Pink, Orange, Red

Phew, it's been a sweltering few days - Close to 30°. Both Saturday and Sunday we got up the plot reasonably early and then had to return home for lunch and a siesta. In fact, it was really too hot to do anything but we had to water, water, water of course!

They're my flowery ice cubes - pretty aren't they? They clouded up a bit more once they were fully frozen. I need to try again and be a bit more careful with the design. None of the flowers are poisonous, though I'm not intending to eat them - there are borage, viola, calendula, runner beans, cornflowers, daisies and buttercups (though these are toxic if eaten in large quantities). I think they'll be a marvellous addition to a Pimms 😊

And here come the Rocky mini cucumbers to also add to that Pimms! All the squashes have gone crazy. The two New England Pie pumpkins are winning with the fruits getting quite large and the foliage providing good ground cover.

In second place are the Tromboncino squash which are going to take over the world, maybe two plants was too many! They're only tiny at the moment, but I see that you can eat them as baby squash so I think maybe I'd better start...

This is a Spaghetti squash, which is climbing well.

 And, I think these are a Boston and either a Honeyboat or a Crown Prince.

It's getting a bit crowded in the tunnel. I keep lifting the trailing shoots and encouraging them upwards rather than along the ground. I haven't needed to use string yet as the tendrils are hanging on tight so far.

Jamie pulled the first Nicola potato - he didn't furkle too much as we only needed a few spuds for a couple of meals. Very nice small salad potatoes to go with our courgettes ... so many courgettes! We've added one to the freebies shelf on the allotment and even had to compost a couple that were marrow-sized already. Again, two plants was clearly too many of the All Green Bush variety!

I was going to use a sunny song, I've been waiting for blue skies for most of July and it is lovely but I heard this song on television the other day (Guy Garvey's From the Vaults programme - it's great) and knew I could match that to a blog post 😊

So please enjoy The Cocteau Twins. Try to singalong but it's a made up language, so don't bother trying to understand it!

Wings

Phew! That was a hot Bank Holiday weekend - how lovely to spend hours in the sunshine on the allotment again. I was pleased with this photo of a recently hatched Cinnabar moth. I particularly like the cape-like wings on this specimen.

I’d normally post this to my Allotment Wildlife Blog, but Cinnabar moths have been posted on there at least twice before; they’re a regular visitor. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year, but I'm sure many more will follow. My camera’s macro was really behaving this weekend.

These are the baby strawberries in the polytunnel - as a result of Jamie's paintbrush pollination (or maybe the abundance of flying insects in there).

And this is a Cardinal beetle - another regular on the wildlife blog as they’re so impressive. They’re not a plot enemy either.

Ok, that’s it for the macro shots. Here’s a sunny shot of our irises by the pond. Notice the may in the hedgerow, a bit later than usual this year, but still May.

I’m pleased that all the squash germinated. I started digging the trenches in the squash tunnel but only got 1metre done as this weekend was too hot for digging like that! 5 more metres to go... well, the plants have more growing to do - I'll just need to feed them prior to planting out as their modules are a bit small.

Our two Rocky cucumbers germinated too. We’re protecting them for the timebeing, we know how slugs enjoy a cucumber seedling!

I earthed-up the potatoes in bags yesterday and added a bit of potato fertiliser for good measure. We were both doing a lot of weeding and tidying - getting rid of the crazy grass edges, it makes such a difference and reduces the slug protection. I dug out some of the thistles from the HAHA wildlife plot, I know they’re good for birds and insects but we need to consider the neighbouring plots and they are rather invasive. It’s definitely greening up and the plants in the bog garden are slowly spreading.

We sowed the Scarlet Empire runner beans and Lingua di Fuoco 2 climbing borlotto beans into modules. The runner bean poles are up and I’m going to use wigwams for the borlotto and Gigantes.

The earth looks very dry, but it’s still wet under the surface. We’re still surviving on rhubarb, but look at this added luxury we had from Ivan on Sunday - it was so delicious! Thanks Ivan!

So that’s the end of the month of May. I'm looking forward to a few days off work this week - allotment all the way, hopefully. The song is by Birdy, because of the cinnabar moth.

Summer Moved On

The weekend moved us from August to Autumn. Don't be too sad, September and October can still  offer some lovely warm days.

The weekend was variable; one moment needing my raincoat and the next needing to sit down as it was so warm when the sun shone. There were also some strong winds which brought the occasional sharp shower.

The main aim of the weekend was to dig up a couple of Kestrel plants - providing us with ~7.5kg of potatoes (~16lb).

That's cleared enough space for us to get our leeks planted - I'm making the holes for leeks in the red-raincoat photo - it's easy using that big pole and leaves enough space around the tiny leek seedlings to 'puddle in'. This method should stop too much dirt getting into the leeks as they grow - eurgh, gritty leeks - yuk!

That should keep us going for a while. We have more left in the seedling pot. We'll probably fill other gaps with some of them.

The Lark sweetcorn is coming on well, should be ready in a couple of weeks I reckon. Hopefully the birds and wasps will stay off for a while longer.

As is the Double Red sweetcorn (below) but the Glass Gem has only just developed it's first male flowers - we'll be extremely lucky if we get anything off those plants before the temperature falls too low.

Another crop which has been too slow to produce is the Yard Long Beans, they're only just flowering! I sowed them at the same time as the other runner beans. I don't think they've got time to produce any beans let alone a yard long one!

The Gigantes have been more successful, producing lots of large pods. Currently no sign of them drying off which is how the beans are to be eaten.

The cucumbers have caught up with the Summer squashes now - we're trying to catch them before they get too large, but there's only so many two people can eat. Still waiting for more tomatoes to go red, but I can't resist eating some each time I visit the plot to water.

And we lost the battle with the courgettes so I cut all these off to encourage the plants to keep producing smaller ones for us to actually eat!

The Summer flowers are still looking beautiful - so pleased with the begonias which we grew from mini-plugs in March and the snapdragons that Ivan gave us as tiny skinny seedlings.

So Summer has officially moved on (song provided by A-Ha) but it's still pleasant for a little while yet..

Walk of Life

What a busy weekend that was!

We've finally planted everything, (oh, excet the brassicas): the Rocky cucumbers are in the tall pots in the front of the photo and a Jack Be Little pumpkin is to the right. This is Plot3 and we've put the mesh up for the spaghetti squash and the Cucamelon to clamber up. My sister gave it to Jamie for his birthday. It's such a tiny plant, hope it grabs the mesh soon and holds on tight!

We've had no rain, lots of heat and plenty of sunshine so have needed to water every day, but it's worth it with everything growing well. The Pickwick dwarf runners have produced masses of flowers and the beans are on their way now...

I wore Jamie's pedometer and walk about 5km everytime we have a watering session, so good practice for the 5km Race for Life walk I did in Oxford with my workmate Ruth on Sunday - I wasn't going to attempt running it. I so love Oxford that I had to take a few photos. Looks good with all the walkers wearing pink (not quite all). It supports all cancers now, not only breast cancer and these events raise a huge amount of money for research.

After having an amazing Paneer naan wrap from Kebab Kid on the Cowley Road I went home and, you guessed it, we needed to water the allotment. The High Street was closed off for Hungerford Carnival so we wandered up and stayed to watch the floats. We saw a few of our plotholder friends in the parade and watching it. Maybe next year we'll be organised enough to have a HAHA float...

We watered everything in the hot evening air, everything looking beautiful around us.

There were 7 Red Kites flying overhead! And so many butterflies fluttering by.

So pleased that some of the freesia bulbs, planted in Spring, have flowered. The fragrance is amazing.

Ivan has stripped down all his pea plants, so gave us his "left-overs". We made a delicious pea soup with garlic, onion and vegetable stock.

So that's another long weekend over - I took Monday off as a recovery day. This hot weather is so gorgeous but it wears me down a bit these days, luckily I have a week off very soon!

The song is by Dire Straits, with such a ground-breaking video in its day!

Down to Earth

What a colourful month September is!

This was yesterday's trug - mostly to be used for last night's roasted vegetables meal. The spiraliser and the sweetcorn stripper came into action. The spiralised courgette cooks quicker than chunks and it's lovely to add a pile of sweetcorn kernels to almost any dish towards the end of cooking.

This was a harvest from earlier in the week. Our last successful cauliflower - the only one we actually ate - we roasted it - definitely worth trying again next year and worth trying a little harder with them too!

This was the harvest from Friday - much of that went into a vegetable cheese omelet (so delicious!)

I pulled the first two edamame plants which have completely dried. Shelling the beans was rather fiddly and the beans are very small. Some pods only had two beans but the majority have three.

Luckily there are several more plants which are nearly dry - I'll need a good deal more for them to be useful - especially with the preparation needed for dried beans...

Yesterday (Sunday) we had a busy afternoon on the site - clearing and weeding. There's Jamie, hand-weeding the carrot bed and pulling a few thinnings to add to our meal.

I cleared all the lettuces which had turned into trees on our plots - I still have chard to use as salad leaf before I move on to soups for lunches.

Two wheelbarrows plus buckets of lettuce - all to the compost bins.

I also gathered a lot of compostable material by hacking back the squash plants.

There were a lot of immature squashes which probably don't have time to reach maturity - so they got the chop. Although it's tempting to leave them, it's better to let the energy get to the squashes which stand more chance of maturing. The plant will generally do this by dropping fruits that it doesn't have the energy for, but it still uses energy creating long new trailing stems.

Now we have two full compost bins and another one more than half-full. We need to mix them up a bit, but that wasn't a job for today - it was very hot and sunny - we can do that once they've shrunk down a little.

So with all that clearing we can see what's growing a bit better - including this little line of Kohl Rabi seedlings - sowed in mid-August.

The song title is provided by Curiosity Killed the Cat (remember them?) because with so much clearing we can see the earth again...