Rinse and Repeat

What a sunny scene of home-sown flowers 😊. 

I must remember to sow lobelia into modules next year. It’ll make it far easier to pot them on. Zinnia seem to be the flower of the moment. And ours are appearing. They’re multi-coloured so some of the orange flowers are zinnia rather than marigolds. 

I’m seeing them everywhere, but look closer and they’re even more fab. No wonder the bees were enjoying them today.

I’m really happy with the Love Lies Bleeding (Amaranthus Caudatus). There are 4 plants around our plots. This one on Plot7 is the most advanced and this lovely long tassel has started to turn the deeper red. Such an amazing plant from the tiniest of seeds. The birds will apparently enjoy those seeds in the Autumn and I may well try some myself, as explained here by the Laidback Gardener’s blog. I hope some will set seed to re-grow next year.

The harvests are continuing and are not very varied, but a bit of creativity means that meals don’t need to be boring. That said, I am missing the kitchen at work where I used to leave all the surplus for my colleagues to take home. I must admit that we left a large patty pan and over-grown courgette on the spares shelf at the allotment and I was pleased to see that someone actually wanted them! I’m also very pleased that the chalk addition to the patty pan watering has largely resolved the blossom end rot problem.

This Rose Harissa dish with sticky rice was tasty though a bit too spicy for my taste (I got carried away with adding the harissa paste!)

The only flavouring in this stuffing, with added pine nuts, was the garlic, shallots and garlic oil. We had this in stuffed courgettes, with some left over for lunch the next day.

This weekend has been so sweltering that cold salads have been best for lunches. 

The temperature has reached 33° in the shade but it's been lovely sitting under the sun umbrella with a deskfan run on a Jackery power station, which we’ve bought for heating the polytunnel in Winter really!

The weather is what everyone is talking about. We even had to postpone our HAHA picnic; not due to rain, but because we’re in the amber extreme heat warning area.

It’s just beginning to cloud over - watch the clouds.

It’s still sweltering and some of us aren’t convinced that the rain/thunderstorms will hit Hungerford over the next few days, but the temperatures are forecast to drop to a more average 23°. Too late for our pumpkin, which has gone into emergency mode and decided to skip a couple of months.

The other squashes don’t seem to have had the same idea, so hopefully more than one fruit per plant, though the ‘tunnel’ hasn’t quite developed this year.

My Florence fennel has sadly all gone to seed. It’s just not been possible to keep it wet enough.

At last the sweetcorn has developed tassels but no cobs are emerging yet, which seems rather slow. We’ll see…

Summing up the last week: Work, water, harvest, deadhead, work, water, eat, sleep and repeat. And, I must say how much I like it 😊 Song title provided by Riton.

The Last Film

Our new trug - thanks Joanne

Today we’re hoping to have another drone video filmed over the site by Colin. Thank goodness the wind has died down from the blustery days we’ve just had, would be nice if the sun shone a bit too. This is the film he produced 8 years ago, in April 2014.

The site is looking much more loved now, which I hope will be apparent from the air. It’s just a shame the ground and grass is so parched at present.

I pulled one of the Salad Blue potato plants yesterday. A good number of tubers and they’re certainly blue!

We finished off our first harvest of Nicola potatoes with roasted veg and halloumi last night. The halloumi is on fried courgette slabs (thick slices).

That meal and the cold roasted veg that I had for lunch turned out much better than the large stuffed patty pan I cooked the other day. The patty pan refused to cook through and I had even boiled the whole thing for 15 minutes prior to stuffing. I had to eat round all the hard bits which doesn’t make for an enjoyable meal.

My sister came to visit us on the plot at the weekend. It was lovely chatting in the warmth and showing her what’s growing and what’s not. Her zinnias at home are in flower but ours seem to be rather slow. However, this comparison from 4 weeks previous shows how far they’ve come on though not as much as the pot marigolds.

The chrysanthemum at the back are shorter than I thought they’d be, but they’re extremely pretty up close.

This River Lily on the wildlife bog garden (not so boggy at the moment) is rather beautiful too. While I was doing a bit of weeding there a small frog (about 2cm) bounced in front of me. I wonder if that is one of our home-grown ones.

Our pumpkin plant has grown one pumpkin, it’s already football-sized (“Come on England!” 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿) but the plant seems to be stopping any other fruits from growing; they drop off very early. We think it may be due to the weather, or perhaps we’re going to have one GIANT pumpkin!

I attempted to plait my garlic, but couldn’t do it, so I have a knot of garlic instead - that’s fine 🙂 and it’s already been used in most of the meals I’ve mentioned. 

The song title, provided by Kissing The Pink (loved this song) is obviously about the 2014 footage, which I’ll just watch again ☺️

First of the Year

The last couple of weeks have been mostly warm, with much less rain than was threatened so we had to water every day. And there have been really windy days with sun-cloud-sun. Stupid weather doesn’t know what month it is!

I like this photo of a mallow flower on the wildlife plot, with its own little wildlife visitor. Talking of wildlife, I’ve uncovered two toads over the last few days. No wonder this one looks so fat with all the slugs that are emerging.

There’s evidence of a mole on Plot3, but it’s just circled the pumpkin for some reason. The young plant is being protected from slugs and wind damage, but we’ll have to release it to the elements soon.

The Wildlife plot has another not-so-wild visitor these days! Not very wildlife-friendly is it 🤭

Here’s Plot7 looking good after a shower, so much more effective than watering but the sun and wind soon dried the soil out. I’ve been weeding and thinning between the beetroots and the Florence fennel on that quarter. 

The thinnings make a good addition to salads and I’ve even had the first few small beets chopped up raw in a salad. I need to sow some more of the Chinese Dragon radish as the first sowing are just beginning to go a bit woody and going to seed.

The harvests are fairly meagre but it’s so nice to be eating fresh-picked again. Most of the meals involve broad beans and a handful of mangetout from every plot-visit.

I’ve really taken to the early-morning plot visits. I work from 7am for an hour then have an hour on the plot before working for the rest of the day. It feels less rushed than lunchtime visits and it’s so often sunnier than the rest of the day. Just look at that beautiful sky!

That’s our potato quarter. The salad blue have lovely flowers.

Of course, not every morning visit is sunny…but things still need watering even if we are in raincoats 🤭

We’ve finally planted up our Crimson Plum tomatoes in the polytunnel- look how pathetic they are! Hope they grow quickly before blight strikes, though they are meant to be blight resistant..

And our Lizzano tomato is planted outside on Plot3 and the two Brussels sprout seedlings are in the cage - well-protected by slug pellets. The black-covered area is where our cucumbers will go, in pots.

A couple more meals on the menu this week. First a lovely salad for lunch with lovage leaves adding a delicious celery-flavour topping and Squeaky Bean pastrami-style slices.

And for dinner, I added rice to this tasty mix including What the Cluck chicken-style pieces fried in chilli and garlic oil. It’s so easy being vegetarian these days, even Hungerford sells these meat-alternatives.

And that pan contains our first courgette of the year - it was tiny and very tasty. It’s the first one that’s actually matured rather than dropping off. Plotholder, David, gave the plant to us and it’s growing in a tub. And that is why I chose this song title by Skrillex.

The Ballad of Peter Pumpkin-head

There goes October, flying by and ending with a pumpkin-filled Halloween weekend.

On Saturday we spent much of the day cooking. Jamie made a roasted red pepper and pumpkin soup, with shallots, garlic and onion.

A great colour for a Halloween starter.

I used the other half of the pumpkin for pumpkin pie. I used this recipe, but baked the pumpkin rather than boiling it.

I was pleased to see how much pumpkin purée it produced.

The pie case was bought rather than home-made. I think it could have been a bit deeper.

I was pleased with it. A very tasty dessert…and breakfast…and lunch.

For the main course of our Halloween meal we had Veggie haggis with mushed-up roast potato and celeriac. We used the celeriac that I grew from seed. Although they were extremely slow to grow they eventually produced some pretty good veg - though nothing like the size they sell in shops. We got these two chunks from two plants.

We visited the allotment to leave two Jack-o-lanterns on the site. We carved these three.

At the plot it was sunny and warm with a clear blue sky, but an hour earlier the wind was howling and there was torrential rain. In fact it took down several trees in the area and blew a whole roof off a barn just down the road.

Luckily there was little damage on site; just a few branches, the usual compost bin lids and a couple of cages in unusual positions!

So the weekend ended with the film ‘Young Frankenstein’ (I do love Gene Wilder) whilst chomping on roasted spiced pumpkin seeds and today I have a day off work. Yay!

I expect we’ll visit the plot later. Here is XTC for the song title.