Scary Monsters

It’s that time of year again Halloweeeeen, ooh spooky 👻 

Our mini pumpkin was included in the meal, decorated our dinner table and Jamie even managed to carve one, but it was a bit fiddly.

The scary monster is a yellow dung fly - we’ve had another manure delivery to site. Hooray! We had a 10 tonne delivery and nearly half had been carted off to plots by the end of the weekend - we had a few barrow loads.

Behind the manure are our broad beans Aquadulce Claudia which we sowed at the weekend. As usual, they’re protected by plastic bottle cloches and netting. The netting doesn’t protect from everything though 🙄

Our little visitor is back to his friendly self and he joined us in the polytunnel during a sharp shower.

The showers were torrential at the weekend but it was reasonably warm and very pleasant when the Sun came out. We noticed that that the wasps were making the most of Ivan’s grapes, which have sadly gone to waste this year.

They were definitely drunk on them. All binging together - we’ve all been there 😀

It seems that we’re well into Autumn now - November today, unbelievable! The leaves finally changed colour. This is a Creeping cinquefoil leaf, so pretty throughout the year, but it does take over.

Even my little hazel tree looked autumnal.

The pot has some excellent moss forming the ‘forest floor’ for the little tree.

But Storm Ciaran is clearing the remaining leaves off the trees today. I have a day off work, so we’ll go up the plot and batten down the hatches later. First I’m having a toasted cheese and beetroot sandwich for lunch. I’ve always liked cheese and beetroot together, but toasted is even better - totally delicious! Talking of delicious, I made this pumpkin and bean curry the other night - mmm, coconut tastiness but unfortunately I didn’t cook the beans for long enough; even though they’d been soaked overnight they would have needed cooking for 30mins I think, not the 15mins I gave them - they were rather hard still.

I had a bit of good news recently - I wrote a poem (I know! Me!?) and WON a £50 voucher from Nomads Clothing. I love their clothes so I was very pleased 😊 Here’s the poem and the coat it’s written about.

The song is provided by David Bowie.

Autumn Leaves

Halloween tomorrow and the clocks have returned to Greenwich Mean Time so we got an extra hour in bed. We’ve spent a couple of hours concentrating this afternoon… carving pumpkins is a serious business 🤭

Only one of those is home-grown this year but we have to have one each; one for the plot and one for home. I’ve had a 4-day weekend which has been great. We had a lovely walk at Bowdown Woods in Newbury on Friday. It was warm and sunny. I was hoping to find some fly agarics but they were all past their best, nibbled or booted.

I photographed this little lone mushroom at the allotment. I’m not sure what variety it is, it’s looked like that all weekend. I’ll see if it changes over the next few days, if it isn’t completely eaten.

At the weekend the temperatures reached 21° so we were in tee shirts on the allotment. I wonder if this is weather we’re going to get used to for future years. The weeds are loving it, especially with rainy mornings and sunny afternoons. The garlic has germinated already, in just 4 weeks - that’s fast, I normally find it quite slow to germinate, which is why we’ve ended up with two plantings some previous years!

Jamie sowed the broad beans yesterday. Aquadulce Claudia We don’t want them to grow too quickly this side of Christmas but we wanted to get them sown before the really cold weather arrives… if it does arrive. The little cloches are for mouse protection.

They’re far enough apart so we can put net cloches over once they’ve germinated.

I cleared the raised bed. I’m planning on it being a herb bed from next year. That’s lettuce at the end of the bed. Slugs have avoided it so far - famous last words; they ruined my Chinese cabbage ☹️

Ivan showed me how to trim back the bearded iris where a fungal disease has damaged the leaves. They’re sprouting new plants around the crown. That’s spread a lot since it was planted last year; the corms need 7hours of sunshine a day to be happy and flower.

Talking of Ivan, he gave us some of his dried peppers. They’re not chilli, so I look forward to adding them to some dishes over the next few months. And our peppers in the polytunnel are finally changing colour! They’re yellow at the moment.

This was a meal we had in the week - mostly home-grown (apart from the plant-based steak strips) including some of our Salad Blue potatoes, roughly chopped and roasted.

Have a fun and spooky Halloween, here are a few more pics from our Autumn woodland walk. The song title is provided by the Goo Goo Dolls.

The Ballad of Peter Pumpkin-head

There goes October, flying by and ending with a pumpkin-filled Halloween weekend.

On Saturday we spent much of the day cooking. Jamie made a roasted red pepper and pumpkin soup, with shallots, garlic and onion.

A great colour for a Halloween starter.

I used the other half of the pumpkin for pumpkin pie. I used this recipe, but baked the pumpkin rather than boiling it.

I was pleased to see how much pumpkin purée it produced.

The pie case was bought rather than home-made. I think it could have been a bit deeper.

I was pleased with it. A very tasty dessert…and breakfast…and lunch.

For the main course of our Halloween meal we had Veggie haggis with mushed-up roast potato and celeriac. We used the celeriac that I grew from seed. Although they were extremely slow to grow they eventually produced some pretty good veg - though nothing like the size they sell in shops. We got these two chunks from two plants.

We visited the allotment to leave two Jack-o-lanterns on the site. We carved these three.

At the plot it was sunny and warm with a clear blue sky, but an hour earlier the wind was howling and there was torrential rain. In fact it took down several trees in the area and blew a whole roof off a barn just down the road.

Luckily there was little damage on site; just a few branches, the usual compost bin lids and a couple of cages in unusual positions!

So the weekend ended with the film ‘Young Frankenstein’ (I do love Gene Wilder) whilst chomping on roasted spiced pumpkin seeds and today I have a day off work. Yay!

I expect we’ll visit the plot later. Here is XTC for the song title.

This is Halloween

We always enjoy celebrating Halloween with a meal followed by a horror film. This is the first year in ages that we had to buy a pumpkin rather than growing our own. Of course, the pumpkin seeds weren’t wasted. I roasted these (about 20mins on 180°) with oak-smoked oil, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. So more-ish, but afterwards, as Jamie said, it is rather like having eaten a balsa wood model airplane 😂

We managed to avoid the rain when we popped to the allotment to leave our 2020-style Jack-o-Lantern on the bench to ward off evil spirits from our plot ;-)

The creepy couple from Plot7

We had a starter of green spicy parsnip soup and for the main had our favourite Stahly’s veggie haggis with roughly mashed roast Festival squash (thanks Kate!) and roast spuds.

And for dessert we had bloody lemoncello.

So that marks the end of October 2020. What a year and we’ve just learned that England is going back into lockdown for a month from next week. It won’t make much difference to my life, particularly as allotments are still able to remain open. The song music is provided from the Nightmare Before Christmas (great) film soundtrack.

Season of the Witch

I've been cooking, I always feel that's worth a blog entry. Last week I cooked one of our spaghetti squash. We still have two left to eat, they seem to be keeping ok - one at home and one in the polytunnel.

I rather like the spaghetti squash, lots of people don't seem to (including Jamie). I only cooked it for about 40 minutes which left the strands firm rather than going smushy. Then I turned the two halves over, forked the 'spaghetti' strands out, added the chopped nuts, cheese and tomatoes and popped them back into the oven for about 15minutes.

Nothing has happened on the plot apart from rain, rain, rain, although when we visited at the weekend, to pick some more dry-ish Gigantes bean pods and drop off some kitchen waste, we saw that the garlic has sprouted already! The weather must have been just right.

And then on Sunday evening I did some more cooking - just soup this time and I actually used a recipe because I wanted to use the cardamom seeds that my friend gave me (Thanks David) and I used half of one of our medium-sized pumpkins.

I made this delicious pumpkin soup - I have to be honest that I'm not sure the cardamom added much flavour. I put 7 pods in, I will try more another time. I did enjoy it for lunches at work this week and I've been snacking on the roasted pumpkin seeds (with paprika) during the evenings - so more-ish even if they are rather woody!

Halloween Night gave us an opportunity for a bit of fun - I do enjoy a wig :-) And we had bloody beetroot & potato mash with a Stahly's veggie haggis for our Halloween meal - lovely.

Song title courtesy of Donovan - Happy Halloween!

Missing

Jamie carved a fab pumpkin for the Marsh Lane gate and also one for us on Halloween.

We had a lovely meal of roasted squash on black rice with black truffle grated on top. We bought the truffle home from holiday, but were disappointed that it didn't seem to have any of the flavour we expected - never mind, at least we know not to spend a lot of money on it in the future! The squash was our Crown Prince and that has lovely flavour - even better (not so sweet) than the Festival I would say.

Now it's November and we achieved a few things on the plot yesterday. It was reasonably warm and quite a few plotholders were on site. We planted up our flower bulbs in big pots

I bought some wallflowers which were on sale, so I got about 30 for £4, I thought that was a bargain, so planted them up along the edge of the plot to cheer it up from March - May (well, that's what the labels say).

I also planted some by the pond at the same time as doing some weeding and getting rid of some of the Californian Poppies which are everywhere!

Jamie dug through the raised bed so that we could plant garlic in it. I left it late to buy it and ended up buying these ones from Waitrose. I think it's a bit naughty to plant shop-bought but hope that because they're from Scotland they'll grow ok. I managed to get 15 good cloves with a few left over to eat too.

The broad beans have grown well, we don't really want them much taller than that.  They're under the cloche net to protect them from the worst of the weather. It'll be nice if we actually get to eat some early broad beans next year!

This is my two celeriac - they've grown well in the old recycle bin. I want to make soup with them, but have to finish off the Crown Prince squash first.

I'm roasting the Crown Prince with sage at the moment, with the skin on. The skin definitely provides most of the flavour and is perfectly soft enough to eat. Look at how pretty it looked in the roasting tray. I've added a bit of chilli powder now it's on the hob. (I've just remembered I meant to add an onion, but I don't think it will be missed as the squash is so tasty)

So this is the last month of Autumn and there are masses of berries on the hedge - does it mean it'll be a hard Winter?

 

We always used to say that, but we'll see... We've already had a week or frosty cold weather, but it's warmed up again now and just a bit wet.

We found one last interesting thing before we left the allotment - a bagful of 10p pieces for my "10 Year Transplant Anniversary Fund" for the Six Counties Kidney Patients Association. People are so generous! Thank you to whoever left it for me! I look forward to doing the big count-up in April!

So today's song...is about the fact that garlic was missing from the garden centres, Wilkos and even Marks & Spencer. But I really hope it's not missing from our plot next year!