Changes

Here we are in June and some real rain arrived yesterday.

We were enjoying coffee in the polytunnel watching the plants enjoying the rain. In between some torrential downpours I managed to plant out the dwarf purple Mistik French beans which germinated at home in a week and direct sowed a row of these Jacob’s Cattle Drying dwarf beans.

We have three wigwams of climbing beans: Scarlet Empire runners, Greek Gigantes and Lamon Borlotto, which have been difficult to germinate this year. I’ve attempted to direct sow a few to fill a couple of gaps but may only have four plants.

We started the month with a plot barbecue for Jamie’s birthday. We had to delay it for a day so we could sit and enjoy sunshine rather than hide from the wind - May has been such a windy month. It was a really lovely day and Ivan joined us for a while too. 

Our first broad beans were included in the salad. We’ve picked another lot for dinner tonight; blackfly are out in numbers so we have resorted to spraying as we haven’t seen any ladybird larvae yet.

Plot7 still has an area that could be planted up, but I’m not sure it’ll happen unless I buy some plants and maintain my method this year of <ahem> casual no-dig! At least the front quarter should fill out with parsnips, nasturtiums, radishes, asparagus pea, a sad courgette and the dwarf beans.

The leeks have been left to flower and look quite interesting like penguins looking skyward, but are taking a long time to bloom. That was yesterday’s stormy sky but no thunder and lightning.

The flowerbed on Plot8 is looking lovely with the highly scented valerian, red Geum and Nigella. Zinnia, verbena and other flowers should start filling those gaps quite soon.

If you know the scent of valerian, this photo will fill your nostrils with the memory. Such a lovely plant.

The pot courgette is producing lots of flowers now, but they’re all male so no threat of a courgette glut at this stage. I haven’t sown any climbing squash (yet) and not sure I’ll be able to deal with plot3 to plant them - we’ll see, but there’s not much time.

The sweetcorn plants are still in their protective cloches and are tiny but have started producing their flowers - I’ll be amazed if they manage to produce cobs. They’re not meant to be mini-corn 😖

The salsify put on a good show, but they finally succumbed to the wind. I’ve put lots of the stems in the compost bins, but it may not be the last we’ve seen of those three plants - the seed heads are quite impressive!

Black Sabbath provide the great song to mark all the changes since I last posted. Growing season is upon us - yay! We’re spending quite a lot of time just sitting and watching - it’s very pleasing.

This is the Day

Look at that! A month has passed. It’s been a busy month with lots of sowing, a bit of digging and some planting. The weather has been extremely dry and mostly sunny but a northerly wind has consistently caused irritation. Jamie has been walking a lot with regular allotment and shopping trips

We planted our potatoes in April - Kestrel and Duke of York in the ground, with a couple of Nicola in bags. They’ve been earthed up now, managed to avoid a couple of frosts earlier this month. They’re in front of these salsify plants - the flowers open in the morning, but close by lunchtime.

The hedgerow is full of life and we’re peppered with confetti whenever we sit on the bench as the May blossom is just going over, it’s been a good year for blossom, even with the wind.

We sowed our climbing beans (Scarlet Empire runners, borlotti and Gigantes) on 2nd May but only the Gigantes successfully germinated, so they’ve now been planted in a wigwam. We’ll re-sow the others.

The sweetcorn finally got planted out, I meant to do a block, but planted in two rows instead for ease of protection from frost. Lots of the parsnips germinated and I thinned them out this week. It’s so dry the watering is quite a chore, but essential at this time. We’re expecting some broad beans to be ready for harvesting soon, so keep them well-watered. We’ve sown carrots into a green crate and beets, lettuce and radish are sown. Chard and nasturtium are in the raised bed along with parsley, which was a supermarket-bought plant and divided into four.

The plots aren’t looking very tidy but things are growing and that’s the best we can achieve during this difficult year. The weeds are going to love that bare earth when the rain does arrive 😒 I’m fighting the bindweed in the orchard; the mulched ground makes it easy to spot the bindweed, but it just keeps coming back and our little apple and cherry trees got aphid attacked this year.

As long as we harvest a few crops, grow some pretty flowers and get time to sit in the sunshine amongst it I’ll be happy. Sadly, Jamie’s not really enjoying it at the moment, understandably, as he’s still so worn out and not feeling sociable but I hope that will improve along with his health.

The song title, provided by The The, is to mark my change to part-time working. Hopefully more free-time will help with everything!

Across the Universe

How amazing are the Yin Yang beans! The patterns are great. Unfortunately only three of my seeds germinated this year, so the beans I harvested this week are being saved to try again next year.

They’re also known as Orca beans. That is all the beans I got from the three dwarf plants; I was expecting more but either they aren’t as prolific as Speedy dwarf French beans that we usually grow or the hot weather had an impact.

The  Borlotti beans and a few Gigantes are a bit more colourful and are in the jar for eating over the next year. In fact, I still have some left from last year and will be using them in a meal this week.

These pods had all dried on the plants but there are plenty more which I’ll dry off in the polytunnel if rain threatens. I prefer to let beans and squashes ripen entirely on the vine, but last week we had a frost warning - I know! In mid-September! So, I picked most of the squashes that look ripe and stored them in the polytunnel.

That’s two Festival, two Sunshine, three Butternut, two Winter Celebration and two Spaghetti. You can see how lovely and sunny that day was and the night stayed clear too. The temperature in the zipped-up polytunnel plunged to 1.1°.  At the top of site some plants show signs of frost damage - did I mention? It's mid-September!

Talking of the top of site (actually the southern end) I mowed the central aisle yesterday and this is the view - with lines that <ahem> straight they may ask me not to do it again 🤭

Apart from that, the only jobs we’ve had are watering the polytunnel and pots, dead-heading - a never ending task, until the frost hits our plot - and harvesting. 

Lovely tasty sweetcorn is arriving and, as you can see courgettes haven’t quite stopped yet…

Those three courgettes were nice with carrot and cheese on top of Smokey beans (not home-grown). 

This orzo, marinated tofu, tomato and courgette was delicious, with chilli-oiled chard cooked like crispy seaweed. I even did some baking, well, an apple crumble with forayed cob nuts provided by Ivan and apples from Alfie.

And today, with an extra Bank Holiday Monday due to the Queen’s funeral, Jamie and I enjoyed a barbecue on the warmish-sunnyish allotment with occasional chats with Ivan and other visitors. The birds were busy, including a very noisy duck over the hedge, and the road was quiet so a very pleasant afternoon while it would appear most other people were watching the Queen’s state funeral.

The song title is a dubious association with Yin and Yang - Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts. And it’s a lovely Beatles song by Fiona Apple with a pleasing video, from the film Pleasantville.

Month of May - Arcade Fire

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 climbing French bean, Yin Yang dwarf French bean, Gigantes and Borlotti beans are 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.

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!