Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
This was the lovely clear view of a very skinny moon early this morning. And the next photo shows the sky looking towards the sunrise, beautiful (my camera made the sky look a bit darker than it really was but the stripes really were that bright). The clear night on Friday slipped the temperature down to 0.4° but there’s not much left growing to be affected by low temperatures now.
In the week Jamie cleared all the remaining tomatoes and the peppers, which still refused to go red. So there is a lot of green pepper added to meals at the moment and these two yellow ones were delicious stuffed with shop-bought veggie fritters for a quick and easy meal. I added cheese for the final 15minutes in the oven, I should have taken a photo as they browned really well and tasted so good.
We had a lovely sunny day on the plot on Saturday. The temperature only reached 6°, but you wouldn’t have known it while in the sunshine. Jamie weeded the potato plot and I did some weeding around the chard and pulled all the remaining beets which all had slug damage.
I wore my hearing aids and was amazed by all the birdsong. Not unusual apparently but I’ve not been using my aids, just turning the sound up on my work laptop and TV - I forgot what I’d been missing! It was mostly robins and great tits but the gulls over the canal were very vocal too. And this huge crow was cawing in the big tree.
The magpies and blackbirds got excited when ‘Ginge’ was around, but he was more interested in compost bins on Saturday. He has been seen taking a magpie from the air though!
The Newbury Weekly News covered both of our unhappy news items last week.
Good that they covered them, but we’d rather have more positive news stories than these 😞
Look at our lovely site, even in Winter. How could anyone even consider building on it?! Idiots 😡
I pulled carrots and parsnips for this evening’s meal. I was really pleased with the parsnips… well, I should say… I was really pleased with the first parsnip I pulled - they got progressively worse, but there was plenty to eat, no matter what the shape of them.
The parsnips and carrots became this gratin meal, roughly based on this recipe. Mmm, tasty and enough leftovers for a lunch. I meant to add the tomatoes to the sauce but forgot, so stuck them on top instead 🙄
I posted a photo of spindleberries the other week, but this is when they look their best; with a beautiful blue sky backdrop.
We didn’t go to the allotment today as it was a bit grey, a bit sunny and a bit rainy. Every time the Sun shone We wished we’d gone up, but it did seem a bit chilly. The ground is so wet, but it made it easy to pull weeds yesterday.
The song title is courtesy of Vampire Weekend, in appreciation of my cousins Paula, Jen and Steve for very kindly buying me that replacement fork after thieves stole all our digging tools - THANKYOU SO MUCH xxx
I took a day off work last Tuesday, I’m determined to have at least one day off a month to break the monotony and it’s quite nice having a random mid-week day. We visited the allotment. Too wet to do anything constructive but I did get to play with some ice.
It looks so pure and I love the frozen bubbles.
I found three frozen circles, but my hands were also frozen so this is as creative as I could be 🙄
The thermometer in the polytunnel showed a minimum of -5.2°
We celebrated Burns Night on Monday, which was why I took Tuesday off. It’s a good excuse for eating, drinking, listening to some different music and watching a film (Whisky Galore, 1949). We are increasingly finding that we’re the butt of the very funny Daily Mash articles but..whatever!
It warmed up a bit over the last few days but now it’s just rain, rain, rain and it apparently feels cold so I’m staying indoors. It’s a shame, as I really feel like getting to the plot to do some clearing, but I don’t feel like getting cold, wet and dirty. Our shallots have been delivered; we ordered a long variety, Jermore, but COVID-19 is taking its toll everywhere and so they were unavailable and we’ve been sent these, Mikor.
The allotments lease is unfortunately a newsworthy subject again, but the date we’re ‘safe’ to is actually 31st December 2022 so it’s not quite as bad as it reads, but bad enough. For our amazing site to ever be at risk of development is a disgrace!
And there was a further mention of allotments in this week’s Newbury Weekly News... at a time when Growing Your Own has had a new lease of life. It is appalling that developers can use words to help win a purchase but then simply remove it at planning stage and still be granted permission. We’d rather stay at Marsh Lane (obviously) but permanent allotment provision should have been included in this development. And don’t get me started on the affordable housing aspect...! 😡
Sad... it may seem at times like the world is changing, but in fact it’s not.
Today’s song title is by The Corgis and it’s referring to my crochet plans... it’s a rather slow process, but I’ll get there... I hope.
That is what I achieved in 3 hours, following Bella Coco on YouTube... luckily I have some time on my hands..!
