Too Much Too Little Too Late

July has arrived! A lot has happened since my last blogpost but I've been too busy to post. Lunches have got more interesting, with radishes, broad beans and mangetout joining the salad leaves.

We've had lots of visits to the plot, with too much to do, but we have managed to get a lot done and watering each day. Finally we've managed to plant up (most of) the remaining courgettes and squashes and the Double Red and Glass Gem sweetcorn, which germinated within a week of sowing in the hot greenhouse.

We pulled out all the poppies and dug holes, filled with manure, for the squashes - pretty sure that won't be the last we've seen of those poppies!

I planted out the globe artichoke and I've protected that, plus the squashes, from slugs with coffee grounds. Not sure whether they work or whether the dry weather has helped keep the slugs at bay, plus our resident frogs.

Our Kestrel potatoes have their first flower.

We've had some lovely sunshine and very high temperatures - too high to work on a couple of days, but we planted out our HAHA competition sunflowers. They look a bit weedy compared to other people's!

We've watched a robin parent feeding its young and now the baby is feeding itself, but it hasn't got a red breast yet.

Jamie's planted the Lark sweetecorn on Plot3.

These mullein moth caterpillars are enjoying the ragwort on Min's plot - they are stunning to see, especially the big ones.

All the different beans (Yard Long, Gigantes, Speedy, Pickwick) have been planted out and seem quite happy. The Pickwick (dwarf runners) are in flower.

The pak choi and rocket plants went to seed a while ago, so I've filled the gap by sowing more beetroot and salad onions.

The carrots are happily growing under their enviromesh cloche - they've got a while to go before we're going to be able to eat the thinnings.

The strawberries continue to be delicious. Certain areas of the site are full of the scent of them - fabulous!

Our raspberries are on their way - though the birds are happy to eat them before they're red enough for us - we really need to get them under netting.

We have some gorgeous blooms on show.

But our french marigold and snapdragon seedlings are too small to produce a show for the Hungerford in Bloom allotment judging on Saturday! They'll be beautiful in a couple of weeks though - just too late for the judging and the fete :-(

All involved are busy preparing for our fete (have I mentioned the fete? This Sunday?) and I enjoyed a little break from that preparation, work and life-in-general by making a pretty tea light holder, for the allotment, at a craft session as part of the Hungerford Summer Festival - pretty and so easy to do.

The song refers to how my life is feeling at the moment. Luckily I have Friday off and then Saturday to finalise everything for THE FETE! And the sun is going to shine and England Ladies won't be in the final for the Women's Football World Cup, which I'm not pleased about ...but...

Food Festival Prep

It's tomorrow, so we've got an early morning to pick carrots and other veg that needs to be kept fresh. I do enjoy helping to set up the HAHA stand and then hanging round talking to people about our site and growing our own. We picked some produce today so we could do some preparation.

The top one is our biggest for the pumpkin competition. It's pretty big (over 10kg) but not mammoth so I don't think it's a winner.

These are the only black radishes that grew. We haven't eaten any. They're meant to be very peppery - they look quite interesting.

This is a photo before I burned them!

So now I'm preparing to roast pumpkin seeds (flavoured with smoked paprika) and fiddling with a photo slideshow (which I could have started a long time ago!) along with washing tomatoes - black ones, that never did completely ripen and orange ones that burst if you look at them too long!

I'm looking forward to seeing Roger Phillips (mushroom and foraging fame) along with having some tasty snacks - shame there aren't a few more veggie stalls turning up, but there are some. 

COME AND VISIT US!

Still Time Left

I've been hoping to do my Butterfly Count for the last week but the weather just hasn't been right. It's been really windy over the last couple of days. It's stayed pretty warm and there's been no rain since the 20mm overnight earlier in the week, but I want to do the count on a bright (mostly) sunny day and we haven't really had one of those.

There are a lot of butterflies about - masses of whites and a few more interesting ones, but hopefully the weekend will prove to be the perfect day for counting...

That little tiddler is a loofah! There are 3 so far on the plant in the greenhouse... I wonder if they'll have enough time to grow big.
The black tomatoes Indigo Rose are getting blacker - very pretty and bigger fruits than I expected. We've only grown cherry-sized ones before.

And the red Aviditas tomatoes are going orange...well, one has so far and plenty of time for them to go red.

I put strings around the Speedy dwarf beans - it may support them once the beans start forming - although the pumpkin plants may swamp them and the sweetcorn before that happens.

The Radish Rats Tails (are they just normal radishes that have gone to seed?!) are very pretty and their pods are forming, so they'll be lovely in salad lunches when I'm back at work (ugh, don't mention it!) next week.

Our normal radishes were nice at the beginning of the season but, as they do every year, they went to seed ages ago. If they form pods I'll see if they taste exactly the same as the rats tails.

By the way, it's August now! And if you're reading this and are in Hungerford (or nearby) don't forget our Horticultural Show is on the 20th. We hope to see lots of exhibits and/or fellow growers in the evening for the prize-giving and the produce auction - always good fun!

Cloud Watching

A lovely sunny afternoon on the plot yesterday. It wasn't a quick visit, but this is a quick blogpost. Apart from weeding and hoeing I sowed some radish (black ones) and turnip (Atlanta) in the little raised bed on Plot3. It's next to the curry plant, which has such an amazing smell! I think we shouldn't have let it flower, but look how pretty the buds are.
I made this timelapse using Lapse-It on my phone. Just watch the clouds and get lost for a minute....

We planted out calendula and marigolds. The poor plants were all rather pot-bound, but they should recover, although they may not be as bushy as the plants that were planted a couple of weeks ago. I cleared some of the enormous fallen stems from the rhubarb - a real haven for slugs! Right beside our strawberries.

But are these the slugs that do the damage? I'm not sure. These are more interested in decomposing matter, according to the DEFRA slug site - where they mention the UK's largest slug....25cm long - Aaarrgh, lucky it's a woodland slug so we shouldn't stumble across that on the allotment!!

Aah Summer Arrived!

Just in time for me to enjoy my last 2 full days on the plot before returning to work. And look what came out with the sun to join us - yay! And the warmth has encouraged the sunflowers to germinate in their modules.

A little scrunched up

2 days of sunshine helped it open up

We dug manure-filled holes over the weekend and today the four pumpkins (Jack-be-Little and Jack-of-all-Trades) were planted out. And our Scarlet Empire runner beans are also planted on Plot3. So there shouldn't be quite so much empty space in a couple of weeks (hopefully!)

I couldn't wait any longer for my courgettes to germinate so bought a yellow courgette plant from the garden centre and planted that out too. Hopefully the green courgette and patty pan style will germinate soon so they'll just be a little late.

I still get excited when I manage to pick a bunch of radish. Some are still a bit nibbled but the enviromesh offers some protection. Some salad leaf would have been a welcome addition to the salad, but that should be along quite soon. The two Rocky cucumbers have germinated so they're in the greenhouse to grow a bit bigger before being planted out. The sweetcorn (sown at the weekend) are also in the greenhouse. They'll get planted out almost as soon as they germinate.

Much of the rest of the time was spent sitting under the sun umbrella, talking and spotting interesting creatures - birds, butterflies and beetles mostly.

A Little Bit of This... A Little Bit of That

Hooray! It's May! And it's been a bright, warm(-ish) day on the allotment with lots of other plotholders on the site. Jamie spent the whole time digging Plot3 but I couldn't face that, so I did lots of different jobs...mostly involving the compost. Not a very interesting picture...

But look at the animated version! The bins are alive with woodlice and worms - both very welcome in the compost to help breakdown the plant material. You have to be quick to see them though, they scatter as soon as the lid is opened.

I pulled up and composted last year's Brussels Sprouts plants. They've been re-growing so I chopped the new growth up but the stalks were too thick so they'll go in the green bin at home. I added some dried out weeds, a wheelbarrow of manure and a pile of shredded household bills - that's the best place for them, if not in the potato trench!

I potted on the petunias. They'll appreciate the extra-growing power from that multi-purpose compost. Their next move will be into tubs and baskets.

I even managed to sow a row of radish into our protected little raised bed on Plot3. (Hungerford Town and Manor have taken away lots of the stones to shore-up the river. Hopefully lots of slugs were taken away too!)

And finally I helped Jamie with a bit of digging, but I did an easy bit with no horrible grass and roots.

Aah, I like May Day.

Autumn on the Plot

I had to scrape the windscreen last week and the nights are creeping down so we moved the pumpkins into the greenhouse. We had to do a bit more clearing in there first. The cornichons are all picked but we're not sure if they'll be very tasty as they've got so huge. We're still waiting for the tomatillos to go purple and they still seem to be growing. I found this lovely dried husk, but the ones on the plant are still green.

 We read today that the husk is meant to go brown when the fruit is ripe... Hmmm.

We got 11 good-sized pumpkins from our 6 plants on Plot3. We were pleased to see that the slugs hadn't got to them.

September wasn't a good time to go away for two weeks as we missed out on so much harvest - look at that waste of lovely tomatoes and we composted lots of cucumbers today. These are our Radish Rat Tails, they're pretty hot. The photo on the seeds showed the seedpods should go red but I can't see that happening.

This photo is evidence for my sister Joanne that I've used the drink jar she gave me!

The tomatoes are blighted so they won't be going into the compost bins - we'll clear them off site very soon.

I was pleased to see we have one (only one) swede that has actually formed properly and we found a courgette that is still edible, though rather big! We pulled a Kestrel potato and have a good supply of spuds for the next week or so - there should be a couple of good ones there for baking - yum!

We're storing manure in the compost bins while we plan what we're doing next year. We haven't got a lease extension beyond April yet!! :-(