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.

So Here We Are

I had an early start on the plot this morning. The Sun arriving over the rooftop at 7am while Jamie slept on. It was a quite chilly 4° but ok once I started digging. There, that looks better. The 3 plants in the middle of that plot are salsify. I’ve left them to flower as Neal’s looked so good last year.

I’m tired now, but hopefully we’ll go up later as I want to pot on some seedlings. We ordered a couple of ‘basket collection’ packs of the tiniest plug plants and potted them on in the week; they grow so quickly and seemed like a bargain though I didn’t mean to order two packs 🤦‍♀️ There are petunia, lobelia, begonia and bacopa snowtopia.

We went for a lovely walk round Bowdown Woods (near Greenham Common) at the end of March. The wood anemones are so pretty carpeting the ground between the bare trees. Masses of bluebells are growing their leaves but no flowers yet.

It was certainly our longest walk for many months and possibly a bit too much for Jamie really, but it was such a beautiful day.

Many of the trees are coated in lichens, which I understood to be a sign of clean air - though I’m not sure how clean the air is around the old RAF Greenham Common Airbase 🧐

I’ve had some home-grown veg over the last couple of weeks. I’ve pulled some leeks and found an unexpected harvest of Brussels sprouts when I was chopping back the plants - they were delicious!

And I’ve had two harvests of our purple sprouting broccoli. It is worth the wait. This was tasty in a red pepper sauce with some fake bacon.

It’s felt like a good week, helped a lot by the warm sunny weather. The temperature was 23° when we visited the plot yesterday afternoon. Jamie’s feeling quite a lot better and sleeping is more comfortable some nights which helps with motivation. We drive to the plot for a quick visit most afternoons, even if we just sit down it’s a pleasure (if there’s no cold wind). Who wouldn’t want to sit under this beautiful blackthorn?

The polytunnel needs to be opened and closed each day because nights are very cold with sweltering days in there. Our seedlings seem to be enjoying it and they’ll be staying in for quite a while yet. I’ve got a lot more digging and clearing to do…

We planted the Red Sun shallots in the raised bed a week ago, there are 12 in there. No green shoots yet, but I’m sure their roots have already started moving down to find the well-rotted manure at the base of that bed and the soil must be pretty warm.

I sowed these flower seeds at home at the end of March; no sign of the cleome yet, but the tagetes minuta have germinated and have been moved into the polytunnel. We really need to start thinking about more veg seed sowing, but there are only so many hours in the day!

Our lives have changed so much since Jamie had his stroke 2 months ago. I was used to him doing all the shopping, washing up and most of the cooking. Well, it’s my turn now! Jamie had his fair share of caring when I was on dialysis. 17 years ago today I had my kidney transplant. I regularly thank the NHS for that life-saving opportunity and now we’re thanking them again for Jamie’s treatment and care. I know where we’d both be without the NHS and it’s a bleak picture. But we have a National Health Service and it may be struggling, it may not be ‘as good as it used to be’, it may let some people down but I am ever thankful for it and will always support it.

Title song is brought to us by Bloc Party - enjoy the fine weather if you can and make the most of where you are.

Start the Healing

After losing February - details here - we’re ready to start now. Looking on the bright side, at least we were out of action through a dreadfully wet month so we probably didn’t miss that much plot-time. It’s been great to have a few short visits to the plot during this warm start to March.

These anemones are the only colour on the plot so far. We were pleasantly surprised that the weeds haven’t grown too wild in our absence. The leeks haven’t grown either, which is rather disappointing, so we’ll probably pull them quite soon but there may be a few worth harvesting.

There are a few signs of Spring in the hedge, but it’s still early. The new growth on the sedum is appearing at the base of last year’s stems. I’ll chop the old stems off at our next visit. A little bit of weeding needed in that pot too - maybe Jamie can do that to help his rehabilitation (I’m not sure I’ll get away with that suggestion too often 😉)

Yesterday (8th March) we sowed the following and they’re under the grow-light in the hallway:

5 x Redcurrant Tomatoes (several seeds per pot)

20 x Lark Sweetcorn (in root trainers)

1x All Green Bush courgette

Hoping for better germination of the sweetcorn than we had last year, but we’ve started early just in case. If everything grows well we’ll move it to the polytunnel and can offer some additional frost protection if needed. It is feeling very Springlike, with lovely misty mornings and the birds are very active.

The weather is meant to go cold again, but this lovely gift parcel from Cousin Jen includes fingerless mittens which will be most useful and the seeds for scattering should provide a bitof extra colour to our flower bed. What a lovely treat to find when we returned home from an exhausting A&E day, when we discovered Jamie has a chest infection 🙁  Lucky I have a few more days of leave already booked.

Korn provide the song title.

Time

Well, I really don’t know how it’s September already, but it is certainly feeling autumnal and now look! 30 leeks planted for next year…I think this is why the months are flying by, too much thinking/planning ahead but needs must.

The swallows are gathering for their migration later in the month. All chitter-chattering on the wires and then a great spectacle when they swoop off en masse. A flock of swallows is generally called ‘a flight’ and also ‘a gulp’! 😀 A ‘gulp of swallows’ sounds rather 20th century to me!

Our sunflowers are finally flowering. The bees do love them and the birds will enjoy the seeds in a couple of weeks. These are quite tall multi-headed ones and the flowers are at different levels of maturity - fascinating to look closely at the different stages.

And we’ve had a few more Purple Dragon carrots and these were reasonably carrot-shaped, though certainly wouldn’t win any prizes. I like the colour of but they’re orange just below the skin. These and the Desiree potatoes were part of a tasty roasted veg meal with our garlic which is hanging in the polytunnel.

Jamie pulled another Desiree yesterday and there are some real monsters in there! That’s the large trug.

Other harvests have been fairly consistent over the last couple of weeks. Just varying the type of bean!

The cucumbers have begun to grow in this shape, probably because of cool nights - our thermometer even measured 6° the other night 😖

We also managed to grow some heart and star-shaped cucumbers again but I’ll need to buy new moulds for next year. 

Apart from masses of cucumber sandwiches we’ve enjoyed this Asian smashed cucumber salad, with soy and sesame. It’s tasty, with less salt than the recipe suggests!

The brassicas (sprouts and purple sprouting broccoli) are looking a bit weak on Plot3 but there’s plenty more growing time for that. If these critters don’t take over - these are large white caterpillars and they’ve just started to appear. We’re keeping a close eye and removing any we find at each visit.

So, on that note I’ll just share this meal we had last night - another use of runner beans; with fake bacon pieces in red pepper tapenade with garlicky gnocchi - yum yum!

The title is provided by The Alan Parsons Project - haven’t heard this for decades! Enjoy.

Raining Again

This was such an amazing rainbow! It was so bright and huge, much more impressive than this photo shows but it’s the best I could get. So beautiful, I stood and stared for a while.

Sunshine and showers definitely sums up the weather over the last couple of weeks/months. I’ve got a few days off for Easter, but the hoped-for plot-days haven’t worked out yet…

We’ve had plot visits and have even done a bit of weeding but it’s hard work having to do it by hand because the ground is too wet to walk on let alone to dig.

Well, that’s the leeks patch cleared to make way for root crops. It’ll need better digging than that to grow some straight carrots!

The leeks were good this year. It’s worth planting them nice and deep to get plenty of white stalk.

The blackthorn has flowered in the hedge but the lovely flowers didn’t last long. The wind, rain, hail didn’t help, but hopefully they were pollinated.

We’ve seen bees enjoying the dandelions, dead nettle and grape hyacinths as well as the other Spring bulbs that are popping up here and there.

I was pleased to see some tadpoles in our little pond although I haven’t seen them since. I have seen a couple of frogs recently though and there’s some frogspawn appeared in the pond on the HAHA wildlife plot.

The teasels on the wildlife plot in a rainstorm yesterday (Good Friday). The sky went black but no thunder like we had on Thursday when the hail was apocalyptic.

Here’s Jamie fighting against the wind and rain while we were trying to secure a honeysuckle trellis which had collapsed on the wildlife plot.

We have achieved some tasks in the last couple of weeks. I’ve managed to weed and feed the garlic bed and Jamie’s cleared the bean tunnel.

And we’ve collected some of the manure for future use - it’s in a compost bin for now. £1.50 a barrow-load from HAHA - what a bargain 😊

Talking of HAHA. We have a fully tenanted site again - it’s great to see the newcomers joining us old-timers 👨‍🌾 And on the sunny breaks it has been a lovely busy site with lots of chat and catching up with plot-buddies. Aah, we do love our allotment and we really should get out there while the Sun is shining because it looks like today may be dry…. with just a small threat of showers… Moby provides the song title.