Ooh La La - Ail mariné

Or, marinated garlic, which is what I've been making this afternoon. There it is, it's got to wait in the fridge for a couple of weeks before I can have a taster. The authentic french version is apparently delicious...

I used three fresh garlic bulbs, which didn't go as far as you may think - these are only very little jars.

I added salt, one of the jars has this Smoked Cornish salt, and red wine vinegar.

I also picked for my dinner this evening: our first beetroot of the year, this one is in surpisingly good condition; fennel; first carrots of the year - these are thinnings so they're only little; a courgette that's getting a bit too big. I'm roasting the veggies (although I haven't got any garlic left at home - duh!). I'll shallow fry the courgette so it's a bit of a different texture, I'm removing some of the water from it first, using salt.

And raspberries for pud.

Mostly Green

But starting with a bit of colour as the raspberries are doing pretty well on Plot7 this year, obviously leaving them to do their own thing is the answer!

We're disappointed with our 3 grafted pepper plants. We expected them to produce a whole string of peppers... At the moment they're all green but they should colour-up when they're ripe.

Milena - the orange one

Perhaps the colder weather mid-growth stopped them in their tracks.

Britney - the red one

Or maybe it was just not warm enough with the greenhouse door open - but it gets stifling in there during the day if it's shut.

Chelsea - the yellow one

Well, hopefully these five peppers will grow big and tasty, even if they don't produce the 'abundance of tasty peppers' the plants are meant to.

At the end of the greenhouse the loofah is growing tall. It's rather straggly with just one flower and no fruits yet...

The pumpkins on Plot7 are spreading as intended - we want them to grow over and around the sweetcorn as the small pumpkins then hang and stay nice and clean.

The Minicole cabbages on Plot3 are looking more like cabbages now. We weeded most of the plot today and it's looking much happier - though the spuds still look awful!

This ringlet butterfly was in the greenhouse, reminding me that I need to do the Big Butterfly Count but want a nice sunny day to do it on - today wasn't sunny, but was warm. 

And for dinner we have our first runner beans - Benchmaster. They have a red line along the edge. I'd take a photo but they're in the cooking pot right now!

An Extra Day on the Plot

I had plans for Tuesday, they fell through but once you've booked leave it's difficult to go back on that, particularly when the sun is shining, so we had a fabulous sunny day on the plot. We were doing more tidying of the plot - mostly Plot 7 and Plot 8. And we picked our first raspberries of the year - so tasty when eaten with strawberries.

Jamie found this tiny, tiny mushroom - look how small yet perfectly formed it is!

 I haven't been able to id it yet.

We're pleased to say that our second sowing of carrots has germinated and all the second sowing of mangetout have also popped out of the ground now. These are the yellow-podded ones, which are doing far better than the purple-podded. They're still a bit weak, but the flowers are pretty.

Whilst weeding and clear hundreds of tiny grape hyacinth bulbs (I'm drying them out in the greenhouse) I pulled this couch grass stem - look how nothing gets in its way! We've seen it growing through a potato before too!

The butterflies have re-emerged since the weather cheered up. Here's a white - I think it's a small white.

And in the evening we had the HAHA AGM. Not a great turnout, but more plotholders than committee members, so that's good! And we had a nice drink and chat after the hour of talking 'business'!

Is it Summer yet?

It's easy to be disheartened as an English plotholder this year. The England flags were taken down as soon as England crashed out of the Euros with an awful football performance :-( The slugs are eating anything and everything; The weather has been as grey as the mood of half the country, but... Taaa-daaaah! Here's a welcome scene we haven't seen for a while! Blue sky - yay!

Of course you can't see from the photo that it was blowing a gale, but it was still lovely and warm and we got a lot done. Because of the wind we're leaving protection around our runner beans, pumpkins and the Rocky cucumbers which have today been planted in their pots on Plot3.

We planted up some tubs with flowers. The plan for an amazing display of 12 tall sunflowers has been scuppered by slugs - it'll now be an amazing display of, at most, 5 shorter sunflowers.
The sweetcorn grow quickly once they're planted out. We'll leave their cloches on for now, they may appreciate the extra warmth.

Quite a lot of the parsnips haven't been nibbled so we weeded the area - hope that doesn't make it too easy for the slugs to spot them - there they are, behind the little fence. Beyond the parsnips we've planted the Valeriana Officinalis which we grew from seed. The flowers are meant to smell of vanilla so I hope they grow as intended.

The broad beans are looking ok, but some of them have been got at (probably) by slugs and (possibly) birds, but there should be a few meals-worth of tasty beans for us.

And who's been eating our strawberries? Looks like everyone's having a go!

Never mind, still enough for us too. There's a tiny garlic bulb and a yellow courgette going home too. The feeble garlic looked like it had been pulled up by a bird, along with some of the remaining silverskin onions. The courgette had its end nibbled, but we'll add it to our dinner.

Most of the garlic is fine. It's in the raised bed, behind the onions, which are just beginning to bulb up.

And the loofah is slowly beginning to climb up its trellis in the greenhouse. It likes hot humid weather which it isn't getting at the moment, but now it's July so surely...

Jamie's sowed some Speedy dwarf french beans. We'll germinate them at home and then they'll be planted around the sweetcorn patch. Speedy beans are meant to be harvestable in 8 weeks - hope so! These are our Scarlet Empire runner beans - just beginning to flower

It's Hungerford in Bloom allotment judging next weekend - our plots aren't entry-worthy (it's a bit too early for us) but I like to support this type of thing so the allotments get a bit of publicity. Fingers crossed for just the right growing weather and no slugs over the next week....hmmm!

Plot3 will not be in Hungerford in Bloom!

Planning and Planting

We had plans today and I'm pleased to say that the weather was perfect.

Last night a frost was threatened so we put some fleece protection over our potatoes - we needn't have bothered. The temperature last night only got down to 7.3°; underneath the fleece it stayed at 12.5°

Jamie earthed up the row of spuds on Plot3 and I earthed up the bags - look how much they'd all grown! Helped by the 40mm of rain we had in a 24hour period during the week.

Before I did the earthing up I planted out the beetroot - they'd definitely had enough of being in their little modules. I've planted 24, but a couple may not survive the night as they were such weaklings! They're planted in a square-ish patch behind the raised bed with the garlic in it.

I also planted up my Florence Fennel. I've put some in a couple of old recycle bins. The plan is that they will be blanched in the high-sided boxes so the bulb will stay nice and white... that's the plan. I had 5 plants left over so I've put them in the salad raised bed. All of them are protected by netting and lots of slug pellets :-(

This is one of our pepper plants. I think I've mentioned that we're growing them 'cordon' style. Jamie cut off one of the two growing stems, so just one grows on. At the top you can see the little pepper growing in the middle of the two new growing stems - one of those stems will be snipped off when they grow a little longer...

During the week Jamie sowed a loofah seed and some pumpkin (Jack Be Little and Jack of all Trades). No signs of germination yet though...

Across the Marsh

It's extremely windy and very wet today but we thought we'd wander up the allotment via Freemans Marsh. The River Dun was running fast and the paths are muddy and slippery.

There wasn't much wildlife to be seen, just a few pigeons and crows letting the wind take them where it wanted. The moles have been busy though! Look at that lovely soil, it always looks good after the moles have worked it :-)

I noticed that our greenhouse is visible across the marsh, through the leafless hedge. The canal is between the marsh and the allotment site. You can tell it's our greenhouse because that's our ash tree (in the centre of the pic).

It was a blustery walk, not too cold though and, not surprisingly, we were the only ones on site. There's so much to be done, but today was not the day to be doing it!

Lots of the grape hyacinths are in flower, but the colour is a bit washed out - perhaps because of the weather? There are certainly more flowers than there were at this time last year though.

Our new pot raspberry bush has some lovely shiny, hairy new leaves growing, which must be a good sign.

And the rhubarb plants are just beginning to reveal new growth under all the dead remains of last year.

Chop Chop!

Sometimes it helps to be slow. We had a lazy morning and didn't make it to the plot till 2:30 but then the sun was finally managing to break through. We had a pleasant 2½ hours with a temperature of about 9° listening to the red kite calling overhead and the terns (Oops! See comment below) screeching over the canal.
A less welcome sound was of shooting in the distance, but some people do seem to hate deer and pheasants :( It upsets me, but perhaps they were clay pigeon shooting ...

We had our plans for what to do today; Jamie potted on the raspberry bush ('Ruby Beauty' from Thompson & Morgan). It claims to produce lots of fruit even in its first year and we intend to net it so we get to eat more than the birds!
My aim was to clear the two raised beds. The big salad bed was full of weeds and grass so at least now there is an area of clear earth showing! We should cover that until it's time to start sowing otherwise the weeds will take over again quite quickly.

The smaller raised bed still had beets in it... It seems wasteful, but at least the uneaten veggies are perfectly recycled as compost.

Lessons learned: don't grow Cylindra beets in a raised bed and don't leave them to get too big... Look at those prize-winning funny-shaped vegetables! I'm sticking to Boltardy beets this year.

I got chopped out of the photo...but chopping the beets up in a bucket was pleasing and warmed me up so even I took my coat off.

The resulting purple mess was layered in the compost bin with dry waste, like the the dried-out tops of the wildflowers. That should rot down nicely and fairly quickly - though may also prove irresistible to mice!

Another vegetable destined for the compost bin - the swedes. We didn't get to eat any of them - they all bolted :-( Shop-bought neeps and tatties for the Burns Night meal on Monday I'm afraid!

Shows and Showing

I've been so busy over the last couple of weeks I haven't had a chance to take photos, let alone blog! Suffice to say we've been living on courgettes, potatoes and cucumbers!
I'm very pleased to say that the Open Day went really well yesterday and, given the dull, wet weather we've had over the last couple of weeks we were extremely lucky that the sun shone for much of the afternoon.

Plotholders are so generous with their time: cooking delicious cakes, savouries and pickles; digging crops to provide produce and of course helping out with the stalls. Others brought family and friends along to show off our site in all its glory during National Allotment Week. We even gained a couple of new plotholders on the day! No-one visiting the site could imagine that we won't be here this time next year - we should find out the future of the site next month...

It was so tiring yesterday I was happy to have a relaxing day today, picking veg, watering and chatting to plotholders in the warm weather.

I'm selecting a few things for showing at the Horticultural Show next Saturday. It's the first year that HAHA are helping the Royal British Legion so we're hoping lots of plotholders will join in. It's a small affair with the emphasis on fun and friendly competition. Jamie and I won't have very much to show - our runner beans are only just getting big enough to eat, so I'm out of the running for the longest runner this year - damn! That's one of my favourite exhibits. (Looks like there will be runners on the menu this week though!)

 I've hung all the garlic in the greenhouse - cleaned up and dead leaves removed. And there are some onions drying in there too - phewee, it's pretty strong in there!

There are a few of our silverskins drying in there too, but most are still in the raised bed to grow a bit further.

We may have some tomatoes for the show but I'm not sure we'll ever get a whole truss of red ones! These are our Lizzano. Still our favourite variety to grow outside. The Sungold in the greenhouse don't seem so prolific and are more fussy with needing their side-shoots snipping all the time.

Here's another bit of colour - on our raspberries. Not enough for a bowl-ful or jam (at the moment) but perhaps we'll get more, though they aren't under protection.

We emptied one of our potato bags with the Tenerife potatoes. Probably about the same amount as we got from the one growing in the ground.

 Jamie also pulled a Kestrel potato, which had masses of tubers.

In that photo you may notice our first celery, which is rather bitter but seems to have worked, and also our first Crystal Lemon cucumber and one of plot-neighbour Neal's lettuces - I've got a tasty salad planned for lunch tomorrow!

Also one of our purple carrots, though it's not as purple as other purple ones we've grown. What an exciting harvest!