A Forest

So that's the last of this year's squash tunnel photos - I hope I didn’t hear a little cheer - the area is cleared and waiting for the trenches to be re-dug in time for the manure delivery so that I can prepare the bed for next year.

The watering funnels for the squashes do help ensure the water aims for the roots once the foliage makes it hard to tell where the plant starts, but the snails do rather take advantage!

This was last weekend. We found lots of ladybirds enjoying the last heat of the year and a lot of wasps were about too.

It was nice to have another warm weekend, but the weeds will love it if the weather doesn't cool down. We planted the Mersey White garlic bulbs and the Jermor shallots into the raised bed and they got well rained in during the past week.

I removed the remainder of the runner beans, Gigantes and Borlotti from the polytunnel roof drying area and took them home in their pods to dry out a bit more. I podded them today and was interested to find a few pods contained these plain black runner beans. They look lovely; so smooth and shiny. It seems they’re just an aberration of the parent plants, which were Scarlet Empire so I didn’t bother keeping for sowing next year - the pods didn’t look any different.

I’m keeping the beans in a paper bag in the warm for a while to completely dry out. I’ve decided not to bother drying the Gaia soya beans; they’re just too tiny to bother with.

A couple of the Festival squash seemed too small to bother with too, but today I’ve made soup using them. I roasted them first with a bit of oil and cayenne pepper.

There was more flesh than I expected when I scraped them out.

And it’s made a lovely creamy soup. I’ve added some cardamom seed which I hope will give an interesting flavour.

I’m making a pumpkin pie for the first time for Halloween next weekend. I hope it’s easy/tasty so I can use up more of our amassed New England Pie pumpkins. I definitely want the Crown Princes roasted, as they’re such a tasty variety. Not sure what I’ll do with the final green tromboncino - soup probably!

I had an afternoon off in the week. Work has been so busy and I’ve been revising for an exam on Tuesday (I know! An exam at my time of life 🙀) so it was nice to have a bit of time away from the screen. Our planned little walk around Savernake Forest, just down the road in Wiltshire, turned into a 10km walk! 

Our unused-to-walking legs were protesting by the time we reached the car and we never did find the ‘Giant Beech’ but we found the 700 year old ‘Cathedral Oak’ and other very impressive trees and fungi. I was surprised to see that most of the trees are still green.

It’s the time of year for sitting enjoying the last rays of sunshine, with a hot drink - although I was watching Jamie weeding and cutting the edges at the time 😄

The song title is provided by The Cure, there aren’t enough songs by The Cure featured in this blog!

In the End

 Like other plotholders, I decided to pick the ripest squashes before the rain came.

The two blue Crown Prince aren’t very big and I was disappointed that the plants only produced one fruit each, but there will be enough for at least two meals from each squash, so I shouldn’t complain. The green stripeys are Honey Boat. I picked three and there should be more to harvest probably in a couple of weeks. They’re my second favourite tasting squash. The fancy multi-coloured Festival are my favourite for looks and taste pretty good too, there are a few more of them to come. The two round yellow squash have been confirmed as Spaghetti squash by Kate, our plot neighbour who gave us the plants. We’ve never seen fruits like that before, but they’ll be fine, just for me as Jamie doesn’t like them. 

In fact, I like them so much that I took one from our site’s ‘Freebies shelf’ the other week and had these two lovely meals. I’ve used fresh Borlotti beans in both these dishes. They are so tasty. They're boiled on the hob for 40minutes, which is the same amount of time I cook the spaghetti squash in the oven (open-side down). Then bits and bobs are added before returning to the oven for 15minutes. 

That second meal has the tiniest Nicola potatoes. I couldn’t bear to throw them away and they cooked up nicely in the oven with the tomatoes, garlic and shallots before I added the beans.

We got a good haul of Nicola potatoes from that bag.

There’s my handful of Borlotti beans, I only used 6 pods for each meal. And look how pretty the fresh beans are, though they are rather dull-looking when cooked.

Most of the beans I’m going to dry and, because of the forecast rain, I picked the semi-dried ones and have put them in the netting attached to the top of the polytunnel. There are still loads more Borlotti to pick and the Gigantes have hardly started drying on the plants yet.

The edamame are the same, they were slow to start but have podded up now and are just beginning to go over.

As well as plants dying back, there are signs of things to come.

The raised bed has been prepared for the garlic and shallots which should be delivered next week (if such deliveries aren’t affected by the HGV crisis we’re now in the middle of 🙄)

The bed is prepared and holes prepped for popping the broad beans in next month. And at the weekend we potted on some strawberry runners. The strawberry bed is a mess but we'll sort that out sometime...

So the polytunnel is looking like a storage area now for a few things and we're hoping to get a few more ripened peppers before the plants get removed.

The song is provided by Linkin Park - great song!

Just Got Lucky

I thought I'd start the post on a happy picture, as the next photo is a less happy one - our tomatoes haven't escaped blight so this lunchtime I chopped off all the leaves in the vain hope that some may actually go red. I'm envious of all the tomato harvests I'm seeing on social media!

What a poor show! So it appears that we'll have to keep buying tomatoes for the rest of this year 😔 It's a shame because everything else in most of my meals is home-grown at the moment.

The runner beans are really paying out. And a branch snapped off my dwarf borlotti beans, so I had some of them in their pods along with the first picking of Speedy dwarf beans.

All of the beans apart from the Edamame are producing beans now. The Edamame have only just started to flower, so not sure whether they'll produce in time - the plants look healthy but the weather is definitely feeling like September.

Harvests are a bit more varied, (well, different shaped courgettes!) but how many more courgettes, cucumbers and beans can I eat??

I've made another batch of marrow and carrot soup, flavoured with celeriac stems. I should have removed the centre of the marrow, as the soup is a bit watery; I may need to add a potato to it to thicken it up a bit. I’ll see how it tastes tomorrow.

We have plenty of garlic - good job I'm working from home and not socialising! And I harvested a first Tromboncino for this tasty meal.

That's the before photo and I scoffed half of it before getting a photo after it was cooked, with a bit of cheese on top. It has Ancho chilli flakes added to the carrot, shallots and garlic; they’re not hot but add a lovely flavour - it covered two meals as Jamie's refusing to eat any more Summer squash 😃

That’s me, making holes for planting the leeks at the weekend - look, the sun shone and it was warm. We now have 40 leeks puddled-in, thanks to our plot neighbour Neal. We’d be waiting rather longer if we used our specimens…! How pathetic are they 😄

Leeks are such a tasty addition, particularly as our shallots didn’t produce very much. Jamie’s been trying to buy pickling vinegar to pickle a small jar of shallots but has found that in short supply - along with other items. Is it COVID-related or BREXIT… or maybe a bit of both?

Anyway, (don’t get me started) I’ll drag myself away from my two favourite subjects. The song title is provide by The Jo-Boxers and I’ve chosen it because more and more I’m reminded of how much ‘luck’ can change people’s fortunes - good or, sadly, very bad. Stay safe all.

Wild is the Wind

Storm Ciara hit the whole country at the weekend. We're not really used to such dramatic weather in Hungerford, we're in a valley and often miss the news-worthy weather. Of course, we couldn't resist a walk out in it so we took the HAHA anemometer up to the allotment.

The rain started while we were on our way, luckily it wasn't too cold and 25.8mph was the strongest gust while we were there. (Official wind measurements are made at 10m which is why they forecast significantly higher speeds.)

There was plenty of wind damage - netting and plastic blown around and structures in various states of collapse. As you can see, our polytunnel cover was removed - well, it was on our list of things to do!

And we seem to have gained another polytunnel... I think it's from Jackie and Elaine's plot at the other end of the site!

It was good to get back home to the warm (we were lucky, our power didn't go down) and we only saw one tree down although many more were reported in the area and so much debris on the roads as I drove to work on Monday morning.
Last week, as promised, I soaked some more dried beans overnight and Jamie cooked them for an hour the next day before I turned them into my long-awaited sausage casserole - it was delicious, quite spicy. I was going to have it for 2 dinners but it was too good to not eat all of it in one sitting.

And then for a couple of days I finished off the remaining beans with salad purchased from the restaurant at work. So tasty for lunch. I've discovered that the Borlotti seeds that I ordered are a dwarf variety, so I will buy some climbers as well, to make sure I get plenty of beans to store along with the Gigantes and some fancy Edamame that I've bought.

This blogpost is brought to you by the the colour (I know, I know, it's a shade) Black, because Ciara is apparently derived from Ciar meaning black (or dark) in Irish and each time we the storm brings us rain or hail the sky is going very dark.

And the song title is provided by David Bowie, and the wind is still rather wild today!

Still Ill

This is my most beautiful squash so far - a Festival.

And this is the biggest and it's so pleasing! A Boston Winter Squash - the only fruit that developed on that plant - perhaps not surprisingly,

I removed a few of the Honey Boat squash too, in case there is a frost this week, as threatened, they're now in the greenhouse along with the others. Including a barrowful of quite small pumpkins - we're blaming the weather. This variety Jack of all Trades normally grow bigger than this for us.

The greenhouse is looking a bit different because we've suspended net from the ceiling to store our onions and shallots. We decided not to risk putting the squash up there - I already bumped into the onions several times today!

The peppers are changing colour - we can definitely see some yellow, red and orange. Really hope the greenhouse is protection enough from the cold... it would be good if they're still fresh for Hungerford Food Festival in 2 weeks time...

I hacked back quite a bit of tomato plant growth. There are a few small signs of blight, but plenty more tomatoes to pick.

As I'm writing this I should be making carrot soup, but I'm being lazy because I have a horrible cold 😩.

I was pleased it was so rainy yesterday so we stayed indoors most of the day and prepared shallots for soaking in salt water prior to pickling. The Longor shallots grew so big this year, we're just doing one big jar full of pickles.

And I shelled the borlotti and soya beans for storage - I do plan to use them, but I need to find a good recipe. I asked on a forum on Facebook and the second answer to 'what should I do with my dried soyabeans?' was 'BURN THEM' - hahaha, that doesn't bode well!!

So now I really should start on that soup...but first, a song title..aah, The Smiths - perfect 🤧.