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!
Thankyou to all our helpful volunteers! Our mission yesterday was to prepare our 'horsetail plots' which surround the composting toilet.
About 6 poles (150 sq.mtrs) have been covered for at least a couple of years now and have always looked ugly (so ugly that the only 'before' photo showing the area is 2 years old - before the toilet was erected!). Two additional plots alongside the toilet-plot have been recently leased so we'll have a productive growing area there once again.
Look at that sea of covers - the aim was to stop the deep-rooted weed from spreading - we tend to call it MaresTail, (but that's actually its cousin which grows in water). Now here's the 'After photo' - doesn't that look much better!
I've never been convinced that we'll stop the weed as it's growing on the canal towpath, the other side of our hedge. If a plot is worked then the weed doesn't cause too many issues, but if left it can spread up the site, which we don't want. So we figure that if we grass seed the area and keep it cut that should curtail further spreading.
We've also prepared the end furthest from the toilet for wildflower seeds - hopefully the mass of roots will also stop the marestail from spreading - it's an experiment and both methods will look better than the white covers.
It was a particularly windy day for this task but, with enough of us, we managed to keep some control though the dirty puddles ended up all over us and we had a few slip ups in the mud, which caused some amusement.
It may have been windy, but the sun shone a few times and it didn't rain, so it was a good day to be working outside with friends. Now I need to select and buy enough grass seed for 100 sq.mtrs and 25 sq.mtrs of British Wildflower seed - what fun!
Thanks for the photo Kerry
Love this song is by Jack Johnson and the title is very apt - many hands do make light work, though our legs and backs are aching today!
Yesterday was the first time I've visited the allotment in 3 weeks! It was a good visit because we had a really good Autumn Workday to clear up the site and, although it was really cold, it was a bright sunny start to the day and we had a big bonfire to get rid of all the broken/rotten wood and hedge clippings.
With lots of helpful volunteers ...
Clearing...
Tidying...
Burning...
They're staring at the sky because there were lots of red kites and buzzards swooping over the site.
Very impressive to see
Eating...
A little more eating...courtesy of Richard's master BBQ-ing skills.
And a bit of drinking - Ivan brought some of his Apple and Blackberry & Apple wine along.
We achieved plenty and were so pleased that it was dry, as we needed the warmth of the fire when the sun went in.And I think the phrase 'Work Party' is very appropriate :-)
The previous weekend we had the HAHA versus Hungerford Twinning Association skittles match. The HTA organised the event last year, so we hosted this year. All the attendees brought food for the buffet - what a lovely spread!
There was a good turnout and it was a lot of fun. The raffle meant that we also managed a bit of fundraising for HAHA. We won the cup, so HTA will have to try again next year.
Jamie has been visiting the plot occasionally to pick some veg - we've had the last of the peppers and tomatoes. We pulled Pentland Javelin from one of the potato bags - a good amount of tubers, but they weren't that tasty. The Nicola that we had recently were much tastier.
Oops, there's that cup again :-)
Squashes have provided me with some nice meals including this one stuffed with marinated tofu and black rice.
I'm currently making Festival squash soup for next week's lunches. We saw a good Japanese TV programme about squashes the other day; I'm roughly copying one of their recipes - I've removed the seeds but left the skin on: the squash, garlic, fried onion, salt and pepper are all in the pan with some water bubbling away. The skin has completely softened and I've just tasted it..mmm
No need for any additional flavouring - just a quick blitz and a little more water, - so sweet and smooth, perfect! The skin adds to the aroma (apparently) so it's best to leave it on.
The title is provided by Coldplay - the clocks have gone back today and it's beginning to feel a lot like Winter...
Yesterday Arts for Hungerfordarranged for the painting of a community mural, depicting aspects of the town. Luckily we were led by illustrator, Simon Jardine.
Zoe (friend and fellow plotholder) and I spent longer than you would think adding the Marsh Lane allotment site to the mural.
Zoe's are the neat, well-defined parts whereas my approach was more splodgy :-) OK, so it's not exactly a work of art, but it kind of looks like allotments!
Here's a small video that was taken during the process. I'm hoping I will be able to find a photo of the completed painting quite soon. It looks lovely and colourful. I may have to wait until it's hung in the library.
In the afternoon Jamie and I spent a few hours in the warm sunshine on the allotment. The weeds have gone crazy! Here's a photo of our salad bed, which has some Chinese lettuce as well as 'normal' lettuce and one lone Pak Choi. In the 'before' photo it was less obvious that there was any salad there!
Jamie planted up our strawberries on top of the weed suppressant-covered compost bed. He's secured their watering pots as this year they kept popping out of the ground.
I spent a long time straightening and securing the Glass Gem corn.
There was a lot of snapping involved but if the weather stays warm then there may be a chance to get a couple of cobs for the food festival in 3 weeks time..
I also did a lot of weeding on Plot46. I don't think our swede are going to work,
but we have some lovely small beets which we intend to pickle.
We left with a bagful of giant Desiree potatoes - Jamie didn't continue excavating the plant as this lot will keep us fed for a while!
Thanks to The Rolling Stones (obviously) but I didn't use any black actually - poetic licence :-)
I know I've got a separate wildlife blog, but I love this super-macro photo so much that I have to share it on here. It's a female orange tip butterfly that was in the greenhouse.
Look at that eye!
These are the butterflies which are currently most prolific on the allotment site. Earlier in the year we've had tortoiseshells and brimstones. The females actually have black tips to their wings; the males have the orange wingtips.
Anyway, back to gardening... The title is because that's what I asked Jamie yesterday. I'd finished digging the quarter which is going to be a flower plot this year but my digging technique left the plot about 2 foot higher than it should be. With a bit of 'knocking back' by Jamie it now looks like this - much better!
Hopefully we'll soon get some of the promised rain and then I can put stepping stones across the middle and start thinking about which flowers go where... that's the plan, I wonder if it'll work this year..
Talking of flowers, I'm planning to make some chive flower vinegar again
as soon as these open up - I'm hoping that will be tomorrow otherwise I
may miss out on them. Chive flowers that come later in the year are
never as good (I find) as the first blooms.
A little bit of Google-fanciness to make this look more interesting than it is!
We've had some new plotholders join us over the last couple of months and we're very pleased that some of them are at our end of the site, so we have a nice big block of loved plots. So lovely to see new people enjoying the site as much as we do.
It can't be right, can it? Our beautiful site which is currently being enjoyed by over 77 families and has been providing a healthy pastime and community spirit within Hungerford over the last 7 years is to be "returned to grassland" by the landowner.
The reason for ending the tenancy is apparently due to a planning dispute. Not because of a plan for housing on Marsh Lane, but for another piece of land which wasn't included in West Berkshire's recent Development Plan. It's understood that the Marsh Lane field is unlikely to ever be given planning permission (though this may be wishful thinking).
So, we allotment holders are stuck in the middle of this dispute and Hungerford will lose one of its greatest community assets unless Hungerford Town Council manage to resolve the situation before April 2016.
Hungerford will be left with an empty field with £5,000 of public-funded rabbit fencing and an unused publicly-funded £5,000 borehole in the middle of it.
Borehole digging in 2010
The town council has leased the land since 2009 and in that time we've received 3 notices to quit, which have been turned around at the last moment. I'm sick of it! It's time the town had a PERMANENT ALLOTMENT SITE, as outlined in the HungerfordTown Plan 2013.
'The Allotment' play in 2012
The Council meeting next Monday (7th Dec), which is open to the public, could be interesting...
Please come along if you think our allotment site is worth keeping!!
Have I mentioned the Open Afternoon on here? I don't think I have, though I have been talking about it a lot in real life! It's a little later in the year than intended, because of the lease extension and then time constraints of HAHA committee members but we're really hoping the weather will be reasonable - or, even better, SUNNY!
I'm going to be looking after the tombola/produce stall and am looking forward to it. Especially now that we have some gazebos to use, thanks to helpful plotholders and my sister :-)
So, next Saturday we're going to have a busy day tidying the site and making the communal areas look their best and then Sunday we'll hopefully have lots of visitors to see how great the allotment site is. There are going to be activities for children too including a 'Nature lotto' (allotment hunt) and paper flower making so they can be entertained along with the adults.
Hope to see you there and maybe a few more Hungerford locals will be inspired to get on the waiting list for a plot! Follow the carrots from the High Street to find the site :-)
Just a quick link to my second article for the Hungerford Quarterly magazine, Chain Mail.
I pretty much summarise what I've written on the blog over the previous months and try to raise the profile of the allotments within the local community. We need all the help we can get with the short lease still hanging over us.
About 6 poles (150 sq.mtrs) have been covered for at least a couple of years now and have always looked ugly (so ugly that the only 'before' photo showing the area is 2 years old - before the toilet was erected!). Two additional plots alongside the toilet-plot have been recently leased so we'll have a productive growing area there once again.
Look at that sea of covers - the aim was to stop the deep-rooted weed from spreading - we tend to call it MaresTail, (but that's actually its cousin which grows in water). Now here's the 'After photo' - doesn't that look much better!
I've never been convinced that we'll stop the weed as it's growing on the canal towpath, the other side of our hedge. If a plot is worked then the weed doesn't cause too many issues, but if left it can spread up the site, which we don't want. So we figure that if we grass seed the area and keep it cut that should curtail further spreading.
We've also prepared the end furthest from the toilet for wildflower seeds - hopefully the mass of roots will also stop the marestail from spreading - it's an experiment and both methods will look better than the white covers.
It was a particularly windy day for this task but, with enough of us, we managed to keep some control though the dirty puddles ended up all over us and we had a few slip ups in the mud, which caused some amusement.
It may have been windy, but the sun shone a few times and it didn't rain, so it was a good day to be working outside with friends. Now I need to select and buy enough grass seed for 100 sq.mtrs and 25 sq.mtrs of British Wildflower seed - what fun!
