was yesterday’s stormy sky but no thunder and lightning.

The flowerbed on Plot8 is looking lovely with the highly scented valerian, red Geum and Nigella. Zinnia, verbena and other flowers should start filling those gaps quite soon.

If you know the scent of valerian, this photo will fill your nostrils with the memory. Such a lovely plant.

The pot courgette is producing lots of flowers now, but they’re all male so no threat of a courgette glut at this stage. I haven’t sown any climbing squash (yet) and not sure I’ll be able to deal with plot3 to plant them - we’ll see, but there’s not much time.

The sweetcorn plants are still in their protective cloches and are tiny but have started producing their flowers - I’ll be amazed if they manage to produce cobs. They’re not meant to be mini-corn 😖

The salsify put on a good show, but they finally succumbed to the wind. I’ve put lots of the stems in the compost bins, but it may not be the last we’ve seen of those three plants - the seed heads are quite impressive!

Black Sabbath provide the great song to mark all the changes since I last posted. Growing season is upon us - yay! We’re spending quite a lot of time just sitting and watching - it’s very pleasing.

The Importance of Being Idle

I was pleased when it was sunnier than expected yesterday morning and we had a lovely few hours on the plot. The clouds started developing while we were digging the area for the leeks. That’s where the broad beans were.

The leeks were sown en masse at the end of that patch - the whole packet. That method has worked for Neal in the past, so we followed his example and the little leeks look pretty good and ready to be planted on. There should be plenty left over for sharing once we’ve planted ours - I don’t think we’ve ever planted them so early.

Apart from that bit of digging I’ve had a relaxing few days pottering around on the plots. We’ve been watching juvenile robins and bullfinches in the hedge, it’s been lovely. The bullfinch father seems to be pointing out the various locations for food by whistling for his young ones to follow.

We pulled a Nicola potato from one of the bags; probably enough for three or four meals. We had all the tiny ones as part of a salad containing 7 other home-grown veggies.

And this is the ice cream dessert with the gooseberry and blackcurrant sauces from Ivan’s fruit. What a treat!

I should have, but didn’t, do the Big Butterfly Count; there’s still another week or so. This brimstone butterfly (I suppose it may not be the same one) has been hanging round Kate’s runner beans for two days now. Our beans are nowhere near this stage! Lots of people are already picking beans and we don’t even have flowers 😖

We do have beans on our Yin Yang dwarf beans though. I was considering eating the pods but it seems that they are best grown as shelled beans even if not dried, so they have quite a bit more growing to do. These are the fab looking black and white Orca beans that were grown from our last year’s collected seed - also known as Calypso beans. 

I mentioned in my last post that the asparagus peas are doing well this year. I let some pods grow a bit bigger and they were very tasty - I boiled them for about 10minutes then cooled them before adding to this Beetroot and Quorn roast salad lunch.

Courgettes are still part of every evening meal and were good with this fried gnocchi in a tomato and garlic sauce. Mmm, I do so enjoy this time of year and I even don’t mind doing a bit more of the cooking.

I did a bit of clearing by the pond - we really need to tackle the bindweed. This scabious is enjoying a bit more light now I’ve cleared some of the Nigella seedheads.

And, having cleared some weed from the pond, a froggy appeared! 

I am enjoying my time off work and I’m pretty sure my cold is thinking about moving on which is why I’m taking it easy 🙂 Great song and video by Oasis - enjoy!

Just Got Lucky

I thought I'd start the post on a happy picture, as the next photo is a less happy one - our tomatoes haven't escaped blight so this lunchtime I chopped off all the leaves in the vain hope that some may actually go red. I'm envious of all the tomato harvests I'm seeing on social media!

What a poor show! So it appears that we'll have to keep buying tomatoes for the rest of this year 😔 It's a shame because everything else in most of my meals is home-grown at the moment.

The runner beans are really paying out. And a branch snapped off my dwarf borlotti beans, so I had some of them in their pods along with the first picking of Speedy dwarf beans.

All of the beans apart from the Edamame are producing beans now. The Edamame have only just started to flower, so not sure whether they'll produce in time - the plants look healthy but the weather is definitely feeling like September.

Harvests are a bit more varied, (well, different shaped courgettes!) but how many more courgettes, cucumbers and beans can I eat??

I've made another batch of marrow and carrot soup, flavoured with celeriac stems. I should have removed the centre of the marrow, as the soup is a bit watery; I may need to add a potato to it to thicken it up a bit. I’ll see how it tastes tomorrow.

We have plenty of garlic - good job I'm working from home and not socialising! And I harvested a first Tromboncino for this tasty meal.

That's the before photo and I scoffed half of it before getting a photo after it was cooked, with a bit of cheese on top. It has Ancho chilli flakes added to the carrot, shallots and garlic; they’re not hot but add a lovely flavour - it covered two meals as Jamie's refusing to eat any more Summer squash 😃

That’s me, making holes for planting the leeks at the weekend - look, the sun shone and it was warm. We now have 40 leeks puddled-in, thanks to our plot neighbour Neal. We’d be waiting rather longer if we used our specimens…! How pathetic are they 😄

Leeks are such a tasty addition, particularly as our shallots didn’t produce very much. Jamie’s been trying to buy pickling vinegar to pickle a small jar of shallots but has found that in short supply - along with other items. Is it COVID-related or BREXIT… or maybe a bit of both?

Anyway, (don’t get me started) I’ll drag myself away from my two favourite subjects. The song title is provide by The Jo-Boxers and I’ve chosen it because more and more I’m reminded of how much ‘luck’ can change people’s fortunes - good or, sadly, very bad. Stay safe all.