Hey Jude

This little (Carder?) bee is busy pollinating our Painted Lady runner beans and good to see there are a few beans already growing on that stem. Quite often we’ve seen bumblebees accessing the nectar through a hole in the back of the flower, which bypasses the vital pollen transfer.

Beans have been on the menu this week - broad beans. These are the ones we sowed in May - we usually sow in the Autumn to avoid the bean weevil. I had to throw a few beans away because of evidence of weevil larvae, but there were enough to add to this very tasty egg bake dish (based on this recipe). The courgettes are still a bit wonky but taste good.

All home-grown veg: green and yellow courgettes, broad beans, shallots, garlic and our Paris potatoes. This one plant produced >500g of small spuds. Very tasty and they held together pretty well while cooking - we thought they may fall apart due to being so dry.

I pulled some of the onions because their foliage bent over - they’re drying in the Sun for now, along with some shallots. There are a few more to pull.

As you can see from these photos the weather is still extremely hot. We totally expect 30+° temperatures now, with 26° feeling cool in comparison and there was a cool (quite strong) breeze out there last night and it’s cloudythis morning though we’re expecting that to burn off with no rain forecast till the end of the week. So, watering, watering, watering is still essential but this is a great time of year now we’re harvesting. I pulled two more potato plants yesterday - another Paris and an Orla. And I’m pleased the sweetpeas have had another burst of blooms. Need to keep picking them to keep them blooming and maybe their stems will get longer.

Our Baby Bear pumpkin is still producing tiny fruits, but most are falling off now. There are 3 reasonable-sized ones which are already beginning to ripen - this heat seems to be making for a short season for some plants. But no flowers yet on our Butternut squash plant yet…

The HAHA Wildlife plot is looking colourful at the moment. The bees and butterflies are loving it.

The ground cover is so thick it must be holding water. On our plots, I’m mostly leaving the flowers to find their own water, as watering the vegetables is exercise enough, but I have been giving this self-seeded sunflower a drink everytime I walk back from the water troughs - and it’s just flowered. What a little beauty!

I’m on a go-slow this morning after another gruelling World Cup match win for England which went to extra time, but no penalties 😮‍💨 - we’re through to the semi-finals against Argentina now. So exciting!

And Jude Bellingham was our saviour yet again - what a star, hence the title song originally provided by The Beatles but sung by the England supporters here 😃

Oh, perhaps the original should be here too, though the YouTube police may delete it.

Oh, What a Night

I’m happy (Jamie less so!) that courgettes are on the menu - still managing to pick small at the moment - along with shallots and our first two tiny tomatoes.

Other tomatoes are reddening now following that Rubylicious example.

Also in the polytunnel, tiny baby peppers have started to form and the aubergine has some surprisingly spiky flowers, which will hopefully produce a few fruits.

The hollyhocks are looking lovely towering over our weedy Plot8. They don’t mind the lack of water, but the weeds are helping to keep the soil damp on that plot

I really love this pale pink flower, but there are also some deep purple ones.

We've just entered our third heatwave of the year - our poor plants are gasping, as am I trying to water everything, but even watering at the roots isn’t really providing enough for happy plants.  

Look at that 😔 Not the lush growth we hope to see at this time of year and the potato haulms are definitely looking past their best - we’re rather concerned whether there will actually be any tubers in that dry soil. We’ve sown a few dwarf beans (Purple teepee) in that front area and I re-planted some lettuce seedlings but I think they may have frazzled. And we finally planted our mini-cucumber out - that’s in a big pot on Plot3 to grow up the bean tunnel.

In between watering it’s nice to sit and watch the bees and plentiful butterflies.

We’ve had another session on the roundabout. Unfortunately our previous work encouraged dormant borage seeds to grow. Normally I’d like a borage-covered roundabout but it was swamping all the perennials so 5 of us spent a few hours carefully pulling out all the borage seedlings - such a shame really.

The ground is rather bare again and would also benefit from a downpour but hopefully the regular watering (thanks to Nia and Kate) will be enough to encourage more flowers. The Britain in Bloom judging is imminent but surely they’ll take the weather into account… and it’s only the second year that Hungerford has been involved.

I really like the Bug Hotel sign that the team have made at the entrance to Hungerford.

Anyway, I really must get up the plot to water before it gets too hot again, it’s meant to reach 29° today. But before I go…

The Mexico v England World Cup match was delayed by an hour - to 2am on Monday (yesterday) morning. It was so worth being awake for. After England took a somewhat unexpected 2-goal lead in the first half, the rest of the match was as stressful as any other England match, particularly after England were down to 10 men. Both teams had penalties and at 2-3 after 60 minutes England heroically defended our goal for the remainder of the game, which included 11 agonising minutes of ‘stoppage time’. Ohhh, the relief and joy when the final whistle blew and England are through to the quarter finals 🥳 Such an amazing match 👏👏🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

And that is the perfect opportunity for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, with a little poetic licence for the title - December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night).

My Time

We’ve had a delivery from Apsley Farms. It’s basically a by-product of the organic process to produce bio-gas from arable crops. The history is an interesting read. It’s quite expensive but hopefully worthwhile, especially on some of our not-so-good soil.

I’m using it as a weed suppressant around the tiny fruit trees. There’s an area left clear around each tree. I’m not expecting it to kill the bindweed but my regular hoeing of the area does appear to have helped suppress it already to some extent… well, we’ll see…

We’ve also covered the area where our broad beans will be planted next month. The area has already been dug and conditioned with lime. It’s spread about 10cm deep. And there’s some left over which we’ll use in Spring. It smells quite strong of ammonia initially, like Guinea pig bedding, but not any more.

I took one of the Festival squashes home and had it roasted with tofu, tomatoes, garlic and chard. It's tastier than the butternut I had the other day - can't eat the skin on this squash though.

The song title is provided by Royal Deluxe and is to commemorate getting some time back as I've stepped down from the HAHA Committee. It's kind of a shame, I've enjoyed it for the last 10+ years but it's taken a bit of a turn so I'll take the opportunity to have more time on our plots rather than thinking about or doing HAHA admin and site management.

Fire

Special delivery! Plotholders are always pleased with a manure delivery - it’s just a shame our plot is at the other end of the site from the manure heap 😩 I only managed three barrow-loads before collapsing, but we’ll get a few more.  HAHA charges £1.50 per barrowful. We pulled the last of our Desiree spuds to use that plot as a storage area until we’ve worked out next year’s planting plan.

I need to pull the courgette from that plot. We’ve had probably our last fruit from it - looks great, but unfortunately it had a hollow heart so no good for eating sadly. But we’re pleased that the Lark sweetcorn are providing us with some delicious cobs, they’re such a sweet variety.

We’ve had some proper stormy weather over the last two days. The early morning lightning was great yesterday (Saturday) as it was still dark when it was lighting up the sky. The rain was torrential and measured 22mm on the allotment. I planted the garlic on Friday - 22 cloves of Carcassonne Wight - so I hope that appreciated the drenching.

We were on site for another torrential downpour but stayed in the polytunnel - it was so loud but no thunder or lightning.

Within an hour we were soaking up the warm rays of dazzling sunshine!

This dandelion looked so pretty drying out in the sunshine and there’s Jamie doing the same on the bench by the extremely overgrown wildlife plot. 😎 

I did a bit of baking last weekend - another ‘floral focaccia’ with a garlic flour mix. Pretty and tasty!

And the plot flowers are still looking pretty - these zinnia were mostly not touched by the frost. Such lovely colours, but the flowers were a bit slow to arrive this year so we haven’t got the flowerbed display I was hoping for. This post is sounding a bit depressed - it’s not meant to be! It’s been a pretty good year, all things considered! And I have a few days off work next week.

Last Sunday we didn’t picnic because we went to see an art event ‘Ablaze’ in Newbury, with fire and music along the canal and in Victoria Park. It was good with lots of people enjoying the metalwork and flaming sculptures.

Which provides the opportunity to use this great track by Kasabian.

Late in the Evening

At last we have more variety in our harvests. That was our second potato bag with a better haul of (Rocket?) spuds. The Cavolo Nero was used as crispy seaweed in a Chinese meal.  The warm and showery weather over the last couple of weeks has made the plot and this plotholder a lot happier as our beds are finally filling up a bit.

The climbing beans tunnel looks quite sparse but is producing a surprising amount of beans and lots more flowers too.

They were part of this early morning, pre-work harvest along with our first courgette (the plant has been sitting in a pot for months with the weather refusing to let its fruits mature!) and our first cucumber. Mmm, home-grown mini-cucumbers are so delicious.

The larger turnips were past their best so went to the compost, but the little ones were tasty roasted with potatoes.

And this trug has our first harvest of tomatoes (well, the first that have gone home), radishes, stripey courgette and some leggy carrots (purple and orange).

We had a tasty salad with 7 home-grown ingredients. The imperfect carrots in mayo made an excellent tasty coleslaw.

These ipomoea were from seeds from my Cousin Jen. Such beautiful colours and they’re beginning to climb the frame now. Related to the dreaded bindweed, which I’m still fighting on our plot. We had a HAHA workday this weekend where we cleared a plot which has been given up. It was completely covered in white-flowering bindweed. We’re not fooling ourselves into thinking the problem is gone but now it’s covered in a plastic sheet for a while it’s at least contained. It’s been a particularly good year for bindweed 😖

The female pheasant, with her remaining two chicks likes the un-loved plots, but they’re less popular with the neighbours! The pheasant herself also has her fans and her haters!

It was breezy and unexpectedly misty and perfect for a bit of digging, so I cleared the area on our plot where the broad beans were and the leeks will soon be planted.

You can see that the soil is actually bone dry as soon as the Sun appeared.

My brother gave me these bees for my birthday, thanks Tim, they look great on the toilet which we can see from our plot and the communal area.

At our Sunday picnic last week we made use of the donated Chiminea when the Sun had gone. It was lovely and we enjoyed seeing bats zipping about around us, such fun.

Which gives me the opportunity to use Paul Simon’s great song title - dance-along now!

HBDMF

Summer arrived - just for a day, but it was tremendously hot and sunny. So I started my holiday early by taking Friday afternoon off and we enjoyed a lovely barbecue on the plot. It was a good start to my 10-day break where hopefully more of the days are like this…

Than this!

Actually those heavy-looking clouds didn’t produce any rain. That’s fine, we’ve had plenty.. and every time it rains the molluscs turn up and eat our plants 😩 Look at this sad display!

Not a leaf left so now they’ve moved onto the flowers. A few things are getting away with less damage and we managed a tasty salad with a tasty peppery turnip.

And we had our first new potatoes Swift with it. They look good and tasted good but that was from a bag where two seed potatoes were planted so it’s a pathetic harvest - lucky there’s only two of us!!

I ventured beneath the netting on the root vegetable plot last weekend and, once I’d cleared the weeds, I found one (yes one!) parsnip, five salsify and a rather weak couple of rows of carrots - ugh, what a year! The garlic harvest was more successful and dried out in the sunshine. Some bulbs have little additional bulblets, I’m blaming the wet Spring for that.

Now, I must stop moaning! A few bees and butterflies arrived with the sunshine.

And the verbena bonariensis is looking stunning alongside the red of the crocosmia.

Also, our wildlife camera snapped a fox visiting the plot - hooray!

On Saturday a group of us plotholders were given a tour of the site for the Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve which is 40acres of ancient water meadow which we really hope will get planning permission in the next few weeks - it’s literally 5minutes walk from our front door and will be great for us, nature and the town. Exciting!

It’s been a great start to my holiday and yesterday we had a picnic, which included a birthday cake, too much wine and a lot of laughter.

Thanks to the Dropkick Murphys for the fabulous song, though I clearly don’t agree with the sentiment 🥳 it does make me laugh. Enjoy.