Showing posts with label runner-beans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label runner-beans. Show all posts

Saturday 23 September 2023

Sorrow

I’ve been offline for a few weeks and the season moved from some sweltering late Summer days to rainy Autumn ones, although it’s a dazzling blue sky this morning.
In the mornings and evenings it definitely feels like Autumn.
Harvests have been plentiful and colourful. 
The French and runner beans have been feeding us well. We were late with the runners so they’re not stringy yet. I may pod some of the French beans for drying, but I probably have enough dried beans…
Most of the Borlotti and Yin Yang are being dried. I move them from the polytunnel roof drying mesh before the pods pop open.
Flowers are beginning to die back, but the Scabiosa Stellata are now in their prime - their seedheads are only small, but so pretty.
The Spanish Flag began to show flowers at about the same time as Spain beat England in the Women’s World Cup final, but September put on a full show.
The calendula have been stunning, but really need deadheading daily.
The two courgette plants just keep producing. We’ve had to share or compost some giants but they keep on coming!
And sweetcorn is now on the menu, for lunch most days. A few of the stalks had been blown down (or dragged down by the weight of the mini pumpkins), but the cobs are excellent; Incredible are not as sweet as our normal Lark variety, but are delicious.
The radish flowers have been so pretty and the pods have been a tasty, hot, on-site snack and addition to salads/stir fry. So many pods that I pickled some and added nasturtium seeds which are extremely tasty when fresh so I hope they’re good pickled.
The song is provided by David Bowie and reflects the current feeling as we said goodbye to my mum who made it to her 95th birthday but pretty much decided that was plenty and fell asleep. A terrible time for us but doing our best to remember the good times, of which there were many.


Sunday 7 August 2022

Rewind The Film

It’s here! The new drone video of the site, courtesy of Colin de Fraine

Marsh Lane Allotments Drone Video

I hope you agree that the plots are looking amazing from all the different angles. How dry it is though! Still no rain, thank goodness for the borehole and generator to pump our water.

From Monday it’s National Allotment Week and we’re having a vote for the Plotholders Choice Award for the favourite plot. I hope lots of people join in and next Sunday we’re having a bring-your-own picnic for the prize-giving. We’re not quite ready for an open day with Covid cases still high, so this is the next best thing - also takes less organisation!
National Allotment Week 2022
We haven’t had any rain all week and aren’t expecting any at least till Friday - hope it stays dry on Sunday for the picnic!
Nicola Potatoes
The dry earth makes digging the potatoes easy and they emerge clean, with no slug damage so far - it makes a nice change. These are Nicola potatoes. The tubers are mostly quite small. They’re tasty hot or cold. We’ve had them boiled, as roasted wedges and mashed. 
Nicola potatoes
I had the carrot, fennel and spring onion with mayonnaise in a roll for lunch - yum yum. Only one Florence fennel looks like it may bulb up quite big - nothing like you see in shops though. They are mostly going to seed but are still good as a flavouring.
Purple potato and green bean salad
I enjoyed the last of the pulled Salad Blue potatoes with French beans and these smoky not-chicken bites. They were a tasty snack and added a bit of extra protein to this colourful little lunch.
Trug full of French beans
Green beans, whether runners or French beans, are well and truly on the menu now. The French beans are  Blue Lake climbing French beans. And the cucumbers are just beginning to join most lunches. 
Trug of beans
Mmmm, cheese and cucumber sandwiches… we just bought some fancy cheddar cheeses from the monthly Hungerford Food market along with some more garlic oil. I also couldn’t resist buying a couple of pots on the plant stall, including a salvia for the flower patch by our bench. Talking of which, that’s where I’m going now.
The song title is provided by the Manic Street Preachers. Go on, why not take another look at the video? It’s only 2½ minutes long.

Friday 3 June 2022

Army Dreamers

We have froglets! The tiniest you’d ever see! I’m so happy 😊

Tiny froglets
There are a least five. The weird thing is that there are still lots of tadpoles which haven’t even developed legs yet. And, weirder still, the frogs are smaller than the tadpoles! 🤔 Here you can see how small this one is compared to duckweed.

Tiny frog

After a bit of a chilly start to the week, yesterday was lovely and, because it was a Bank Holiday, the site was really bustling. We planted out our three types of climbing beans: Scarlet Empire runners, Lingua di Fuoco borlotti beans and Blue Lake French beans.

Bean wigwams

Jamie’s planted the All Green Bush courgette and the Sunburst patty pan. We’ve put slug pellets around these small plants with netting/fleece for protection from the weather and to stop the birds eating the pellets - they are the legal ferric phosphate ones, but we’d still prefer the birds to steer clear.
Protected courgette
I’ve sown another row of carrots… 3rd time lucky? And I’m pleased to see some of the parsnip seeds have germinated on the ‘paper towel trick’, so I’ll plant them today.

Germinated parsnip seed
I finished digging the other trench in the squash tunnel after we’d had a bit of rain at the beginning of the week. So the ground is waiting for the plants now…. They’ve just begun to germinate, so are a bit slower than I’d hoped.
Plot3… waiting
As you can see, Plot3 is still a plot-in-waiting, but at least it’s weed-free now though it won’t be if we don’t get some plants in soon!
HAHA Jubilee tree
Here’s me with fellow committee members, Liz and Richard, with our HAHA-decorated jubilee tree. All the organisations in the town were offered a High Street tree to decorate. And this is what my pompom bees were for, along with seed packet/veggie home-made bunting and decorated flower pots.
Pompom bees
We wandered up the High Street yesterday to look at the other decorations. I think it’s a nice idea. Here are a few of the trees. I really like the Nursery School’s golden wellies 🙂
Hungerford jubilee trees
Decorated jubilee trees
Anyway, back on the allotment. We’ve been potting on marigolds, colourful chard and amaranthus (love lies bleeding).
Potting on
We’ve had our first harvest of delicious broad beans.
Before applying spray to the annoying black fly, which always breed quicker than the ladybirds 😖
Blackfly on broad beans
And I thinned the beetroot so enjoyed those thinnings with a halloumi dinner the other night. They were rather earthy-tasting - needless to say, Jamie didn’t want any 😀
Sautéed beetroot thinnings
The potatoes were earthed-up and fleeced at the end of May as there was concern for a frost. It was fine, only dropping to 3.5° then on the night of June 1st the thermometer recorded 1.4°! But no frost damage.
Earthed-Up potatoes
There are more bees and beetles about and we watched this lovely mullein moth caterpillar chomp through a flower on the wildlife plot (apparently they can stay as a pupa for 5years!) but butterflies and ladybirds seem to be laying low at the moment. We need a few less blowy days I think.
Mullein moth caterpillar
Anyway, it’s time to get back onto the plot. Great song by Kate Bush dedicated to our army of tiny frogs (apparently that is the collective noun).

Saturday 23 October 2021

A Forest

So that's the last of this year's squash tunnel photos - I hope I didn’t hear a little cheer - the area is cleared and waiting for the trenches to be re-dug in time for the manure delivery so that I can prepare the bed for next year.

The watering funnels for the squashes do help ensure the water aims for the roots once the foliage makes it hard to tell where the plant starts, but the snails do rather take advantage!
This was last weekend. We found lots of ladybirds enjoying the last heat of the year and a lot of wasps were about too.
Harlequin ladybird
It was nice to have another warm weekend, but the weeds will love it if the weather doesn't cool down. We planted the Mersey White garlic bulbs and the Jermor shallots into the raised bed and they got well rained in during the past week.
I removed the remainder of the runner beans, Gigantes and Borlotti from the polytunnel roof drying area and took them home in their pods to dry out a bit more. I podded them today and was interested to find a few pods contained these plain black runner beans. They look lovely; so smooth and shiny. It seems they’re just an aberration of the parent plants, which were Scarlet Empire so I didn’t bother keeping for sowing next year - the pods didn’t look any different.
I’m keeping the beans in a paper bag in the warm for a while to completely dry out. I’ve decided not to bother drying the Gaia soya beans; they’re just too tiny to bother with.
A couple of the Festival squash seemed too small to bother with too, but today I’ve made soup using them. I roasted them first with a bit of oil and cayenne pepper.
There was more flesh than I expected when I scraped them out.
And it’s made a lovely creamy soup. I’ve added some cardamom seed which I hope will give an interesting flavour.
I’m making a pumpkin pie for the first time for Halloween next weekend. I hope it’s easy/tasty so I can use up more of our amassed New England Pie pumpkins. I definitely want the Crown Princes roasted, as they’re such a tasty variety. Not sure what I’ll do with the final green tromboncino - soup probably!
I had an afternoon off in the week. Work has been so busy and I’ve been revising for an exam on Tuesday (I know! An exam at my time of life 🙀) so it was nice to have a bit of time away from the screen. Our planned little walk around Savernake Forest, just down the road in Wiltshire, turned into a 10km walk! 
Our unused-to-walking legs were protesting by the time we reached the car and we never did find the ‘Giant Beech’ but we found the 700 year old ‘Cathedral Oak’ and other very impressive trees and fungi. I was surprised to see that most of the trees are still green.
It’s the time of year for sitting enjoying the last rays of sunshine, with a hot drink - although I was watching Jamie weeding and cutting the edges at the time 😄
The song title is provided by The Cure, there aren’t enough songs by The Cure featured in this blog!

Sunday 10 October 2021

Time of the Season

The mornings have been foggy and dark this week, but this weekend has been mostly warm and sunny. I’ve been prepping for future meals. I do enjoy seeing jars of stored beans.

Storing beans

The Borlotti and Gigantes came from all these pods, which have mostly been drying in the polytunnel. The Gigantes are drying slower than the other beans and haven’t produced so many pods this year.

Trug of goodies
I filled the trug yesterday, with the intention of doing the podding at home. But it was so sunny that I did it on the plot and it was very relaxing. The Borlotti lingua di fuoco 2 are great; they basically just unzip and the beans pop out. The runners, Scarlet Empire were podded last week and taken home with the peppers. The slugs definitely enjoyed more peppers than us. We’ll probably grow a smaller variety (peppers, not slugs) next year so they’re ready for picking earlier.
I had some of the podded runner beans in a dish covering a couple of meals, along with the orange pepper, chard, garlic and shallots - a fully home-grown meal. Very tasty and even better eaten a couple of days later when the flavours were enhanced. It’s apparently a peculiarly British-thing to eat the pods of runner beans, with most other nationalities growing them for the beans. And, I was surprised to see that in the US they are predominantly grown as an ornamental plant (hummingbirds love them) and are not even considered for food. See this blog, The Sharing Gardens, which is an interesting read.
Peppers, chard, beans, potatoes
My chard is looking better now than it’s looked all year, so I roasted some with sesame seeds yesterday, to eat as ‘crispy seaweed’ along with roasted veg - another fully home-grown meal, which up till now have been infrequent this year.
Roast veg and crispy seaweed chard
Jamie has some sort of flu (not COVID-19) so I’ve been to the allotment on my own a couple of times recently. I always think I don’t want to go, but am so pleased when I do. It’s such a lovely spot and there’s always someone to talk to.
Wheel barrow full of pumpkins
Yesterday I moved all the ripe squash into the polytunnel, there are still a few more to pick as they may still further ripen. 
Now that the foliage has died back, it’s clear that we didn’t keep up with the Rocky cucumber production! That lot will go in our compost bins so it’s not really wasted and we did eat a LOT of cucumbers this year.
The kohl rabi are beginning to bulb up. I’m concerned for them because the purple sprouting broccoli (single plant) and Chinese cabbage are being chomped by something - it looks like caterpillar damage but I haven’t found the culprit yet…
We also didn’t see who tucked into the sunflower seeds, but they’ve nearly cleared all of them now.
Sunflower seedhead
I had a couple of hours on the sunny plot again this afternoon. I took down the runner bean and Borlotti bean plants and poles. All the foliage will go in a trench under the squash tunnel once the plants are cleared and we’re expecting a HAHA manure delivery in a week or two.
And the cycle starts again with the Aqua dulce broad beans sown under their bottle cloches.
Broad beans sown
We’re hoping the garlic and shallots will be delivered in the week so can get them planted into their prepared beds. The title song is provided by The Zombies because, well, it really is that time…