How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

Aah, what a joy to see blue sky and sunshine. Working on the plot it certainly felt Spring-like (ok, so I did need a big jumper and coat but still..!). The sunshine brought lots of plotholders out of hibernation and we spent several hours on site both days. You can see from the shape of the polytunnel that it was still extremely windy but even that cold wind wasn't too awful. We’ve partially dug and weeded various parts of the plots but it’s hard work compared to the working-week, when I only walk about 35 steps most days 😖

I showed some new plotholders around the site and they quickly snapped up a 3-pole plot which had been left in perfect condition by the previous plotholder - at 90, Ron had to give up his plot and I'm glad that it's gone on to an ex-gardener who should keep it looking well-loved. We have quite a few more plots to re-let so are just working through the waiting list now. I love showing people round, especially on such a beautiful day when the site looks welcoming, even in February.

The Wildlife plot gained a plot sign and another plant - an oxeye daisy which spreads easily and forms big clumps of tall flowers that the insects love. There were quite a few insects around including bumblebees and ladybirds, but they're fighting for the few spots of colour that are just appearing.

The Wildlife plot also gained some nice stepping stones from a plot which was recently released from another of our long-term plotholders. I'm sure she would be pleased to see them put to good use on a communal area.

This is the robin that hangs round the Wildlife plot. He (we think it is a male as he sings a lot) comes extremely close and took a mealworm from my hand, but wasn't willing to stand on my hand just yet. The robins near our plot are much less tame.

We had a nice taco meal the other night to celebrate our un-wedding anniversary. It was very tasty but they are a messy thing to eat - I wouldn't want to eat them in public 😀

Last week I had a couple of days off, but the weather was wet and windy so we couldn't do much. We picked some leeks and the single purple sprouting broccolli plant is still providing me with some tasty greens. The leeks went into a cheesy leek pasta dish and we had another lot in a stuffing for baked potatoes. 

I used the PSB along with mushrooms that I marinated in a harissa sauce - I really like the Rose Harissa flavouring, just spicy enough for my palette and it's a great colour.

Today I'm working so don't mind that the weather has returned to grey drizzle (I am on my lunch break at the moment - avoiding watching the sad depressing news about Ukraine. For goodness sake, Putin! Haven't we got enough to put up with, with COVID-19 still hanging round?!).
Florence and the Machine provided the song title.

Year of the Tiger

 This dwarf iris provided a spot of colour on an extremely wet and windy site yesterday afternoon.

It didn’t seem like a day for being outside but working for a few hours on the HAHA wildlife plot was actually very pleasant. We put a wigwam up for the birds to perch on. We noticed that the bullfinches seemed to like standing at an angle when we were watching them last year.

There are lots of baby plants emerging so we wanted to remove the unwanted ones in order to make room for the ones we want - there must be hundreds of seeds in that soil! We tried to only pull grasses, docks and some of the other more intrusive weeds that we recognise. Jamie's cleared the bog garden. Some of the irises have spread well, but other plants we bought have disappeared without trace.

These are a few of the wildflowers that we think we recognise from the plantlets... of course, I welcome correction if you know better.

Rosebay Willowherb and Jacobs Ladder

Foxgloves and Teasle (hopefully) or is it Bristly Ox Tongue?

Cowslip at the top and (possibly) Hairy Hawkbit (left) and Corncockle (right)

As you can see, the cowslips are just flowering. I guess the plants should be divided at some point. The plot doesn't look much at the moment, but up close there are loads of nigella, feverfew and scarlet pimpernel seedlings as well as a few pockets of bulbs, which I think are grape hyacinth, so the bees will be happy when they flower in a few more weeks. In the meantime the blackbirds, magpies and robins were very happy with the bit of trowelling that we did.

When we got home I made some soup using part of the last Crown Prince squash with leeks and celeriac from the plot. 

I was disappointed with the other crown prince this year so I hoped this one would be a bit more tasty. I wasn't too convinced when I had a taster, hence the addition of curry powder! I think I'll use the Festival squash instead when I cook my next squash-based meal.

At the weekend we celebrated the Lunar New Year with a tasty Chinese veggie meal. It was delivered frozen a couple of weeks ago and it was fun opening all the parcels. I must say that the mushroom and veg buns are my favourite and I prefer the fried gyoza to the veggie dumplings. There was way too much for the two of us, so filling! We really should have only cooked half of it.

The cardboard steamer wasn't quite as successful as we'd hoped, as the gyozas stuck but it was a fun parcel to receive. We need to take our excitement where we can these days 😏 Saying that, I have my fourth COVID-19 vaccination next weekend, so that's a trip out of Hungerford! - fingers crossed it provides me with a higher anti-body count than I'm currently seeing.

Saturday was a much nicer day, but we only had an hour on the plot in the sunshine, this was the view through the hedge to Freeman's Marsh.

Anyway, the predictable song title is provided by Myles Kennedy.

In the Gloaming

Two very cold afternoons on the allotment this weekend. We’ve actually started to do a bit of clearing. I say ‘we’, it was mostly Jamie working while I took photos of the impressive clouds, but I did a bit.

We were having such a pleasant time, even though it was really cold. We chatted with several plotholders who we haven’t seen in months. We’re sad to be losing a few plotholders this year who we’ve really enjoyed getting to know over the last few years; I really hope we can have some socials in the not-too-distant future so that we can meet up again.

On Saturday we saw a sparrow hawk flying along the hedgerow with, what appeared to be, a bloody pigeon in its talons. We aren’t positive on the id, but both noticed the greyness of its back and wings. We also saw the bullfinches (heard the call first) and long-tailed tits. I should have done my RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch then, rather than yesterday…. Here’s my tally, (which wasn’t worth sitting still and freezing for!):

1 wren

2 blue tits

2 magpies

2 robins (nice to see they’ve paired up)

1 great tit

2 wood pigeons

Once I’d finished with that Ivan gave me some roots of Rosebay willowherb (Chamaenerion angustifolium) to plant up in the HAHA Wildlife plot. I cleared an area of the plantain (Plantago lanceolata) which is good for some wildlife (apparently) but rather boring to look at - we need a plot which generates interest and wildlife as well as curtailing the spread of marestail (which it seems to be doing).

Back on Plot7 many of the leeks don’t look too healthy although they look happier than the broad bean plants, but we’ve seen them recover before so fingers crossed. I’m pleased that we planted the leeks deeper last year, so once pulled there’s a good amount of leek for eating.

We pulled a couple of carrots and five of the best leeks on Saturday and had some with cheesy pasta. And yesterday morning I made chunky soup with leek, carrot and honeyboat squash (note to self: raw honeyboat squash can be easily peeled with a potato peeler). I added rosemary, thyme, salt, pepper and veggie stock as flavouring.

I made soup with roasted honeyboat squash last weekend and used rose harissa to flavour. It has a really good spicy flavour and two big teaspoons didn’t add too much heat - I couldn’t taste the rose petals, but I’m glad it lasts for months in the fridge.

I’m getting through my squash supply now and last week I had a stuffed festival squash with ‘Brazilian Smokey beans’. I must say that the beans weren’t as flavoursome as when I make Smokey beans with my home-dried ones.

Last night I wanted to use the purple sprouting broccoli that I picked so I used a packet of Merchant Gourmet grains and rice with a couple of slices of ‘fake bacon’ which needed eating. The PSB was the best part of the meal 😊

Our spuds are now chitting in the hallway: Nicola, Sarpo Mira, Desiree (just one) and I couldn’t resist buying three Salad blues as the colour looks so good.

The post title is derived from speaking to Min’s sister as we were saying goodbye to Min in the gloaming (twilight - I’d never heard the word before). The Sun is arriving earlier and is still reasonably light at 5:00pm - a welcome sign of things to come.

Song provided by Trentemøller.

Arwen’s Song

We enjoyed a bit of snowfall yesterday. Nothing like the weather that Storm Arwen brought to the north of the country, but we don’t usually get much snow so I always think of it as a treat. A little slow-mo video.

We had a freezing night and this morning we awoke to a frozen dusting of snow on rooftops and a beautiful dramatic sky. You can (just about) see the crescent moon in the photo too.

I’m having a long weekend so we went to the allotment this morning to pick a couple of carrots and see how the site looked. Ok, so neither the carrots nor snow are that impressive, but it was nice crunching through the icy grass.

We were glad to have protected the broad beans at the weekend. They looked a bit limp through the tunnel, but not too bad.

Something had left interesting tracks on a plank. I can’t work out what made them. Brrr, chilly little feet!

We didn’t stay outside for long and came home to make a leek & potato soup, using a Jamie Oliver recipe. It only needed two smallish Kestrel potatoes. We really need to dig up the last plant, but not today!

We bought leeks as ours aren’t big enough yet and the soup has celery in it too. The carrot added a bit of colour. We blitzed it rather than leaving it chunky and it has a nice texture and flavour. 

Last night I ate my last spaghetti squash. It’s a shame I only got two fruits this year, but I’ll try again in 2022.

Roasted for 45 minutes then toasting after adding a cheese, nut and paprika topping. It really is a tasty squash variety.

We missed out on the Christmas lights switch-on and preparations for the Hungerford Extravaganza which we’ll also skip this year. We’ll stick to the plan to hopefully avoid Covid-19 including the new Omicron variant which has recently surfaced. We both took antibody tests today, mostly out of interest to compare our results rather than anything else.

I hope the storm didn’t cause you too many problems and this beautiful song from The Lord of the Rings is the only reminder of the first named storm of this season.

Just Got Lucky

I thought I'd start the post on a happy picture, as the next photo is a less happy one - our tomatoes haven't escaped blight so this lunchtime I chopped off all the leaves in the vain hope that some may actually go red. I'm envious of all the tomato harvests I'm seeing on social media!

What a poor show! So it appears that we'll have to keep buying tomatoes for the rest of this year 😔 It's a shame because everything else in most of my meals is home-grown at the moment.

The runner beans are really paying out. And a branch snapped off my dwarf borlotti beans, so I had some of them in their pods along with the first picking of Speedy dwarf beans.

All of the beans apart from the Edamame are producing beans now. The Edamame have only just started to flower, so not sure whether they'll produce in time - the plants look healthy but the weather is definitely feeling like September.

Harvests are a bit more varied, (well, different shaped courgettes!) but how many more courgettes, cucumbers and beans can I eat??

I've made another batch of marrow and carrot soup, flavoured with celeriac stems. I should have removed the centre of the marrow, as the soup is a bit watery; I may need to add a potato to it to thicken it up a bit. I’ll see how it tastes tomorrow.

We have plenty of garlic - good job I'm working from home and not socialising! And I harvested a first Tromboncino for this tasty meal.

That's the before photo and I scoffed half of it before getting a photo after it was cooked, with a bit of cheese on top. It has Ancho chilli flakes added to the carrot, shallots and garlic; they’re not hot but add a lovely flavour - it covered two meals as Jamie's refusing to eat any more Summer squash 😃

That’s me, making holes for planting the leeks at the weekend - look, the sun shone and it was warm. We now have 40 leeks puddled-in, thanks to our plot neighbour Neal. We’d be waiting rather longer if we used our specimens…! How pathetic are they 😄

Leeks are such a tasty addition, particularly as our shallots didn’t produce very much. Jamie’s been trying to buy pickling vinegar to pickle a small jar of shallots but has found that in short supply - along with other items. Is it COVID-related or BREXIT… or maybe a bit of both?

Anyway, (don’t get me started) I’ll drag myself away from my two favourite subjects. The song title is provide by The Jo-Boxers and I’ve chosen it because more and more I’m reminded of how much ‘luck’ can change people’s fortunes - good or, sadly, very bad. Stay safe all.

Loser

It was Hungerford in Bloom allotment judging at the weekend so it was a busy site on Thursday and Friday, with lots of plot holders making their plots look their best. It’s a nice time to walk around because labels appear so we can see the varieties that people have chosen this year.

All our edges were trimmed - I don’t think they have to be straight ☺️, just tidy 🙂. That was where we uncovered most of the ants nests. Red ants and black ones. They sure get agitated when disturbed and both of them nibble when they get up your arms!

We only entered Plot7 and Plot3 into the competition; plot8 has a mass of weeds which we haven’t had time to clear, it’s the most ‘in bloom’ of all our plots though. At least the tidy edges may reduce the slug and snail damage - 2 of our 5 'tallest' sunflowers have been eaten down to skeletons already and they've definitely eaten more of our lettuce than we have!

We sowed some Chinese Cabbage into modules and leeks into a pot at the weekend. They're in the polytunnel for now but we'll move them outside once they've germinated. Jamie bought a basil plant from Waitrose and has divided it into 3 pots which are in the polytunnel by the tomatoes.

We've just had a quick visit to the plot at lunchtime to pick some broad beans and it's so windy! Lots of our tall bean plants have blown over but plenty more beans are available. Poor broad beans after they survived the hardest frost of the year they now find themselves snapped off in their prime :-(

I hope the wind doesn't cause too much damage, particularly to our runner beans, cucumbers and squashes which are beginning to make their way upwards.

At the weekend we picked the first of our courgettes, there are bound to be more to come given the number of little ones on their way - as long as the wind doesn't snap the plants. We've added some bamboo poles to hopefully hold them in place.

The song is by Beck, because we didn't win any prizes in the competition - well, we knew we were up against some brilliant plots!