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!

Rhythm of the Rain

Mmm, is there anything tastier than freshly picked, cooked, buttered, peppered corn on the cob? These Lark variety really are delicious although germination was rather poor this year with only 10 from a whole packet of 25 seeds, but with 1 or 2 cobs per plant we have enough to enjoy for lunches.

Here are the Orca or Yin Yang beans, they’re so fabulous aren’t they! I need to check if any of the other plants have managed to produce any beans for storing. We had another frost this weekend but not too severe and I had netted the dwarf beans so they may continue to mature. The climbing tunnel beans are looking awful after far too much rain so sadly I don’t think I’ll be able to store any of them. Have I mentioned the rain?…

The rain continued to be torrential at the beginning of last week - cheered up a bit when I returned to work on Thursday 🙄. We did go to the allotment most days though, at least to pick a bit of veg and check how the plot was faring. 

We saw plenty of slugs and snails - I thought that snail above was rather pretty and this tiny specimen is an interesting one. I don’t recall seeing a conical one like this before and am still looking for an id.

I picked my two Festival squashes ahead of the frost - they’re quite large and I hope they’re ripe enough. They can stay in the polytunnel for a bit before I eat them. I fleeced the butternuts again as they haven’t had a very long season and the foliage is still looking reasonably healthy.

These tomatoes finally went red so we’re enjoying them in various meals. 

The pretty chard was used in a layered bake which fed me for two evenings: 1. Chard layer 2. Butternut & sage pesto with a few shallots 3. Slices of tomato 4. Quorn ‘ham’ layer, topped with the pesto 5. Thinly sliced Desiree potatoes on top. It was extremely tasty. Took about an hour to cook and, although there was a lot, the chard pretty much disappeared.

We’ve picked lots more tomatoes- ones that have any slight colour change, so hopefully they’ll ripen at home.

We’re pleased to see that the Halloween peppers have actually started going orange. They’re strange. They went from green to black then back to green before going orange!

So, although it’s been so wet we have had some lovely, chilly, blue sky mornings the clouds have soon built up - I thought this was a rather impressive take-over bid! I think the cloud won the day. We’re just going into yet another yellow weather warning for wind and rain overnight.

And, talking of our September weather, there was at least another 57mm of rain last week over 3 days! I mustn’t complain compared to how other towns have been so badly affected though. And a friend, who has recently got an allotment in Abingdon, reported floating squashes on their site 😩. So, that’s why I’ve selected this song by The Cascades - a golden oldie.

Bad Day

That is the top of the allotment site on Friday 13th September - you may not be able to see it, but there’s frost on the ground! And it’s steaming in the bright early morning sunshine. The temperature dropped to 0.8° and walking through the site it was clear that flowers and plants, particularly squashes, had been frosted. By the next day their leaves were black 😖 Too early! We were hoping for an extended growing season after the rough start! It’s the earliest frost we’ve seen since having a plot. I’m pleased I put fleece round my butternut squash, they may be small but I hope they are worth saving. 

I chopped all the excess growth and tiny fruits off the other week so the plant could concentrate its energy into these few squashes.

We may have had the last of our Summer squashes now. These have been quite tasty, but a bit too large a seed cavity so not much firm flesh for cooking. The chard is really pretty this year, great stems!

Those lovely spring onions are from fellow-plotholder David. I can never grow them but he has too many! They are really spicy too - delicious. The cucumbers succumbed to the frost and we’re not too unhappy about it - we still have some in the fridge 😀

I’ve started drying my beans in the roof of the polytunnel. I now know why my borlotti beans didn’t grow very tall or turn red - they were dwarf Yin Yang beans 🙄 It seems my labelling got a bit muddled and none of my borlotti survived the Spring slug-fest. I have more Yin Yang beans which I protected on the frosty night as the plants are still green. I’m going to dry the runner and French beans too this year, but they’re not ready to pick yet; they need to start drying on the plant first.

We’ve cleared and dug that area in front of the bean-tunnel for over-Wintering our broad beans. And this area is ready for the garlic to be planted quite soon. It looked straighter than that while I was digging and edging 🫣

September has thrown a lot of weather at us. Thunder was rumbling round for days and we’ve had some torrential rain but it’s really hot again when the Sun re-appears. Have seen some excellent clouds.

I think we left just in time before that storm broke. And this was an interesting sky. I think this was on one of the rumbling days when it was really muggy.

But the sunshine days have been glorious!

There are so many bees and butterflies around. Making the most of the buddleia…

The sunflowers…

And the Autumn Joy sedum.

Harvests continue including our first delicious sweetcorn last night which was added to this halloumi meal. Served with our Desiree potatoes with garlic, shallots and red pepper tapenade - so delicious.

And either kale or chard has been added to a variety of different bean dishes that I’ve made using the last of last year’s beans and our carrots.

This was the last harvest of runner beans for this year. They were just on the edge of going stringy, which is why I’m going to dry them - too many on the plants to waste. And that was the only lettuce I got to pick before slugs and caterpillars had a field day!

Tomatoes are providing meagre pickings but I’m glad the frost didn’t take them out…there are plenty to come if they get a chance to mature..

Song title is a blast from the past (1983) to celebrate Friday 13th - a good song though I had almost forgotten about it and the singer, Carmel.

This is the Life

The photo makes it look like a tree; it's not, but this plant in a pot is providing us with some lovely courgettes at last! And we've had some beautiful blue sky and hot days during August. We're having a bit of rain now, which is quite welcome as long as we see Sun again at the weekend.

Look at those pretty multi-coloured chard leaves. I like chard. The taste is a bit too earthy for some, but I enjoyed it steamed and served with a tofu chinese curry and it's such a colourful addition to a meal or salad.

And the plot is looking a bit more colourful too as the zinnia are finally flowering - just one at a time at the moment but they're getting there...

That trug contains one each of our two types of courgette. The yellow ones are a bit firmer than the stripey ones. Our third courgette plant is meant to be a Zucchini but no fruits on there yet. The carrots are all tiny and multi-legged but taste carroty so that's fine! And every harvest includes at least one not-so-mini cucumber.

The courgettes were stuffed with shallots & garlic, fried in oak-smoked oil, grated carrots and peanuts with a teaspoon of marmite and topped with cheese - so delicious! And the cavolo nero was chopped up small and steamed with butter and pepper added on the plate. Yum Yum!

That is our first showing of a butternut.. it's not really been a good year for them as they like a long growing season... I wonder if it will make it. I'll probably cut off all the other growth to give it a fighting chance when it reaches a stage when it looks like it could survive.. we'll see.
Unfortunately I had to pull up one of the cavolo nero plants - I think it had downy mildew as the leaves were yellowing and there was definitely some sort of grey fluffy mess in the growing centre. It seems strange that the other two plants appear to be entirely unaffected - let's hope it stays that way...

These are our Halloween peppers. They are meant to go orange, but can be eaten black. We tried one, it was green inside and wasn't ripe enough so we'll let them mature a bit before trying another. They look good though and are sweet peppers, not chillis.

That not-so-wee beastie is an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar. Jamie spotted it walking up a pathway so I moved it to the butterfly bush on the wildlife plot where there is a lot of willowherb which it eats. Fabulous to see. And another good spot by Jamie was this Orange Swift Moth which had just emerged and was in the process of pumping its wings up. Both were worthy of updated entries on my Allotment Wildlife Blog.

The swift moth was spotted during our latest Sunday picnic, which ended as a star-gazing event as it was during the Perseid meteor shower. The moon slipped over the horizon and it was a beautiful dark sky. We saw plenty of shooting stars and were quite shocked to see how many satellites were moving about up there - not the International Space Station as they weren't bright enough. They were mostly GPS satellites. It was a beautiful evening after a glorious hot afternoon.

So, a final few trug photos and then I need to nip up the allotment for more beans (and a cucumber probably!) before work. The cucumbers in hte bottom photo should be star-shaped and heart-shaped for our next picnic I think!

Aahh, this is the life! Thanks to Amy Macdonald.