December

Well, that was quick! Now it’s December! It’s still wet, not sure it’s ever going to dry up! There are self-formed ponds on the site where we’ve never seen water-logging before. (Not our plot, yet)

We’ve only been to the plot for very brief visits over the last week. The robin is always. pleased to see us bringing his breakfast of mealworms. And there are carrion crows, magpies and a male pheasant with three females - not sure if they’re last year’s offspring, but they’re safer on our site than in the fields where we can hear shooting 😠

We’ve had a couple of very clear, frosty early morning visits. It is worth getting up early on these clear days - whatever the season!

The temperature was down to -4° on Thursday morning. The teasels really do look great. 

Some of the remaining plants look so pretty with their coating of frost.

Others less so! Our leeks and garlic should be able to survive this though.

Curly parsley is quite resilient but this may have been too cold for it to pull through. The different types of frost are interesting, aren’t they?

I’m not sure whether frosting increases the flavour of brassica anymore - I expect they’re bred to be tasty, but the sprouts were frozen on the stems under this leafy top.

It was a lovely early morning visit, but brrrr I was happy to get back home to get back to work! It made a nice change to have a sunny outlook even though I had to pull the curtains because the Sun is so low it reflects on my computer screen! But today I’m on leave - yay! Here are Earth, Wind and Fire to dance around to.

Blurry

We definitely needed the chiminea last Sunday as the temperature wasn’t great before we started our picnic (some call it a wine club, whatever, it’s a lot of fun!).

It was too cloudy for any star gazing that evening but Jamie and I went up after work on Thursday; the one night with clear skies, hoping to see the Comet A3. With Sunset at about 6:00pm and a good western sky view we thought we’d be lucky.

Unfortunately we’ll have to wait another few thousand years to see that one, but we did have a lovely evening nonetheless.

We enjoyed the most amazing Super Moon - so beautiful emerging from a cloud.

And the bats were extremely active.

And very difficult to photograph! They were flitting about really close to us.

The ginger cat was hanging round, but wasn’t interested. Either they were too quick for him or possibly he was too full after catching a mouse in front of us, running away when I tried to stop him and then gobbling part of the mouse when I caught up with him - what a naughty boy!

So, you can see it’s been an exciting week 😊 and also my new pasta spoon arrived - perfect for gnocchi too. We’re trying to get through all the tomatoes which are going red quite quickly in the polytunnel and certainly once we bring them home. Peppers, garlic and cavolo Nero or chard are also included in my meals and I roasted one of the small butternut squashes. The meals were tasty but the squash wasn’t as sweet as I expected.

So that’s it for now. The Sun is shining so we need to make the most of it. No chiminea required today; it’s 15° Woohoo!

Put your feet up and enjoy this title song by Puddle of Mudd in honour of my bat and moon photos!

Bridge over Troubled Water

It can be difficult getting into the swing of things after Christmas and 2024 started with such rotten weather that it hasn’t been very motivating.

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.

At home I’m so pleased to see that our hellebore is coming back to life. It’s such a pretty and long-lived flower - perfect for these dull months.

Apart from soggy plot visits, I have regular morning walks up the High Street, just to move a bit! I really like to visit the fruit and veg stall at our market - when we don’t have our home-grown this is the next best thing I reckon.

I’ve bought a few seeds which look interesting including some flowers (Zinnia, penstemon (from one of my mum’s flower lists) and echinacea) and veg (purple dragon carrots, piccolo courgette and biquinho red pepper). We haven’t really started our planting plan yet, but will do soon. 

I haven’t done any interesting cooking yet this year, but after Christmas I made this lovely chestnut & sprout puff pastry ‘thing’ and a delicious parsnip and chestnut soup. I probably should pull another parsnip for soup this weekend actually. I shouldn’t waste them as they’ve grown so well for a change!

Look at that horrible brown water which is usually calm, clean and has trout in. Aah well, it’ll soon be Spring 🫣 But it gave me an excuse to use this beautiful song, of course, provided by the great Simon & Garfunkel. Sit back, relax and sing along. Beautiful.

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.

The magpies and blackbirds got excited when ‘Ginge’ was around, but he was more interested in compost bins on Saturday. He has been seen taking a magpie from the air though!

The Newbury Weekly News covered both of our unhappy news items last week. 

Good that they covered them, but we’d rather have more positive news stories than these 😞

Look at our lovely site, even in Winter. How could anyone even consider building on it?! Idiots 😡

I pulled carrots and parsnips for this evening’s meal. I was really pleased with the parsnips… well, I should say… I was really pleased with the first parsnip I pulled - they got progressively worse, but there was plenty to eat, no matter what the shape of them.

The parsnips and carrots became this gratin meal, roughly based on this recipe. Mmm, tasty and enough leftovers for a lunch. I meant to add the tomatoes to the sauce but forgot, so stuck them on top instead 🙄

I posted a photo of spindleberries the other week, but this is when they look their best; with a beautiful blue sky backdrop.

We didn’t go to the allotment today as it was a bit grey, a bit sunny and a bit rainy. Every time the Sun shone We wished we’d gone up, but it did seem a bit chilly. The ground is so wet, but it made it easy to pull weeds yesterday.

The song title is courtesy of Vampire Weekend, in appreciation of my cousins Paula, Jen and Steve for very kindly buying me that replacement fork after thieves stole all our digging tools - THANKYOU SO MUCH xxx

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.