The Right Direction

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 😌

Good Riddance

What a fabulous few days! This post is brought to you by the colour red ♥️

Friday morning-ish celebratory breakfast consisted of a delicious red gooseberry topping on icecream and pancakes. Yum yum, it’s fun having a special day off.

We had a very late night on Thursday, enjoying watching the General Election results come in and the demise of the hopeless party with Labour making a welcome return to Government after 14 painful years.🌹 Even our constituency isn’t blue anymore which has only happened once before in my lifetime! We haven’t gone red - can’t see that happening - but still worthy of celebration.

Unfortunately the weather hasn’t played ball and we’ve had a lot of (cold) rain - 35mm of rain over Friday/Saturday. 

We got several drenchings over the long weekend and the slugs and snails emerged from their hiding places while we were thankful to have the polytunnel to hide in!

But there were some lovely warm sunny moments between the showers.

And the soil and flowers are looking much happier after the last couple of weeks with no rainfall.

I managed to plant up some marigolds and zinnia today as well as sowing a row of Speedy dwarf French beans. The climbing French and runner beans are being very slow. This is the only flowers produced so far - not quite the flush of scarlet we like to see…

We decided to work through the rain today, mostly, and chopped back the broad beans which have provided us with so many lovely meals this year.

We cut them, rather than pulling, to let the nitrogen nodules on the roots remain in the soil - the leeks will be planted there in a few weeks. We had the judging for Hungerford in Bloom this weekend but our plots are definitely not winning any prizes!

But hopefully July and August will encourage everything to catch up, as it usually does…

We just need a little positive thinking…

And we have even more reasons to celebrate and be positive as England made it through to the Euros semi-finals yesterday! ♥️

Green Day provide the perfect song title (ok, maybe not so positive) as we move into a new era, after all surely things can only get better (😉See what I did there 🤭).

Mas Que Nada

This post is mostly going to be about food, with the occasional ‘Come on England!’ because I’m so excited that we’ve reached the Euros final!

The broad beans have been serving us well and I made hummus today using the recipe from The Lazy Cat Kitchen. I did add a bit of chilli and used sesame oil, instead of olive oil.

It’s a tasty dip for charcoal crackers. (Neal, if you’re reading this I meant to say that I pinched a bit of your mint. Hope you don’t mind!)

We enjoyed this broad beans dish as part of a tapas meal. So tasty fried with onions and paprika. The red onion makes it look very different from the recipe I used from The Fiery Vegetarian.

Another tapas dish was this bean salad, with last year’s Gigantes beans, peppers, spring onions and tomatoes. Again, it looks completely different from the recipe, but was so delicious. It covered me for an additional 3 lunches too.

As well as broad beans, the courgettes are now coming thick and fast so we had my favourite courgette stuffed with cheese, onion and mixed nuts stuffed courgette for dinner last night.

We went to the allotment this afternoon, it was cool, grey but at least dry after some torrential rain yesterday. Jamie fed all the plants and I mostly played about with our new camera. It’s an Olympus Tough TG6 and look how tough… This is how you wash it!!

It’s a good handy-sized camera and is particularly good for macro shots. These are two microscope mode shots of a pumpkin flower. So far, so good.

Some of this year’s garlic had fallen over so I pulled it early and it’s dried off nicely so they went home.

I pulled the rest of the garlic today and have hung it in the polytunnel to dry - it’s quite pungent in there! I don’t know whether it’ll help or add to the amount of insect life we have in there.

So that’s what we’ve been doing to pass the time while waiting for England versus Italy; England’s first time in a final since I was one-week old! COME ON ENGLAND 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 

The fab song title means ‘more than nothing’ or ‘more than everything’ and is by Tony Hatch.

Good Day Sunshine

Look at those feathers! Interesting aren’t they? I never realised that greater (probably) spotted woodpeckers literally have polka dot feathers! Unfortunately there was a pile of them. We have a sparrow hawk which leaves piles of feathers around the site every few days.

Photo courtesy of Ted

Our HAHA chair, Ted, was lucky enough to get this photo of the sparrowhawk with some prey. It was busy protecting its dinner from a red kite overhead so Ted was able to get pretty close. Amazing. We wish it would take out rats rather than our bird life though.

We’ve been enjoying broad beans over the last couple of weeks. They’re so delicious; hot or cold. We’ve had them in these dishes: broad bean & tofu sweet chilli noodles, broad bean & ‘Vivera bacon’ gnocchi, with seitan fillets & mash, covered in parsley sauce and in allotment salads for lunch.

I actually made a cake too - I know, twice in two years - unbelievable! This one was just as a topping on strawberry & rhubarb, instead of doing a crumble. I used this recipe and it was really delicious. We don’t have any vanilla essence so I used a splosh of honey rum instead.

We had a lovely day on the allotment last Saturday. It’s our Hungerford in Bloom judging this weekend so we were doing a lot of weeding. We’re only entering Plot7 and Plot3; Plot8 is still a bit out of control 🙄

Plot3

I made another bottle waterer for the patty pan on Plot7, all the squashes and courgettes have one now, so watering is directed straight to the roots. We chop the base off the bottle, Leave the lid on and burn holes in the lid and in the cone part of the bottle so the water doesn’t pour through too quickly once it’s pushed into the ground. With trailing squash it also helps you remember where the plant’s roots are!

And can you guess what’s going to be appearing on our meal lists quite soon..?

I’m unusually writing this on a Thursday as I have 2 days off work - yay and the sky is blue-ish! We’ve been enjoying the year-late Euros, especially when England beat Germany so we’re on to the quarter finals this weekend.

So, a happy song for you to enjoy, provided by…Paul McCartney. Sing along now 🥳

World in Motion

Another bonus for home-working. We visited the allotment for an early lunch and, although it was mostly cloudy, we saw the partial solar eclipse. In fact, the cloud helped with the photo.

I do enjoy an astronomical phenomenon!

It’s been a warm, moving on to hot, week and the weekend has been positively sweltering. We’ve spent lots of hours on the allotment and our runner beans are finally in the ground.

Those are Borlotti. Jamie has added wind protection round the Scarlet Empire as they’re a bit susceptible at the front of the plot, at least until they’ve got a hold on the poles.

The courgettes are freed from their mesh protection and seem to be happy. And, so far, all my squashes are intact. The plots are needing a lot of water at the moment, with no rain for a while.

It’s too hot for some of the seeds we sowed last week. The purple sprouting broccoli germinated, but succumbed to the heat yesterday and had collapsed. We’ll re-sow at home. Our peppers have been growing on at home for a while but they’re in the (tidy) polytunnel now in growing bags: Chelsea, Milena and Denver grafted plants.

Harvests are just starting - pretty meagre helpings but for lunch I had a nice salad with cold blanched broad beans, mangetout, salad leaf and chives and we’ve had a few strawberries. We’re hoping for more broad beans later this week. There they are… nearly ready.

The rhubarb has rather collapsed, not sure whether it’s the heat or because it’s so huge. We’re looking forward to this rhubarb and strawberry mixture with ice cream for puddings - it looks prettier before it’s fully cooked and smells amazing.

You may have noticed the England flag is in position - for Euro2020, postponed from last year. We do love a footie tournament and England won against Croatia this afternoon so we’re off to a good start 👏. So the song is one of the best football songs ever, by New Order and has a spurious link to the eclipse too 😊