Time is on My Side

We've had a couple of visits to the allotment after work but the light fades so quickly that we only have time to water the tomatoes in the greenhouse, pick some sweetcorn and get home as quickly as possible to eat it.

We had our HAHA 'Seed Evening' at the British Legion last Tuesday. It's really just a plotholder get-together where we are given the Kings Seeds catalogues and told how to get our 40% discount through our Seed Secretary. There weren't many of us there, but those of us who went enjoyed a bit of chat about what's grown well or what we won't try again next year - not always agreeing of course!

We visited the plot when it was already dark. You can just see my pumpkin (bottom left) for the Food Festival competition - it's not a winner, but it's going to do better than Ted's which unexpectedly grew into a sunflower :-D

Two tomato plants in the greenhouse and the redcurrant tomato at the end haven't succumbed to blight yet. They're still providing additions to most lunches. The onions and garlic are drying out in there but quite a few of the onions have a brown layer inside so won't store for long, though they taste fine.

I made this lunch look fancy so took a photo before I added the tomatoes. Raw grated beetroot and carrot with lettuce and lovely smoked cheddar cheese. That's one of the last cucumbers for this year, but we were pleased with MiniMunch.
And, that fancy-looking lunch is why I chose this title song. Well, I'm on flexi-time so sometimes I get into work a bit later :-D

(Oh! Didn't mean to put two Rolling Stones songs together)

Been Shopping...

Our Kings Seeds order has arrived through our HAHA Seed Secretary's discount scheme. We haven't collected them yet but the news put us in an allotment mood - so we got out the seed catalogues...

Here are a few of the seeds I was tempted by. And note the heart & star mould set - really looking forward to growing some interesting cucumber shapes with that!
I think some of these will be used on the HAHA Plot - they're certainly quite unusual.   The most interesting seeds are part of the James Wong Homegrown Revolution collection. I hope ours grow as well as some of the pictures I've seen online!

Also really looking forward to seeing star and heart shaped cucumbers!!
These I bought from Suttons Seeds

Of course we'll be growing mos of the basics too, but no shallots this year as we've still got plenty of pickled ones left to eat from last year.
These are from Thompson & Morgan.

HAHA Seed Night

We held the HAHA Seed Evening & Get Together on a wet Monday evening. Not many turned out which was a shame but we had a good time up the legion. I had arranged a quiz but that's been saved to be used another time when there are more people to make up teams!

Instead we had a few drinks and a nice couple of hours of chat. We had an interesting discussion about the best potatoes - so many different opinions and this year was such a poor year to base a decision on!
We picked up the 2012/13 Kings Seeds catalogue - they've printed in colour, it looks so much better than the black and white one and is surely more enticing to buy from :-)
As members of HAHA we get an excellent 40% discount off all their seeds.

Kings Seeds Facebook page

So, Jamie and I now need to go through that and decide what we want. We have so many old seeds at home but many of those will be from 2009 when we first got the allotment and bought everything we saw :-) It's time to actually start planning...