Golden Skans

I made the rosehip jelly - it was a bit of a palaver to be honest. Two little jars of gold - they look great, but I think they may just be super-sweet and maybe not worth the effort. We’ll find out in a couple of months… I used this recipe from LarderLove. We ended up having to buy the apples and then today someone has left bagfuls of crab apples on the freebies shelf - they would have been perfect for it. 🙄

I only had 250g of rosehips so used about 500g apples and 250g sugar plus a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice. I filtered it through coffee filter bags (I didn’t want to risk getting the itchy hairs in the jelly- yuk!) The juice was cloudy throughout the process so I was pleased when it went clear during the final part of boiling the juice with the sugar. All that sugar!

I picked the last of the squash as the temperature was forecast to fall last week. It did and reached 0.6°. I’m sorry that we only got those two Honeyboat squash, they’re usually one of my favourite squash varieties. The peppers have been delicious fried up on cheese toastie-lunches and there are plans to eat the remaining ones this week. They had to be picked because I snapped a branch off the plant by mistake. There are probably another 8 big ones that we’re still hoping will go red on the plant.

And finally the tomatoes are going red in (what’s now) the squash store. The cold nights have gone for the timebeing and we’ve had some good heavy showers. The sweetcorn is delicious but the pollination is a bit hit and miss as you can see.

We had a lovely few hours on a mostly-sunny 17° site this afternoon. My Czechmate Wight garlic arrived from DT Browns yesterday, so I planted it out. It’s a hardneck variety so hopefully we’ll get garlic scapes to eat ahead of the bulbs - two harvests from one planting 🙂

The two bulbs gave us 31 cloves! They’re on Plot3 by the leeks, in front of the squash tunnel. I’ve planted some of them a bit deeper this year, in the hope for bigger bulbs.

The squash tunnel is useful for storing the canes off the ground over Winter and we’re thinking we’ll grow our beans up the tunnel next year and have the squash elsewhere for a year.

The slugs have arrived with the rain and have found my Chinese cabbage, which is annoying! They don’t seem so keen on the pak choi so far. Jamie’s lettuce are still tiny but should provide us with a bit of salad in a few weeks if they don’t get decimated…

The chard was looking good in the sunshine. I’ll be having some more of that made into ‘crispy seaweed’, it’s my preferred way to eat chard now that the leaves are bigger.

You may remember the ugly warty Desiree potatoes from my last post. We’re pleased to report that they made delicious mashed potato and we’ll be having more tonight. We expect to have a few more courgettes this week and I’m hoping to have some roast veggies, including the smallest butternut squash - unless the courgettes get bigger than expected!

The zinnia and other flowers are still looking okay and still need deadheading, but windy weather in the week caused a bit of damage, so I have a bunch of flowers beside me. The Love-Lies-Bleeding is going to drop everywhere I think.

So that’s another weekend over, another new month begins and we had another COVID jab last week - my 6th one… I hope you can all have a good week. Here’s a great song by the Klaxons with ‘golden’ in the title, but don’t ask me what ‘skans ’ are, perhaps ‘scams’ is more apt in England at the moment.

Ugly

The weather has been rather changeable. When the sun shone it was lovely but not so good when the cloud took over and that mass brought about 5 spots of rain with it, so the earth is still really dry.

This weekend we had two days of clearing away the three bean wigwams and then we dug the area for our broad beans. We've also managed to do a lot of weeding; it still amazes me how well the weeds grow with so little rain. The nigella have spread seeds and seedlings everywhere - beautiful, but rather a nuisance!

The remaining borlotti beans are drying on netting attached in the top of the polytunnel. The smaller squashes may go up there later when we need to use the chair!

More of the tomatoes are finally ripening but the peppers are remaining obstinately green. With the temperatures dropping to about 4° most nights I wonder if they’ll ever ripen…but you know some good things do come to those who wait. This Chinese Dragon radish was sown months ago, did nothing during the heatwave and finally started to appear a few weeks ago. I thought it would be woody, but no.

It’s hot fresh flavour was a great addition to this lunchtime potato salad with raw beetroot and Chinese cabbage thinnings.

I bought a julienne peeler recently and it’s perfect for carrots and radish but the beetroot was a bit too tricky and messy, so I just sliced that really thin. We’ve been enjoying carrots and pak choi in a couple of stir fries recently too, the Blue Dragon sauces make life easy. But as I’m mentioning brands, if you see these Itsu Bao buns for sale, buy them! They’re so delicious! Talking of delicious..Here’s the bean, carrot and courgette meal I made the other day with last years beans, a can of chopped tomatoes flavoured with smoked paprika, garlic and a little rose harissa.

Someone had cut back overgrown sections of the allotment hedge, so I thought I'd pick the rosehips if the birds aren't going to get to eat them - there are still plenty in the hedge for them. This is the recipe I intend to use to make rosehip jelly which I've never made before. The author of that recipe is quite funny and she is so right - the thorns are so nasty!! I'm a bit concerned that the irritable seed hairs get mentioned quite often in recipes, I hope my draining bag is fine enough to capture them...

The zinnia flowers are still creating a buzz - sorry 🤭 - with bees and hoverflies. I think this is a Common Carder bee (David, please correct me if I’m wrong!) and the hedge is alive with buzzing insects on the ivy flowers. We've also seen a dragon fly zipping about recently - such a huge insect but it never sits still for a photo.

So, you may be wondering, why the title song by the Sugababes? Well, Jamie dug up our single Desiree potato plant and …

Oh dear they're really not pretty and though a little scab on a baked spud can add to the flavour I wouldn't want to risk one of them! That’s what a dry Summer can give you. I just hope they taste okay once they are peeled and mashed. And here are the Sugababes.

Changes

During the week we had our first Pak Choi harvest, I thought it was quite tasty, we had it steamed with dauphinois potatoes and a Quorn fillet. And we harvested our first EVER melon! 

We knew the mangomel was ripe because the skin had turned yellow. And, as you can see, a bird (probably) had also decided it was ripe enough to sample. So the remaining growing fruit now has a protective cage round it.

It weighed over 1.6kg and served us for two breakfasts. It was so deliciously sweet, well worth growing. I wonder if it grew particularly well because of the heatwave and perhaps that’s also why we only got two fruits - apparently it can produce up to five.

Looking back at my blog from last year I was reminded of the carrot and beetroot fritters. So I picked the main ingredients in the morning and cooked them up in the evening. Unfortunately they’re shop-bought shallots.

It’s such a straightforward recipe. Saying that, I probably added a little too much water so it was more sticky than intended but the fritters are so tasty and served me for two dinners. I used the thinnings of Chinese cabbage in the salad.

Last week I commented on it being Autumn and it’s most obvious in the mornings, with mist/fog and condensation in windows. 

The hedgerow is full of berries.

The Love Lies Bleeding is getting redder. This is the biggest of the plants; it’s certainly taken advantage of the space on that patch!

The cucurbits are starting to succumb to mildew, so we’ve nearly (but not quite) reached the end of courgette season.

Temperatures have remained warm and we’ve had some significant rainfall, mostly at night. Early morning plot visits are more relaxed as we only need to water in the polytunnel, but (every silver lining) the rain is really bringing the weeds on well 😣

Talking of the polytunnel, we cleared most of the excess growth and new shoots from the tomato plants. We hope that will provide more light for a few more of those lovely looking Crimson Plum tomatoes to ripen and keep mildew at bay…

The Cleor pepper has lots of long peppers which we also need to turn red… waiting, waiting…

Allotment-time this weekend has mostly been about weeding, clearing and dead-heading but I did plant up some Crocosmia bulbs which fellow plotholder, Martine, put on the freebies shelf. I’ve put some in our flower plot and some on the wildlife plot. We sowed some radish in the potato bag that we emptied today - they’ll go into the polytunnel once the tomatoes are cleared. 

And here’s a photo of the ‘allotment cat’. He’s such a friendly chap, we all like it when he turns up - well, everyone I speak to does ☺️

The song title is provided by Will Young (I’ve used David Bowie before) and what a lot of changes; not just the season and the weather, but with the death of the Queen - I wonder how long before it sounds normal saying ‘King’ - not a personal impact on my life but certainly the loss of a constant. Boris Johnson is no longer our Prime Minister - thank goodness - but time will tell how much of a change Liz Truss offers. Changes are afoot…

I’m Free

I have more than a week off work - Yippee! And the weather is good - Hooray! 

Actually the weather has been beautiful continuously since my last post. The photo above was from last Sunday when the clouds put on a marvellous display throughout the day. And look at these beauties.

We spent most of the weekend on the plot, but needed the shade of the brolly at times. The daily watering continues.

Our one gladioli 

We spent much of the time potting up flower troughs and pots of begonia, lobelia and fuchsia - some of these will go on our shady doorstep, but we’ll let them enjoy a bit of sunshine for a while. Talking of flowers, our beans (runners, borlotti, French and Gigantes) are all on their way.

The Gigantes is winning (of course it’s a race) and there’s only one plant so I hope it produces a lot of beans!

The race is also on in the squash tunnel. The Butternut is definitely winning. In fact, some of the plants look more like bush varieties, but I hope that isn’t the case… Look how dry it gets between watering, but we have the bottle waterers so the roots are reaching water and the plants should be fine when there’s a bit more foliage.

A lesson learned this year: don’t write labels with stupid pink pen! They’ve all faded so I need to re-do them, or just wait and see what develops - Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

Ivan let me pick some of his blackcurrants so I made a sauce with added lavender. It was so delicious on ice cream or vanilla soya yogurt and look how pretty it was pre-cooking.

The broad beans are over now. I had the last, rather gnarly, ones fried into ‘falafel’ the other night. They were very tasty made of broad beans, mangetout, onion, garlic, cumin - all ground together and fried. I couldn’t get them to hold together so fried them in metal pastry cutters. I had them with a grain mix and a tiny courgette and tiny patty pan. And, I successfully microwaved a couple of beets ☺️ 

Neal gave us beets, turnip and lettuce yesterday. It made for a tasty lunch. The thinly-sliced raw turnip was nicely peppery. I had the remainder boiled with dinner, very tasty but no longer peppery. I must grow some again next year.

The wildlife plot is doing its job attracting pollinators. The bumblebees love the evening primrose flowers.

They also spend ages on the teasel flowers - the plants are over 8ft now!

This mallow is stunning, but doesn’t seem to attract as much wildlife as I thought it would. I’ll keep an eye on it over the next week as there are loads of butterflies about now.

So that’s me caught up before the holiday-on-the-plot begins. Great song by The Soup Dragons

Hot Hot Hot

 

Finally got round to filtering the chive flowers from the vinegar. It’s so pretty and the chive flavouring is a lovely addition to chips or a salad. I’m thinking I may make some lavender vinegar, though I’m not sure that would work on chips…

Lettuce is now joining the harvests. The beetroots are the perfect ‘golfball-size’ that I’ve read about. I thought I’d try microwaving them rather than using the hob or oven for an hour. I’m no cook or much of a microwave user, but I can confirm that 7 minutes for two freshly picked small beets is much too long. I took the lid off to find two deflated splodges! I’ll try again… 

I did make a delicious gooseberry crumble though; gooseberries courtesy of Ivan. It served for breakfasts and desserts for much of the week. Ivan also gave me some redcurrants which are so beautiful and made into a sauce provide a perfect topping for chocolate ice cream. Yum.

We got a lot done on the allotment last weekend. I sowed another row of Salad Onions and Chinese Dragon radish - 5 days on and the radish are already up. Jamie potted up the pepper in the polytunnel and I planted the two final squashes in the tunnel - Winter Celebration. The melon and pumpkin are released and are heading off sideways.

Mangomel Melon

The cucumbers are planted in their pots, they’re very small plants at the moment but hopefully will be as prolific as they usually are quite soon.

I pulled all the garlic, but the bulbs are a bit smaller than usual. Lucky there are plenty of them, now drying in the sun on an old saucepan stand.

We did get some rain, but not enough so have been watering every morning. It’s taking us more than an hour to water everything now so need to start getting up a bit earlier, or starting work later…

Nice to see these early morning altocumulus clouds and seeing our buddleia there reminds me that I saw my first ever Hummingbird Hawkmoth on there in the week - what an amazing little moth! Not a great photo, but it was so speedy.

Anyway, that was all last week. I’m looking forward to a hot, hot, hot weekend though am rather disappointed that the blue sky has turned grey in the last hour! Song title provided by Arrow. Have a lovely weekend all.