The rain, brought by Storm Henk, was so torrential that there has been serious flooding in nearby towns and Hungerford’s rivers and canal have all overflowed with some houses needing to be pumped out - not us I’m pleased to say. What a truly horrible way to start the new year 😞
Here's the River Dun by the war memorial, at least 1 metre higher than it should be, with water gushing through from flooded areas upstream. Thank goodness for the marshland around Hungerford to capture most of that excess water. Nearby Marlborough didn’t fair so well…We’ve had a few visits to the plot, mostly just to plod around thinking how nasty it looks, but our leeks have survived the drenching and continue to grow. This photo shows that there has been some very welcome sunshine this year - makes a nice change to see it on a weekend!And the broad beans have grown quite tall under their protection as the weather has been mostly mild so far this Winter. We’ll leave them protected for now as the weather has turned frosty and snow is threatening over the next week…The spindly garlic is the only other sign of good things to come on the allotment.Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention. Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire. A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me. From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
Saturday 13 January 2024
Bridge over Troubled Water
Sunday 20 November 2022
Cousins
This was the lovely clear view of a very skinny moon early this morning. And the next photo shows the sky looking towards the sunrise, beautiful (my camera made the sky look a bit darker than it really was but the stripes really were that bright). The clear night on Friday slipped the temperature down to 0.4° but there’s not much left growing to be affected by low temperatures now.
In the week Jamie cleared all the remaining tomatoes and the peppers, which still refused to go red. So there is a lot of green pepper added to meals at the moment and these two yellow ones were delicious stuffed with shop-bought veggie fritters for a quick and easy meal. I added cheese for the final 15minutes in the oven, I should have taken a photo as they browned really well and tasted so good.
We had a lovely sunny day on the plot on Saturday. The temperature only reached 6°, but you wouldn’t have known it while in the sunshine. Jamie weeded the potato plot and I did some weeding around the chard and pulled all the remaining beets which all had slug damage.
I wore my hearing aids and was amazed by all the birdsong. Not unusual apparently but I’ve not been using my aids, just turning the sound up on my work laptop and TV - I forgot what I’d been missing! It was mostly robins and great tits but the gulls over the canal were very vocal too. And this huge crow was cawing in the big tree.Monday 7 February 2022
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.
Tuesday 7 December 2021
Sunrise, Sunset
When I opened the curtains on Thursday morning and spotted the moon, I had to dash for my big camera to get a photo and I was pleased to see it was in focus because 10 minutes later the moon was hidden by mist as the Sun arrived.
We did a little bit of clearing but the before and after shots didn't look much different on a typical December allotment plot!
A couple of hours later we took a wander up the High Street to see the Christmas lights.
The blue tree is particularly beautiful and the little trees attached to all the shops are always lovely to see, though the traffic was too busy to show the High Street off in all its glory - perhaps we'll do a late-night visit when the road is empty.The canal has to be the most photographed part of Hungerford and The Rose of Hungerford often has a starring role. When we drove past earlier there was quite a crowd gathering to have a canal trip with Santa 😊
So apart from that, I have barely moved from the living room in the past week, except to do some cooking...
I made these bean balls with gigantes and runner beans. The smoked paprika tomato sauce was very tasty and the green spinach noodles were a colourful addition. This is the bean balls cooking - I mashed them together with fried shallots and a bit of bell pepper, they were very tasty although not very photogenic.
I'm working my way through a packet of chestnuts and a Festival squash at the moment, so had a ricey-tomatoey meal last night.
And for lunch I've just had cold roasted squash, with chestnuts and a bought salad with lambs lettuce and beetroot slivers.
Sweet and delcious, but now I have to do some more work. I've just seen that a meeting has been cancelled - that's always a bonus! Aah, and a song title from Fiddler on the Roof - haven't seen that beautiful film for years.. maybe it'll be on at Christmas 😏Saturday 2 February 2019
A Whiter Shade of Pale
I didn't want to risk the 25 mile journey to work (lucky I didn't as the roads became the usual mess) so I worked from home, keeping a close eye out the window with much repetition of the phrase "It's still snowing!".
Finally I'd worked enough hours so Jamie and I went for a walk through the Winter Wonderland...
..to the allotment, obviously. Crossing the slippery bridge over the part-frozen canal. All the ducks were hiding somewhere.
Passing by the Corn Exchange with the clock looking a bit special with its covering of snow
And our poor broad beans ☹️ We knew they'd grown too much over the thus far mild Winter and we thought they'd get frost damage, but this was a bit extreme. At least half of the plants were squashed flat under that heavy weight of snow. There's a slim chance that they may re-grow - we'll see...
Look at all these goldfinches! They were flying around the allotment all the while - shame they didn't turn out for the Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend. And, do you know what a flock of goldfinches is called? A charm! Isn't that pretty? There were probably about 30 birds and one kestrel keeping close watch.
We didn't sit down....(!) but it was nice to trudge through the crunchy snow and release a pheasant that was stuck in someone's brassica cage...
With frozen fingers we walked home past other frozen people and children with very rosy cheeks pulling sledges. Such a lot of fun - if you don't need to travel.
And I wanted to share my photo, from January 31st at 7:30am. That's Venus on the left of the moon and Jupiter on the right - they were so bright (much brighter than this photo shows) in the clear morning sky, quite beautiful.