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 last week I’ve worked more than my current required hours but it’s still felt rather like holiday time. I think there are positive vibes in the air.
We’ve been walking to the river to feed this lovely family - eight cygnets! The River Dun is so clear and there are masses of fish which were also jumping out of the water to eat the floating swan & duck food. One afternoon it was so warm and sunny we decided to go to a local pub for dinner and a bottle of wine - what a treat! Sitting in the riverside garden the same swan family swam buy and were enjoying eating the weed. So beautiful.
We’ve been to the allotment nearly every day, there’s not much to do apart from watering and picking a few bits for dinner. Courgettes are still a major element in our meals:
Layered courgette, tomato & shallot bake with cheesy sweetcorn topping
Pan-fried courgette, sweetcorn, chard & lardons with roast potatoes and onion sauce
Courgette and sweetcorn fritters with our first two runner beans
The Baby cucumbers are producing well so I made tzatziki dip, using a recipe from this great recipe book my sister gave me.
We enjoyed that as part of a Sunday picnic - here’s Jamie ready and waiting ☺️ You can see we were prepared for all weathers but I’m pleased to say it didn’t rain and we had a great time with various plotholders dropping by.
We’ve pulled our last Nicola(?) spud - not sure went wrong to produce those mutants! Let’s blame the weather but I think I may have something for the Horticultural show after all 🙄
We’ve picked most of our sweetcorn now and are noticing that something (birds or squirrels) has been stripping the cobs clean on some plants around site. I left a partially formed cob on the plot and the next day we could see just how popular sweetcorn is - amongst many species! We’ve seen wasps eating them but never ladybirds before! It is a very good year for ladybirds and quite surprisingly most I’ve spotted (ðŸ¤) have been 7-spots rather than harlequins.
It’s been feeling rather autumnal in the mornings and evenings now, but apparently another heatwave is due over the next few days - good! I’m not ready for Summer to end yet.
Now sing-along with Boney M - you surely can’t resist!
I had a lovely break from work and now it’s August - wow, time flies! The weather over the last couple of weeks has been warm and mostly dry so we visit the plot every day. We’ve been watching the juvenile robins who have been well tutored by their parents to know where they get fed.
The blue tits and great tits are also very active in the hedgerow but don’t seem to have a taste for monkey nuts - unless the celebratory England flags are putting them off.
I’ve been holding off doing the Big Butterfly Count waiting for a warm sunny day without a strong breeze, there have been lots of butterflies around so I probably should just get on and do it really!
Our harvests are getting more varied with Lark sweetcorn making a welcome appearance along with the essential courgette and cucumber most days. As tomatoes show a blush we take them home to complete their ripening. The Black Moon variety are prolific (from the polytunnel) and really tasty.
We’ve picked our first aubergine - Graffiti I think. I roasted it separately from the other veg and it was a nice addition to the meal which included some super-sweet carrot thinnings too - waste not, want not 🙂
This vegetable passata bake was all home-grown (apart from the passata) so delicious with potatoes, courgette, garlic, shallot, chard and sweetcorn.
We’ve pulled another couple of potatoes too - Kestrel it seems.. They’re delicious roasted.
The remaining salad leaf has been pulled from the raised bed and I bought some additional herb plants - Greek basil, oregano and creeping thyme. I split the basil plant so have a couple of pots in the polytunnel. I was going to pull the chard, which hasn’t grown very well, but as I only eat a few leaves occasionally I decided to leave it. And it is so colourful! The sage needs a trim - I’ll do that when I take the heads off the lavender.
The shallots dried off so we made two jars of pickled onions. Jamie’s jar in pickling vinegar with mustard seeds and mine with balsamic vinegar using a slight adaptation of this recipe.
We received some free All Year Round cauliflower seeds from DT Browns so we’ve sown them in modules and they’ve germinated. I guess that means I should be weeding the brassica cage which hasn’t been looked after this year. It just has some Brussels sprout and PSB growing along with a lot of weeds at the moment.
Oh! Plus a blueberry in a pot which Jamie bought from the RHS as a birthday present from my sister. I hope next year is as good for fruit as this year seems to have been. We’ve never seen so many sloes in the hedge by our plot - does it mean it’s going to be a hard Winter??
Well, I don’t mind as long as it doesn’t come too soon. My squash plants are growing quite well now and beginning to climb but need a good few weeks to produce some decent fruit. The recent rain-Sun-rain has been great growing weather.
We can only see one tiny melon on the polytunnel plant and none on the outdoor plants yet - as Jim (plotholder) said ‘they’d better get a wriggle on’. I quite agree!
The runner beans are finally beginning to form and the borlotti are beginning to colour. A few more weeks till they dry off and I’ll be storing them. Last year it was so wet that I couldn’t save any beans - I hope that doesn’t happen again! This is a bean’s eye view of their world 🙂
On the health front, I have started EPO injections which kidney patients often need to help the kidney produce red blood cells so I should feel like I have a new burst of energy quite soon. Thank goodness Jamie is able to do my injection as I can’t. I’ve had so much needling all my life but I never look (and you really need to when injecting yourself!). What a wimp I am!
It’s 6 months now since Jamie had his stroke. What a terrible time, but he’s made such great progress, though he doesn’t always feel it and it is still early days. He’s easily tired and rather painful but that’s not unexpected although unwelcome. Overall we’re going in the right direction - thanks to Goo Goo Dolls for the song title 😌
I got up early and left Jamie sleeping this morning. I got to the plot at about 7am and it was already warm but not sweltering.
The plants still had dew on their leaves and I noticed that one of the melons has begun to send out stems in three directions.
The plant in the polytunnel has grown faster and is beginning to climb its framework. I’ve moved the aubergine so both plants are in the sunny doorway now. They both have flowers and quite a few buds. Manoeuvring in the polytunnel is getting a little awkward!
I was hoping to prepare the bed for leeks, but the ground was too dry so I did some clearing instead. Terrible bindweed and so much Nigella which has seeded everywhere - they look lovely but are a bit of a pest and the bindweed clings on all over it. The weed pile is full of life; crickets, ladybirds and other wee beasties so I’m leaving it on the plot to dry off and the insects can move on.
Hmm, well it looks better and we can see the pond again but that bindweed will be back for me to fight another day. The little bed in front of the raised bed needs tackling too, but that can wait!
The raised bed has chard and salad leaf as well as the herbs. There are only a couple of small rows of mixed leaf, but it’s cut-and-come-again so perfect for salad and sandwiches.
The Baby cucumber is growing quickly and some tiny cucumbers are hopefully a sign of things to come. We haven’t tried Baby before as we usually grow Rocky.
The tomatoes are always a bit slower to ripen than we’d like, but there are some great looking trusses on their way on the Black moon plant in the polytunnel…
The courgettes have started regular production so the creative cooking needs to start - or perhaps they’ll just be fried up with garlic, which is good enough for me.
The broad beans are still going, but they won’t be part of many more meals; once there’s evidence of the broad bean seed larvae we stop eating them 😖 This was a tasty satay Raman noodle meal I enjoyed the other night. Very quick and easy.
I keep stroking the pollen on the sweetcorn to encourage it onto the silky tassels. Some are going brown, but they aren’t ready yet. Waiting, waiting!
Today we pulled one of the potatoes - thought it was a Duke of York, but appears to be Kestrel. A bit better than the potato bag that had one potato in it!! Potatoes really don’t like such dry weather.
So, with a final hollyhocks photo - what a beauty - I’ll say goodnight.
The song title is provided by Prince and as we’re into our third heatwave of the year it seems appropriate. Phew, stay cool all.
I need to pull the courgette from that plot. We’ve had probably our last fruit from it - looks great, but unfortunately it had a hollow heart so no good for eating sadly. But we’re pleased that the Lark sweetcorn are providing us with some delicious cobs, they’re such a sweet variety.
We’ve had some proper stormy weather over the last two days. The early morning lightning was great yesterday (Saturday) as it was still dark when it was lighting up the sky. The rain was torrential and measured 22mm on the allotment. I planted the garlic on Friday - 22 cloves of Carcassonne Wight - so I hope that appreciated the drenching.
We were on site for another torrential downpour but stayed in the polytunnel - it was so loud but no thunder or lightning. Within an hour we were soaking up the warm rays of dazzling sunshine!
This dandelion looked so pretty drying out in the sunshine and there’s Jamie doing the same on the bench by the extremely overgrown wildlife plot. 😎
I did a bit of baking last weekend - another ‘floral focaccia’ with a garlic flour mix. Pretty and tasty!
And the plot flowers are still looking pretty - these zinnia were mostly not touched by the frost. Such lovely colours, but the flowers were a bit slow to arrive this year so we haven’t got the flowerbed display I was hoping for. This post is sounding a bit depressed - it’s not meant to be! It’s been a pretty good year, all things considered! And I have a few days off work next week.
Last Sunday we didn’t picnic because we went to see an art event ‘Ablaze’ in Newbury, with fire and music along the canal and in Victoria Park. It was good with lots of people enjoying the metalwork and flaming sculptures.
Which provides the opportunity to use this great track by Kasabian.
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.
