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 🤭).

Start!

It’s been a very, very hot week. And dry; showers have passed us by and we’ve literally been able to count the raindrops! That’s not very helpful rain at this time of year so we’ve been watering and watering - backwards and forwards from the troughs. So much walking in fact that I've already exceeded the 68,000 steps for Kidney patients so I need to think about a new target...

This potted rudbeckia fulgida was looking how we felt, but (like us) perked up after a long refreshing drink. Over the weekend we planted up most of the remaining seedlings - I've added a row of rainbow chard and french marigolds to that plot - each plant getting a good splosh of water, but they really want some decent rainfall.

We've planted the two aubergines from the HAHA Plant Swap into the polytunnel - I'm not really keen on aubergine but will eat them if they're home-grown and they are such a lovely looking fruit (yes, like tomatoes they're a fruit not a vegetable - I had to look it up).

I've planted up two flower troughs for HAHA - I'm rather ambitiously hoping that they fill out a bit ahead of next weekend's Open Day, but I think that's rather unlikely!! Oh well, they should look cheerful in July and August.

I'm pleased to say that the mangetout are finally being harvested - a few being chomped on the allotment and others being added to various meals. Even if they don't make it into a meal I pick them to keep them producing so they don't run to seed. On the other hand, I'm pleased to see that these have run to seed. These are the Radish Rats Tails, which should produce long pods for adding to salads, stir fries or for pickling. I'm looking forward to seeing them form.

In the background of that photo you can see the sunflowers and the two mini cucumbers which have been planted up into pots. The mangomel melon is on Plot3 too and is planted into the ground with weed suppressant surrounding it. You can, just about, see it in the background of this sunflowers photo - all 3 plants are surrounded by netting at the moment to give them a fighting chance against everything that may try to stop them growing (which includes the weather).

I'm pleased to see that the Paris Silverskin onions that I sowed about a week ago have germinated. I like onion seedlings with their little bent stems. It makes them easy to spot amongst the weeds. These are sown into the raised bed but in recent years have been purely slug food - would be nice to have a few to ourselves this year....

I was looking at our garlic on Saturday as I was expecting it to be time for them to be pulled however they are still one bulb rather than broken into cloves. The Winter frost is meant to aid the cloves forming. Ivan advised that I should just leave them and in a few more weeks they may well separate into cloves. If they don't it seems that they can still be eaten as 'wet garlic' - they just don't store well.

They look ready, but the bulbs are showing that they're not.

The broad beans are providing us with regular harvests, they are so delicious. We've had several meals including a broad bean curry, broad beans in parsley sauce with souflettes, broad beans in a tomato sauce and in this stir fry with tofu knots (really tasty!) and radish (a nice colourful addition). The tofu knots are dried so I soaked them overnight prior to frying - we had 6 each and there are lots left over so that's a handy stash to keep in the cupboard.

Ivan gave us a plant (I thought it was a weed) that had appeared amongst his irises. It's now flowered and what a beauty! It's a Siberian Larkspur (Delphinium Grandiflorum) and is such a beautiful colour on its tall flower spikes. It's an annual delphinium apparently but will hopefully self-seed in the flower patch. Look at at that colour - it's like ultraviolet in the sunshine.

And Ivan gets another mention as he let me pick some gooseberries - payback was a bit of weeding. I used the nice simple recipe from the BBC Good Food website.

The song title provided by The Jam  is in reference to our first courgette of the year - I'm sure there will be many more to follow.

The flower was huge; the courgette tiny 😊 And, I've taken so long writing this that we've had rain - a perfect overnight drenching and some drizzle this morning before the Sun came back out - perfect. Will see this evening what difference it's made to the plots - perhaps the HAHA flower troughs will be full of flowers 😒

Hot Hot Hot

 

Finally got round to filtering the chive flowers from the vinegar. It’s so pretty and the chive flavouring is a lovely addition to chips or a salad. I’m thinking I may make some lavender vinegar, though I’m not sure that would work on chips…

Lettuce is now joining the harvests. The beetroots are the perfect ‘golfball-size’ that I’ve read about. I thought I’d try microwaving them rather than using the hob or oven for an hour. I’m no cook or much of a microwave user, but I can confirm that 7 minutes for two freshly picked small beets is much too long. I took the lid off to find two deflated splodges! I’ll try again… 

I did make a delicious gooseberry crumble though; gooseberries courtesy of Ivan. It served for breakfasts and desserts for much of the week. Ivan also gave me some redcurrants which are so beautiful and made into a sauce provide a perfect topping for chocolate ice cream. Yum.

We got a lot done on the allotment last weekend. I sowed another row of Salad Onions and Chinese Dragon radish - 5 days on and the radish are already up. Jamie potted up the pepper in the polytunnel and I planted the two final squashes in the tunnel - Winter Celebration. The melon and pumpkin are released and are heading off sideways.

Mangomel Melon

The cucumbers are planted in their pots, they’re very small plants at the moment but hopefully will be as prolific as they usually are quite soon.

I pulled all the garlic, but the bulbs are a bit smaller than usual. Lucky there are plenty of them, now drying in the sun on an old saucepan stand.

We did get some rain, but not enough so have been watering every morning. It’s taking us more than an hour to water everything now so need to start getting up a bit earlier, or starting work later…

Nice to see these early morning altocumulus clouds and seeing our buddleia there reminds me that I saw my first ever Hummingbird Hawkmoth on there in the week - what an amazing little moth! Not a great photo, but it was so speedy.

Anyway, that was all last week. I’m looking forward to a hot, hot, hot weekend though am rather disappointed that the blue sky has turned grey in the last hour! Song title provided by Arrow. Have a lovely weekend all.