Changes

Here we are in June and some real rain arrived yesterday.

We were enjoying coffee in the polytunnel watching the plants enjoying the rain. In between some torrential downpours I managed to plant out the dwarf purple Mistik French beans which germinated at home in a week and direct sowed a row of these Jacob’s Cattle Drying dwarf beans.

We have three wigwams of climbing beans: Scarlet Empire runners, Greek Gigantes and Lamon Borlotto, which have been difficult to germinate this year. I’ve attempted to direct sow a few to fill a couple of gaps but may only have four plants.

We started the month with a plot barbecue for Jamie’s birthday. We had to delay it for a day so we could sit and enjoy sunshine rather than hide from the wind - May has been such a windy month. It was a really lovely day and Ivan joined us for a while too. 

Our first broad beans were included in the salad. We’ve picked another lot for dinner tonight; blackfly are out in numbers so we have resorted to spraying as we haven’t seen any ladybird larvae yet.

Plot7 still has an area that could be planted up, but I’m not sure it’ll happen unless I buy some plants and maintain my method this year of <ahem> casual no-dig! At least the front quarter should fill out with parsnips, nasturtiums, radishes, asparagus pea, a sad courgette and the dwarf beans.

The leeks have been left to flower and look quite interesting like penguins looking skyward, but are taking a long time to bloom. That was yesterday’s stormy sky but no thunder and lightning.

The flowerbed on Plot8 is looking lovely with the highly scented valerian, red Geum and Nigella. Zinnia, verbena and other flowers should start filling those gaps quite soon.

If you know the scent of valerian, this photo will fill your nostrils with the memory. Such a lovely plant.

The pot courgette is producing lots of flowers now, but they’re all male so no threat of a courgette glut at this stage. I haven’t sown any climbing squash (yet) and not sure I’ll be able to deal with plot3 to plant them - we’ll see, but there’s not much time.

The sweetcorn plants are still in their protective cloches and are tiny but have started producing their flowers - I’ll be amazed if they manage to produce cobs. They’re not meant to be mini-corn 😖

The salsify put on a good show, but they finally succumbed to the wind. I’ve put lots of the stems in the compost bins, but it may not be the last we’ve seen of those three plants - the seed heads are quite impressive!

Black Sabbath provide the great song to mark all the changes since I last posted. Growing season is upon us - yay! We’re spending quite a lot of time just sitting and watching - it’s very pleasing.

This is the Day

Look at that! A month has passed. It’s been a busy month with lots of sowing, a bit of digging and some planting. The weather has been extremely dry and mostly sunny but a northerly wind has consistently caused irritation. Jamie has been walking a lot with regular allotment and shopping trips

We planted our potatoes in April - Kestrel and Duke of York in the ground, with a couple of Nicola in bags. They’ve been earthed up now, managed to avoid a couple of frosts earlier this month. They’re in front of these salsify plants - the flowers open in the morning, but close by lunchtime.

The hedgerow is full of life and we’re peppered with confetti whenever we sit on the bench as the May blossom is just going over, it’s been a good year for blossom, even with the wind.

We sowed our climbing beans (Scarlet Empire runners, borlotti and Gigantes) on 2nd May but only the Gigantes successfully germinated, so they’ve now been planted in a wigwam. We’ll re-sow the others.

The sweetcorn finally got planted out, I meant to do a block, but planted in two rows instead for ease of protection from frost. Lots of the parsnips germinated and I thinned them out this week. It’s so dry the watering is quite a chore, but essential at this time. We’re expecting some broad beans to be ready for harvesting soon, so keep them well-watered. We’ve sown carrots into a green crate and beets, lettuce and radish are sown. Chard and nasturtium are in the raised bed along with parsley, which was a supermarket-bought plant and divided into four.

The plots aren’t looking very tidy but things are growing and that’s the best we can achieve during this difficult year. The weeds are going to love that bare earth when the rain does arrive 😒 I’m fighting the bindweed in the orchard; the mulched ground makes it easy to spot the bindweed, but it just keeps coming back and our little apple and cherry trees got aphid attacked this year.

As long as we harvest a few crops, grow some pretty flowers and get time to sit in the sunshine amongst it I’ll be happy. Sadly, Jamie’s not really enjoying it at the moment, understandably, as he’s still so worn out and not feeling sociable but I hope that will improve along with his health.

The song title, provided by The The, is to mark my change to part-time working. Hopefully more free-time will help with everything!

Bad Day

That is the top of the allotment site on Friday 13th September - you may not be able to see it, but there’s frost on the ground! And it’s steaming in the bright early morning sunshine. The temperature dropped to 0.8° and walking through the site it was clear that flowers and plants, particularly squashes, had been frosted. By the next day their leaves were black 😖 Too early! We were hoping for an extended growing season after the rough start! It’s the earliest frost we’ve seen since having a plot. I’m pleased I put fleece round my butternut squash, they may be small but I hope they are worth saving. 

I chopped all the excess growth and tiny fruits off the other week so the plant could concentrate its energy into these few squashes.

We may have had the last of our Summer squashes now. These have been quite tasty, but a bit too large a seed cavity so not much firm flesh for cooking. The chard is really pretty this year, great stems!

Those lovely spring onions are from fellow-plotholder David. I can never grow them but he has too many! They are really spicy too - delicious. The cucumbers succumbed to the frost and we’re not too unhappy about it - we still have some in the fridge 😀

I’ve started drying my beans in the roof of the polytunnel. I now know why my borlotti beans didn’t grow very tall or turn red - they were dwarf Yin Yang beans 🙄 It seems my labelling got a bit muddled and none of my borlotti survived the Spring slug-fest. I have more Yin Yang beans which I protected on the frosty night as the plants are still green. I’m going to dry the runner and French beans too this year, but they’re not ready to pick yet; they need to start drying on the plant first.

We’ve cleared and dug that area in front of the bean-tunnel for over-Wintering our broad beans. And this area is ready for the garlic to be planted quite soon. It looked straighter than that while I was digging and edging 🫣

September has thrown a lot of weather at us. Thunder was rumbling round for days and we’ve had some torrential rain but it’s really hot again when the Sun re-appears. Have seen some excellent clouds.

I think we left just in time before that storm broke. And this was an interesting sky. I think this was on one of the rumbling days when it was really muggy.

But the sunshine days have been glorious!

There are so many bees and butterflies around. Making the most of the buddleia…

The sunflowers…

And the Autumn Joy sedum.

Harvests continue including our first delicious sweetcorn last night which was added to this halloumi meal. Served with our Desiree potatoes with garlic, shallots and red pepper tapenade - so delicious.

And either kale or chard has been added to a variety of different bean dishes that I’ve made using the last of last year’s beans and our carrots.

This was the last harvest of runner beans for this year. They were just on the edge of going stringy, which is why I’m going to dry them - too many on the plants to waste. And that was the only lettuce I got to pick before slugs and caterpillars had a field day!

Tomatoes are providing meagre pickings but I’m glad the frost didn’t take them out…there are plenty to come if they get a chance to mature..

Song title is a blast from the past (1983) to celebrate Friday 13th - a good song though I had almost forgotten about it and the singer, Carmel.

Time

Well, I really don’t know how it’s September already, but it is certainly feeling autumnal and now look! 30 leeks planted for next year…I think this is why the months are flying by, too much thinking/planning ahead but needs must.

The swallows are gathering for their migration later in the month. All chitter-chattering on the wires and then a great spectacle when they swoop off en masse. A flock of swallows is generally called ‘a flight’ and also ‘a gulp’! 😀 A ‘gulp of swallows’ sounds rather 20th century to me!

Our sunflowers are finally flowering. The bees do love them and the birds will enjoy the seeds in a couple of weeks. These are quite tall multi-headed ones and the flowers are at different levels of maturity - fascinating to look closely at the different stages.

And we’ve had a few more Purple Dragon carrots and these were reasonably carrot-shaped, though certainly wouldn’t win any prizes. I like the colour of but they’re orange just below the skin. These and the Desiree potatoes were part of a tasty roasted veg meal with our garlic which is hanging in the polytunnel.

Jamie pulled another Desiree yesterday and there are some real monsters in there! That’s the large trug.

Other harvests have been fairly consistent over the last couple of weeks. Just varying the type of bean!

The cucumbers have begun to grow in this shape, probably because of cool nights - our thermometer even measured 6° the other night 😖

We also managed to grow some heart and star-shaped cucumbers again but I’ll need to buy new moulds for next year. 

Apart from masses of cucumber sandwiches we’ve enjoyed this Asian smashed cucumber salad, with soy and sesame. It’s tasty, with less salt than the recipe suggests!

The brassicas (sprouts and purple sprouting broccoli) are looking a bit weak on Plot3 but there’s plenty more growing time for that. If these critters don’t take over - these are large white caterpillars and they’ve just started to appear. We’re keeping a close eye and removing any we find at each visit.

So, on that note I’ll just share this meal we had last night - another use of runner beans; with fake bacon pieces in red pepper tapenade with garlicky gnocchi - yum yum!

The title is provided by The Alan Parsons Project - haven’t heard this for decades! Enjoy.

This is the Life

The photo makes it look like a tree; it's not, but this plant in a pot is providing us with some lovely courgettes at last! And we've had some beautiful blue sky and hot days during August. We're having a bit of rain now, which is quite welcome as long as we see Sun again at the weekend.

Look at those pretty multi-coloured chard leaves. I like chard. The taste is a bit too earthy for some, but I enjoyed it steamed and served with a tofu chinese curry and it's such a colourful addition to a meal or salad.

And the plot is looking a bit more colourful too as the zinnia are finally flowering - just one at a time at the moment but they're getting there...

That trug contains one each of our two types of courgette. The yellow ones are a bit firmer than the stripey ones. Our third courgette plant is meant to be a Zucchini but no fruits on there yet. The carrots are all tiny and multi-legged but taste carroty so that's fine! And every harvest includes at least one not-so-mini cucumber.

The courgettes were stuffed with shallots & garlic, fried in oak-smoked oil, grated carrots and peanuts with a teaspoon of marmite and topped with cheese - so delicious! And the cavolo nero was chopped up small and steamed with butter and pepper added on the plate. Yum Yum!

That is our first showing of a butternut.. it's not really been a good year for them as they like a long growing season... I wonder if it will make it. I'll probably cut off all the other growth to give it a fighting chance when it reaches a stage when it looks like it could survive.. we'll see.
Unfortunately I had to pull up one of the cavolo nero plants - I think it had downy mildew as the leaves were yellowing and there was definitely some sort of grey fluffy mess in the growing centre. It seems strange that the other two plants appear to be entirely unaffected - let's hope it stays that way...

These are our Halloween peppers. They are meant to go orange, but can be eaten black. We tried one, it was green inside and wasn't ripe enough so we'll let them mature a bit before trying another. They look good though and are sweet peppers, not chillis.

That not-so-wee beastie is an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar. Jamie spotted it walking up a pathway so I moved it to the butterfly bush on the wildlife plot where there is a lot of willowherb which it eats. Fabulous to see. And another good spot by Jamie was this Orange Swift Moth which had just emerged and was in the process of pumping its wings up. Both were worthy of updated entries on my Allotment Wildlife Blog.

The swift moth was spotted during our latest Sunday picnic, which ended as a star-gazing event as it was during the Perseid meteor shower. The moon slipped over the horizon and it was a beautiful dark sky. We saw plenty of shooting stars and were quite shocked to see how many satellites were moving about up there - not the International Space Station as they weren't bright enough. They were mostly GPS satellites. It was a beautiful evening after a glorious hot afternoon.

So, a final few trug photos and then I need to nip up the allotment for more beans (and a cucumber probably!) before work. The cucumbers in hte bottom photo should be star-shaped and heart-shaped for our next picnic I think!

Aahh, this is the life! Thanks to Amy Macdonald.