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!
I must remember to sow lobelia into modules next year. It’ll make it far easier to pot them on. Zinnia seem to be the flower of the moment. And ours are appearing. They’re multi-coloured so some of the orange flowers are zinnia rather than marigolds.
I’m seeing them everywhere, but look closer and they’re even more fab. No wonder the bees were enjoying them today.
I’m really happy with the Love Lies Bleeding (Amaranthus Caudatus). There are 4 plants around our plots. This one on Plot7 is the most advanced and this lovely long tassel has started to turn the deeper red. Such an amazing plant from the tiniest of seeds. The birds will apparently enjoy those seeds in the Autumn and I may well try some myself, as explained here by the Laidback Gardener’s blog. I hope some will set seed to re-grow next year.
The harvests are continuing and are not very varied, but a bit of creativity means that meals don’t need to be boring. That said, I am missing the kitchen at work where I used to leave all the surplus for my colleagues to take home. I must admit that we left a large patty pan and over-grown courgette on the spares shelf at the allotment and I was pleased to see that someone actually wanted them! I’m also very pleased that the chalk addition to the patty pan watering has largely resolved the blossom end rot problem.
This Rose Harissa dish with sticky rice was tasty though a bit too spicy for my taste (I got carried away with adding the harissa paste!)
The only flavouring in this stuffing, with added pine nuts, was the garlic, shallots and garlic oil. We had this in stuffed courgettes, with some left over for lunch the next day.
This weekend has been so sweltering that cold salads have been best for lunches.
The temperature has reached 33° in the shade but it's been lovely sitting under the sun umbrella with a deskfan run on a Jackery power station, which we’ve bought for heating the polytunnel in Winter really!
The weather is what everyone is talking about. We even had to postpone our HAHA picnic; not due to rain, but because we’re in the amber extreme heat warning area.
It’s just beginning to cloud over - watch the clouds.
It’s still sweltering and some of us aren’t convinced that the rain/thunderstorms will hit Hungerford over the next few days, but the temperatures are forecast to drop to a more average 23°. Too late for our pumpkin, which has gone into emergency mode and decided to skip a couple of months.
The other squashes don’t seem to have had the same idea, so hopefully more than one fruit per plant, though the ‘tunnel’ hasn’t quite developed this year.
My Florence fennel has sadly all gone to seed. It’s just not been possible to keep it wet enough.
At last the sweetcorn has developed tassels but no cobs are emerging yet, which seems rather slow. We’ll see…
Summing up the last week: Work, water, harvest, deadhead, work, water, eat, sleep and repeat. And, I must say how much I like it 😊 Song title provided by Riton.
It’s colourful-meal-time! No colour enhancement necessary for Salad Blue potatoes (they’re actually a maincrop). Fabulous looking and great flavour.
The one Salad Blue plant that we pulled provided enough potatoes for several meals and there are still a few little ones left.
These veggies were fried in chilli oil and included garlic so was totally delicious though only included home-grown potatoes, garlic and courgette. Our tomato plants are only just producing tiny fruits on the plants in the polytunnel and outside.
As more fresh veg becomes available I’m happy to eat very simple fair. Garlic and soy sauce was all that lovely veg needed for this rice dish.
Unfortunately our patty pan have started to develop Blossom End Rot - a result of too much nitrogen. I’ve removed the dodgy fruits and put chalk pellets in the watering bottle so hopefully subsequent fruits won’t be affected. There are loads of fruits developing.
The Sunshine, Butternut and Spaghetti squash plants have started to produce small fruits and the butternut in particular is starting to climb. Not as prolific as last year’s tromboncino,but hopefully more tasty!
We still haven’t had any rain so we’re watering daily. It has continued to be lovely and warm. Look how dry the earth is though! This is where we cut the potato haulms off as the foliage was dying off on this row of Nicola spuds. They’re a second early variety so it’s fine to stop them growing at this stage.
I’m thinking of sowing some Chinese leaf and Pak Choi where I cleared the mangetout yesterday. The mangetout had gone to seed during the hot weather and we considered harvesting them as peas but they were incubating pea moth, so we decided to compost them instead!
The brassica cage on Plot3 has 2 x Brussels sprouts, 3 x Purple sprouting broccoli and 1 x Cavolo Nero. They all look rather weak, especially as other plotholders are already harvesting their Cavolo Nero!
I’ve taken so long writing this that it’s now rained! So we’re off to see a wet plot for a welcome change. Need to be back in time for England versus Germany in the Women’s EUROS FINAL this evening! So exciting! Annoyingly we didn’t put the flag on the plot in time for the first match but we’re too superstitious to put it up now 🙄, hence the song title provided by Stevie Wonder!
And, because this is such a colourful post I have shared it with Dave's Harvest Monday blog, which I usually miss but enjoy reading.
Today we’re hoping to have another drone video filmed over the site by Colin. Thank goodness the wind has died down from the blustery days we’ve just had, would be nice if the sun shone a bit too. This is the film he produced 8 years ago, in April 2014.
The site is looking much more loved now, which I hope will be apparent from the air. It’s just a shame the ground and grass is so parched at present.
I pulled one of the Salad Blue potato plants yesterday. A good number of tubers and they’re certainly blue!
We finished off our first harvest of Nicola potatoes with roasted veg and halloumi last night. The halloumi is on fried courgette slabs (thick slices).
That meal and the cold roasted veg that I had for lunch turned out much better than the large stuffed patty pan I cooked the other day. The patty pan refused to cook through and I had even boiled the whole thing for 15 minutes prior to stuffing. I had to eat round all the hard bits which doesn’t make for an enjoyable meal.
My sister came to visit us on the plot at the weekend. It was lovely chatting in the warmth and showing her what’s growing and what’s not. Her zinnias at home are in flower but ours seem to be rather slow. However, this comparison from 4 weeks previous shows how far they’ve come on though not as much as the pot marigolds.
The chrysanthemum at the back are shorter than I thought they’d be, but they’re extremely pretty up close.
This River Lily on the wildlife bog garden (not so boggy at the moment) is rather beautiful too. While I was doing a bit of weeding there a small frog (about 2cm) bounced in front of me. I wonder if that is one of our home-grown ones.
Our pumpkin plant has grown one pumpkin, it’s already football-sized (“Come on England!” 🏴) but the plant seems to be stopping any other fruits from growing; they drop off very early. We think it may be due to the weather, or perhaps we’re going to have one GIANT pumpkin!
I attempted to plait my garlic, but couldn’t do it, so I have a knot of garlic instead - that’s fine 🙂 and it’s already been used in most of the meals I’ve mentioned.
The song title, provided by Kissing The Pink (loved this song) is obviously about the 2014 footage, which I’ll just watch again ☺️
Hands up who else was flagging like this yesterday!
Sagging Patty Pan plant
“When leaves show their undersides, be very sure rain betides” says the Farmer’s Almanac.Well, the rain reached Swindon but missed Hungerford, so I think it was wishful thinking for the beans, or perhaps they wanted us to do some more watering.
Watering just isn’t the same as rainfall, so we had to water twice on the hottest day in Britain EVER. Such hard work 🤭
The temperature in the shade on the allotment was 37° But look at the polytunnel temperature - Ugh! Didn’t stay in there long.
On Monday we got to the allotment for sunrise (05:10am). It felt really cold at 8° but it’s always interesting to see the site waking up and to see how much dew forms on the plants. The magpie family were flying about like they were playing in the squash tunnel and then we saw 3 squirrels frolicking. Perhaps they were dashing about to warm up, as I was.
The sun reached the top of site first.
Jamie took the haulms off one potato plant which had died back - just one Nicola out of the row. We firkled to see how the tubers were doing - no sign of blight, so perhaps the plant just died due to lack of water. Anyway, the potatoes were lovely.
That courgette was one of Neal’s. We had a larger one than that another day and I stuffed it with shallots, garlic, baby carrots and cheese. Really delicious.
They weren’t home-grown shallots, though I have pulled ours now. Not a very impressive haul again this year.
On one of the less-hot days I sowed my seed paper that my clever cousin Jen made - I’m making sure I keep the pot well-watered and look forward to seeing what appears.
Talking of emerging, I found this shiny golden chrysalis on a lettuce. I think it may be a small tortoiseshell.
Rain is threatening again, but I wonder if it’ll actually fall today. We’re back to our average temperature for now which is rather a relief but I have enjoyed the blue skies.
It’s raining!! The song is provided by The Stereophonics. Good video but I don’t like the thought of crunching sand in that bread. 😣
What a beautiful May weekend we’ve had, after a rather grey start to the month.
We've had some of the rain that all us gardeners were waiting for, but there’s little sign of it on the site apart from the weeds growing taller! We spotted a couple of these (below) on the wildlife plot. Often mistaken for fungi, it's the spore-bearing 'flower' of horsetail (aka Mares Tail).
You can see the green shoots of the more familiar ferny plant just appearing. It's an interesting perennial with very deep roots and is a reason why some areas of our site aren't used as plots - though it's only a problem if left to run rampant. We’ve finally confirmed that we have teasels growing on the wildlife plot when we noticed the little 'ponds' in their leaves. So, I never realised that teasels are carnivorous but they gain extra sustenance from insects falling into these rain traps. Here's an interesting read about it.
Our own little pond on our plot has two frogs in it now. The tadpoles, if they haven’t been eaten, are lying low. They're about 6-weeks old now so may be moving on to a meatier diet and legs could start appearing, especially on the ones in the wildlife pond which have always been bigger than others on site.
We’ve been planting and sowing over the last two weekends: Blue Lake climbingFrench bean, Yin Yang dwarf French bean, Gigantes and Borlotti beansare all sown into pots in the polytunnel. The Zinnia are in modules on a window sill at home and Jack of All Trades pumpkin, All Green bush courgette, Sunburst patty pan and Mangomel melon are in pots under the grow-light. And today I sowed some Florence fennel directly into the ground.
The Shiraz mangetout, grown in the guttering, have been planted out and I added a few more seeds in attempt to get some successive harvests. The frame has a protective net otherwise the pigeons will decimate them as they’ve done previous years.
On the last day of April we planted our potatoes. I’m looking forward to the Salad Blue; I hope they’re as blue/purple as the Congo that we grew a few years ago - I just checked, that was 11 years ago! Wow, how time flies. And yesterday Jamie planted 4 Nicola into bags.
On Saturday we weeded on plot3. It was hard work, as the ground is so dry, but it looks a bit better. Some of the grass was too difficult so I’ll deal with that after giving the ground a bit of a water. I hope you can tell which is the After photo - thought there's still a lot of work to be done before I can get my squashes in (well, they're not sown yet so I have time).Whilst working on Plot3 Jamie opened our storage chest and found a wasp nest - it was only at embryonic stage but we couldn't leave it where it was. We felt guilty, but flicked it over the hedge and ran away as the wasp queen zoomed round trying to locate her babies. I live in hope that she found them and continues the nest in the hedge, but that's probably unlikely. More photos/info on my Wildlife blog.
We've been going to the allotment most days for watering. I like eating my lunch up there but it's so hard returning to work! With no rain forecast for at least the next week we'll be visiting a lot in May, but it is so perfect. We have great tits nesting somewhere on our plot and have seen the bullfinches nearby. Our visits are accompanied by the cuckoo over the marsh and a little bird, possibly some sort of warbler, singing a very repetitive song.
The purple sprouting brocolli went completely to flower and the leeks have woody centres so those remaining have been cleared. I'm still eating the dried beans from last year though and was very pleased with these bean burgers. Borlotti, gigantes and runner beans blended together with chives, tomato paste, rose harissa pesto and some oak-smoked olive oil. I did more beans than I needed so the burger was significantly larger than the bun, but was delicious.
What a lovely month May is! Such a busy site with everyone talking about what they're sowing and growing. Rhubarb will be on the menu this week and broade beans should follow quite soon. Aah... now, back to work Belinda! Arcade Fire provide the title song.
