The Life of Riley

Robbie was keeping an eye on my digging technique last week as I dug the bean trench on Plot8.

It took me three separate visits to complete, as it was hard work. The soil was bone dry and like concrete at the bottom of the trench which is about 50cm deep.

There were a few weeds but it was mostly salsify roots, though I still wasn’t inclined to take any home for eating.

Phew, finished, I left the hollyhocks at the end. I added cardboard and emptied the builders bag of decomposed weeds - hoping the seed heads are rotted and deep enough to not re-emerge - along with some partially-composted vegetables before adding the sweetcorn stalks. All that organic matter should provide a good base for our climbing beans next year and helps with the plot clearance.

The trench has had a good drenching over the last couple of days so there may be room for a bit more green waste before I back-fill that soil heap.

Whilst working on that I uncovered this little field vole. It was trying to hide under dried grass where I was working so I caught it in a pot and released it in the hedge. So cute.

On the Saturday I knew when the steam train The Flying Scotsman was passing through Hungerford so I secured my spot to get a reasonable view - it’s not the best view from the allotments, but good enough.

There it goes! I took a small video but the camera lost focus at the vital point 🙄

Here’s a rather better record of it passing over Hungerford High Street, courtesy of Oxygen Aerial Images. Perfect.

On the chilly Sunday morning I joined a little group of Britain in Bloom volunteers in returning to the roundabout to plant Spring bulbs (I think there were 400) and sow some drought-tolerant wild flower seeds. The perennials that we planted in May have grown pretty well, considering the weather.

Since May other volunteers have been watering and borage-pulling, it’s always threatening to take over. Such a lot of work and dedicated volunteers involved. Hungerford won the Silver Gilt award in the Small Towns category of the 2026 RHS Britain in Bloom competition - I’m not sure that the roundabout played any part in that, but it has looked good and should look even better next year.

Yesterday I was at the hairdressers as we watched Storm Austen stripping leaves and blowing horizontal rain up the road. Jamie and I were meant to be going to see lit up trees at Welford Park’s Spectacle of Light — we aren’t sorry that the visit has been postponed for a few days, we got a drenching when we went last year. We popped over to Oxfordshire last week and saw quite a different spectacle at Millets Farm.

Dahlia Beach

Pick your own dahlias and pumpkins! It was a very grey and rainy day but both fields were very impressive. I was sneaking up a muddy side track to get a peek of Dahlia Beach before I realised it was closed so could wander about a bit more, but couldn’t get in amongst the blooms. The buckets in the foreground are for collecting bunches of the flowers and they also sell the tubers. And I’ve never see so many pumpkins! They planted/planned for 100,000 fruits 😳

Pumpkins galore

And another cool thing. Jamie’s been having one-to-one swimming sessions with Next Stroke Swim School since finding that he could no longer swim post-stroke. Well, last Sunday he swam unaided for the first time - on his back and his front. “Drowning slowly” he calls it, but I call it a breakthrough 👏 Mike (and others) have been really great. I’m so glad we spotted their advert.

Jamie’s tutor, Mike, urging him on

This morning there’s a blue sky with pink clouds as the Sun’s just rising. We’d better go to the allotment later to see what damage the wind and rain has caused - hoping our polytunnel is still in one piece.

So to the title song, by the brilliant Lightning Seeds for this mishmash of a post. Well, since I retired, 8 months ago, I determined to achieve at least one thing each day rather than lounging. Last week on a rainy day I made a cherry and almond flapjack which counted as ‘an achievement’. I really do think some people could say I’m living the life of Riley!

Let the Sunshine In (Aquarius)

Back in May, you may recall that a few of us allotment holders started improvements to one of the town’s roundabouts. At that stage we didn’t realise that we were going to suffer heatwave after heatwave so some hardy people have been doing a lot of watering to keep it alive and to help the seeds germinate.

I think it looks pretty good, considering. I can see we missed quite a few borage seedlings and the plants haven’t grown as bushy as we’d expect if we’d had rain but at least it looks much better than it has for the last few years and will hopefully be even better next year… Britain in Bloom results are due in September.

I took that photo early this morning. I was hoping it would be a glorious sunny morning so walked along to the River Kennet at about 6:30am. It was lovely with lots of birds and I saw a water vole swimming across but it was rather cloudy so the photos weren’t as glorious as I’d hoped and no otters.

The weather has remained warm/hot, and dry, over the last week. Although on the one day that the temperature was back to average it felt decidedly chilly(!) and I missed the sunshine. And look - the overnight temperature fell to 3.5°! That thermometer is in the shade behind the polytunnel.

I’ve been to the allotment watering every day - apart from one, which is why we ended up with two very large courgettes in the trug! As well as our first cucumber of the year.

Those potatoes were from a rogue plant which grew in our onion bed. It got frosted 3 times but kept coming back. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many decent tubers when I first put the fork in. Not sure what variety it is.

A couple of hot days it was really windy, threatening our sweetcorn which now have cobs forming. The magpies have taken a liking to these on site so we’re planning some kind of cob protection.

The aubergine plant is producing lovely fruits - look at this beauty!

I used that along with courgettes, onion, tomatoes, garlic and passata to make a large batch of “ratatouille” and froze 4 portions. We had one with fried gnocchi the other night and it was delicious.

We went to a ‘Summer Evening’ event at the Newtown Road Cemetery in Newbury at the beginning of the month. The recorder recital was a bit awkward but it was a nice evening so we sat outside and then wandered around the graves which date back to 1850.

The Bat Talk was what we went for and it was very interesting. The expert, Linda Clark, brought her two tiny pipistrelle bats along for us to have a close-up look. They’re so sweet. These can’t fly so she has them at her home and feeds them mealworms. They can live for 12 years, I’m not sure how old these are. It seems we’re doing all the right things to encourage bats on the allotment, which is good news.

I’ve been decorating the hall all week, still a work in progress… It’s a cheery bright yellow as you can see. I still need to paint the cupboard doors, put up shelves and lay a laminate floor 😮‍💨 All because we bought a pretty lamp on holiday 😄 Thank goodness Jamie can advise, I’m not very practical with DIY-ing. 

The song title is in honour of the new paint job, provided by The Fifth Dimension. It’s a sing-along for a Sunday morning. Look at that groovy bunch 🤗 It can also recognise that the solar panels were being fitted at the allotments for our water pump - much better than needing petrol for the generator all the time - a bit more work till they’re in use, but nearly there. And we have a partial solar eclipse to look forward to next week - hope the clouds stay away for that bit of excitement.

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).

Heat Waves

Oh, I know I’ve moaned a lot about the weather over the last 6 months or so; too cold, too wet, too windy but the last 3 days really have been too hot! Even for me, a Sun worshipper. The early mornings are so beautiful and not too exhausting to carry watering cans around.

A few of us had an early-ish session on the roundabout on Sunday morning, before it got too sweltering.

It’s just about complete now, though Nia wants to fill a few spots. There are two outside rings of seed - calendula and cornflower. We’re away for a couple of weeks soon so I hope when we return it’ll be a mass of flowers… it would be helpful to have a few downpours.

We waited for storms yesterday; we could hear thunder nearby but it seems that a fierce storm emptied all the rain over Wiltshire and didn’t reach Berkshire, at least not Hungerford - shame, but the building clouds were impressive.

Watering is an unavoidable chore at the moment, the tomatoes are happy in the polytunnel but germination of our beans seems slow (nearly 2 weeks, though we’ve now seen that some have germinated but not appeared above ground yet). We decided to buy some dwarf bean and runner bean plants yesterday. If the sowed beans also grow then that’ll be a bonus. It feels like there’s too much bare earth showing at the moment, but it is only May so I think I’m being impatient.

The runner bean plants we bought are Painted Lady which are a red and white flowered variety.  As it happens we’ve just started seeing Painted Lady butterflies on site, they’re very pretty and quite large but I haven’t managed to get a photo yet. I did capture this lovely Small Copper butterfly that was in the polytunnel. Wasps will eat them if they stay in there so we always release them.

And this impressive male thick-legged flower beetle was on one of the perennial pot plants - it eats pollen so doesn’t cause any damage. No points for guessing how he got his name!

There are masses of bees and other flying insects about. They really love the purple thyme flowers but this bumblebee was determined to get something from this pretty poppy.

We’ve been waiting to see the great tits fledge - the parents have been so attentive. Taking turns to take grubs and caterpillars back to their nest in that storage area. They’ve not minded us working around them. The great tit is in that photo.

Here’s a little video where the parent flapping its wings seems to be encouraging the young to exit but then the other parent takes some food down to the nest. When we went back in the afternoon there was no sight of them so it seems we missed the little ones actually fledging, but it’s been nice watching the parents over the last few weeks.

The flower plot is looking pretty with pink verbascum, white valerian, blue Nigella and red poppies providing scent and colour. 

These wild poppies are so delicate and pretty but the flowers don’t last a day. Other seedlings are emerging but no flowers yet.

We were amazed to see that the remains of the tagetes French marigolds which were completely frosted and brown have actually re-grown! Good job I was lazy and didn’t bother pulling them! I definitely thought they were dead. 

Monday was incredibly hot - the hottest May Day on record, it was certainly about 32/33° on the plot and Jamie and I had a barbecue <phew>. We did start quite late in the afternoon and stayed till the Sun was about to set. It was so lovely, mostly staying in the shade and just enjoying the lovely warmth in between cooking.

I lay on the grass at one point, it was quite nice and cooling and provides a different view of the world, although it was rather itchy. Aah, just look at that beautiful blue sky.

My next post will probably be about Tenerife, unless something dramatic happens during our final plot visits this week….

The song title is thanks to The Glass Animals as the heatwave continues.