Up in the Sky

I’ve been enjoying my holiday so far. The weather has been perfect, not too hot and some evening (heavy) showers so we haven’t needed to water too often.

Ivan let me pick a punnet of blackcurrants so I made a load of sauce and we’ve been having it with ice cream, it is delicious. I added sugar at a ratio of 1:3 so it still has a tartness to the flavour.

We had a lovely picnic on the plot for my birthday - my sister gave me a veggie hamper from a local deli which was perfect for the hot day; better than the planned bbq.

We’re doing quite well keeping up with the courgettes. Now joined by Patti-pan squash, which I think have a bit more flavour than the green bush courgettes.

I’d not really appreciated how delicious cold roast veggies are before. I’ve been having them for lunch over a few days. Beets, garlic and courgette from the allotment plus other bought veggies at the moment. I look forward to it containing all home-grown, one day soon. Cheese, onion and nut stuffed courgettes are our other current favourite meal (particularly when I fried the onions in Oak-smoked oil prior to stuffing).

I’ve pulled the remains of the broad beans, where the leeks will be planted. The broad beans left on the plants were well past their best, but there were enough good ones to make broad bean and courgette soup using this recipe from Riverford Organic. It tastes really nice and creamy.

The Jermore shallots have done all that they can, so they’ve been moved to the polytunnel for a bit of final drying. They didn’t grow as much as expected, with some very small bulbs and the clusters per planted shallot were rather weak. There are enough reasonable-sized ones to have a jar pickled for Christmas and the rest will be nice additions to various meals.

Most of the beans are flowering (not the edamame or dwarf french yet) and a few tiny beans are appearing on the Scarlet Empire runners. I think the Borlotti flowers are the prettiest, so delicate, but the pure whiteness of the Gigantes beans is also rather stunning.

Monday was a sunnier day than we expected so we took some photos with the camera on the end of a 6ft bamboo cane.

It gives an interesting alternate view of the world.

But then Ivan offered us his fishing rod extension - 4m gives an even better view! Can you see our sun umbrella at the further edge of the site, near the tree?

All the plots are looking so amazing this year. It’s beautiful to wander round. Even the less well-kempt ones look nice because there are so many butterflies (I really must try to do the Big Butterfly Count today) and birds - we’ve been enjoying watching a family of bullfinches on a neighbouring plot (see my wildlife blogpost).

So that’s why I chose today’s song by Oasis. If you’d like to see more of the photos, they’re on the Marsh Lane Allotments Facebook page or here on Google Photos.

Cheat

No, it’s not cress. That, believe it or not, is a celeriac seedling.

There are 3 or 4 like that. I'm not convinced they'll survive to planting stage but will keep them going, even though we nipped to a garden centre and they had these. Now they look a bit healthier and will be planted rather earlier than our home-germinated plants. Don't they look lovely and healthy?

Talking of healthy, our site is now 100% leased, with most plots looking prepped and ready for the year ahead - a bit different from this time in 2010, when the land developer had withdrawn the idea for allotments on Marsh Lane after 1 year of being set up. Thank goodness the Council were able to negotiate a 4-year lease for us - and that was 11 years ago :-)

We were on the site at the weekend. In between snow showers the sun would come out and it was really hot - as my boss pointed out, the sun is as high now as it is at the end of August! We sowed some teasel seeds on the wildflower plot and I'm pleased to say that our bog plants from Bakker are on their way so it'll be good to get them planted out. I moved the drainpipe of mangetout seedlings outside to a cold frame as I'll (hopefully) plant them out next weekend. The weather is still far more wintry than we want in April - look what we woke up to yesterday - snowy rooftops!

I thought it was going to feel like a soup week, so I soaked some of my home-grown dried beans - I added celery seeds to the water which smelled lovely.

To the stock, I added the few leaves of Cavolo Nero, that we'd grown, plus a few carrots and tomato puree, as per Shaheen's recent soup recipe. I have to admit that my soup doesn't look very pretty, but it tastes good. I wish I had mushed up some of the gigantes beans separately rather than blitzing the whole soup, though there are some whole beans at the bottom of the cup.

Remember our broad beans that got severely hit by the frost in February? They unexpectedly revitalised and now look! I hope the frosts we're having at the moment don't take them out at this stage in the game...

I have to start work now, but just one last thing... You must watch the BBC4 programme: A Year in an English Garden: Flicker & Pulse. It's so beautiful, with time-lapse and other fancy effects and just a little bit of talking - I really enjoyed it, in fact I may have to watch it again (and copy some of their ideas).

The song title is provided by The Clash and is because of buying seedlings from a shop. But, as I said to Forbes on site, "It's not cheating. It's common sense" ;-)