Sunny

This last week I’ve worked more than my current required hours but it’s still felt rather like holiday time. I think there are positive vibes in the air.

We’ve been walking to the river to feed this lovely family - eight cygnets! The River Dun is so clear and there are masses of fish which were also jumping out of the water to eat the floating swan & duck food. One afternoon it was so warm and sunny we decided to go to a local pub for dinner and a bottle of wine - what a treat! Sitting in the riverside garden the same swan family swam buy and were enjoying eating the weed. So beautiful.

We’ve been to the allotment nearly every day, there’s not much to do apart from watering and picking a few bits for dinner. Courgettes are still a major element in our meals:

Layered courgette, tomato & shallot bake with cheesy sweetcorn topping

Pan-fried courgette, sweetcorn, chard & lardons with roast potatoes and onion sauce

Courgette and sweetcorn fritters with our first two runner beans

The Baby cucumbers are producing well so I made tzatziki dip, using a recipe from this great recipe book my sister gave me.

We enjoyed that as part of a Sunday picnic - here’s Jamie ready and waiting ☺️ You can see we were prepared for all weathers but I’m pleased to say it didn’t rain and we had a great time with various plotholders dropping by.

We’ve pulled our last Nicola(?) spud - not sure went wrong to produce those mutants! Let’s blame the weather but I think I may have something for the Horticultural show after all 🙄

We’ve picked most of our sweetcorn now and are noticing that something (birds or squirrels) has been stripping the cobs clean on some plants around site. I left a partially formed cob on the plot and the next day we could see just how popular sweetcorn is - amongst many species! We’ve seen wasps eating them but never ladybirds before! It is a very good year for ladybirds and quite surprisingly most I’ve spotted (🤭) have been 7-spots rather than harlequins.

It’s been feeling rather autumnal in the mornings and evenings now, but apparently another heatwave is due over the next few days - good! I’m not ready for Summer to end yet. 

Now sing-along with Boney M - you surely can’t resist!

The Right Direction

I had a lovely break from work and now it’s August - wow, time flies! The weather over the last couple of weeks has been warm and mostly dry so we visit the plot every day. We’ve been watching the juvenile robins who have been well tutored by their parents to know where they get fed.

The blue tits and great tits are also very active in the hedgerow but don’t seem to have a taste for monkey nuts - unless the celebratory England flags are putting them off.

I’ve been holding off doing the Big Butterfly Count waiting for a warm sunny day without a strong breeze, there have been lots of butterflies around so I probably should just get on and do it really!

Our harvests are getting more varied with Lark sweetcorn making a welcome appearance along with the essential courgette and cucumber most days. As tomatoes show a blush we take them home to complete their ripening. The Black Moon variety are prolific (from the polytunnel) and really tasty.

We’ve picked our first aubergine - Graffiti I think. I roasted it separately from the other veg and it was a nice addition to the meal which included some super-sweet carrot thinnings too - waste not, want not 🙂

This vegetable passata bake was all home-grown (apart from the passata) so delicious with potatoes, courgette, garlic, shallot, chard and sweetcorn. 

We’ve pulled another couple of potatoes too - Kestrel it seems.. They’re delicious roasted.

The remaining salad leaf has been pulled from the raised bed and I bought some additional herb plants - Greek basil, oregano and creeping thyme. I split the basil plant so have a couple of pots in the polytunnel. I was going to pull the chard, which hasn’t grown very well, but as I only eat a few leaves occasionally I decided to leave it. And it is so colourful! The sage needs a trim - I’ll do that when I take the heads off the lavender.

The shallots dried off so we made two jars of pickled onions. Jamie’s jar in pickling vinegar with mustard seeds and mine with balsamic vinegar using a slight adaptation of this recipe.

We received some free All Year Round cauliflower seeds from DT Browns so we’ve sown them in modules and they’ve germinated. I guess that means I should be weeding the brassica cage which hasn’t been looked after this year. It just has some Brussels sprout and PSB growing along with a lot of weeds at the moment. 

Oh! Plus a blueberry in a pot which Jamie bought from the RHS as a birthday present from my sister. I hope next year is as good for fruit as this year seems to have been. We’ve never seen so many sloes in the hedge by our plot - does it mean it’s going to be a hard Winter??

Well, I don’t mind as long as it doesn’t come too soon. My squash plants are growing quite well now and beginning to climb but need a good few weeks to produce some decent fruit. The recent rain-Sun-rain has been great growing weather.

We can only see one tiny melon on the polytunnel plant and none on the outdoor plants yet - as Jim (plotholder) said ‘they’d better get a wriggle on’. I quite agree!

The runner beans are finally beginning to form and the borlotti are beginning to colour. A few more weeks till they dry off and I’ll be storing them. Last year it was so wet that I couldn’t save any beans - I hope that doesn’t happen again! This is a bean’s eye view of their world 🙂

On the health front, I have started EPO injections which kidney patients often need to help the kidney produce red blood cells so I should feel like I have a new burst of energy quite soon. Thank goodness Jamie is able to do my injection as I can’t. I’ve had so much needling all my life but I never look (and you really need to when injecting yourself!). What a wimp I am!

It’s 6 months now since Jamie had his stroke. What a terrible time, but he’s made such great progress, though he doesn’t always feel it and it is still early days. He’s easily tired and rather painful but that’s not unexpected although unwelcome. Overall we’re going in the right direction - thanks to Goo Goo Dolls for the song title 😌

Think for a Minute

Dear Clouds 

Thankyou for bringing us some proper rain - real torrential showers. We were happy to avoid puddles, admire rain pouring from leaking gutters and water hammering out of down pipes. 

We’ve been very happy to see the earth on the allotment looking a rich brown colour instead of pale and dusty. The plants say “thankyou” too.

I was very happy to be able to make holes that didn’t fill up with dusty soil as soon as they were dug (using a bulb planter). Thanks to Neal for the baby leeks, we now have 27 planted.

Just one thing, Clouds…. Did you need to have the biggest cloudburst just as the Hungerford Carnival parade was setting off and then disperse leaving sunshine as the parade finished?! Terrible timing! Most of the remaining crowd were sheltering under the railway bridge.

The Town and Manor cows 😀

Anyway, the rain saved us from a lot of watering for a couple of days which was a welcome break. I’m on holiday this week so I’m glad that it’s still warm, not sweltering, and we seem to have a few more dry days lined up for plot-days. And, we’ve picked our first tomatoes.

The beans are getting there, although we only see one(!) tiny bean so far on the Scarlet Empire runners…

Ahead of the rain, I pulled the shallots. They’re now trimmed and drying in the roof of the polytunnel before they’ll be pickled. They’ve done well this year - mostly due to the lack of slugs, I think.

Some of the small ones went home along with a potato harvest - the contents of one bag and two from the ground. They appear to be Nicola and Kestrel but who knows? Not me and I planted them!

Some of the potatoes and shallots have been used in several meals already. Roasted vegetables with paneer also included peppers, but mostly home-grown ingredients.

And I used a chargrilled pepper paste to marinade the halloumi for this delicious roastie.

The raised bed, where the shallots were, has been topped up with soil from the potato bags and topped with Apsley Farms mulch. We’ve sown a row of radish and we’re going to sow some pak choi for over-Wintering.

The zinnia are flowering now and I’m dead-heading regularly to encourage more bushiness - such a pretty flower. And, as you can see with that tiny hoverfly visitor, they are good for pollinators.

The nasturtium on the other hand have proved irresistible to flea beetle this year - the heat has helped their numbers and they are being very destructive. Some plants on site are black with them and when you get close they all ping off in different directions. Nasturtiums are often used as sacrificial plants, but I was hoping to enjoy some leaves myself! The tiny beetles are also enjoying the radish, which are finally going to seed. I hope I can still pick some pods for a spicy snack.

The Sun is just breaking through the cloud now so we shall head for the plot for a bit of pottering, sitting, watching and thinking. The Housemartins provide the lovely song title, aah.

Daylight

We’re mid-heatwave at the moment - it’s extremely hot (high 20s) but I must say I’m loving it, especially working my part-time hours. We go to the allotment for lunch and stay until we’re flaking out.

There’s so much to water now that we’ve pretty much planted all that’s going in … well, there may be some additions if the mood takes me. My row of Jacob’s Cattle drying beans have all germinated and we’ve potted up the polytunnel. Jamie can help with a lot, but needs to sit down even more than me these days, but the allotment is definitely his happy place 😊

In the polytunnel we have:
Aubergine - Graffiti
Aubergine - Meatball
Melon - Alvaro
Tomato - Redcurrant
Tomato - Black Moon

I’ve grown one of the Redcurrant tomatoes and three of the Alvaro melons outside too - just with holes dug through this weed suppressant - hopefully the melon growth will cover that entirely. It was only after I’d planted them that Jamie piped up “why didn’t you plant them in the middle?”. Hmm, good point, of course  I’m wanting them to grow towards the centre of our plot but they’re bound to head the other way 🙄

We’ve planted a Cocktail Crush tomato and a Baby cucumber plant on Plot3. We’re expecting that just one cucumber plant will suffice, rather than swamp us with cucumbers this year! I’ve sown some celtuce, a Chinese salad veg into the raised bed. The radish, mangetout and salad leaves are providing me with some small lunch additions. I’ve used the garlic scapes in various meals and have used a couple of bunches of shallots (picked before fully mature) as I’ve given up with salad onions.

I have pulled one garlic but it needs more drying. I’ll probably wait another week before pulling the rest. And that is our first courgette of the year - we based our whole fajita meal round that tiny specimen 🤭

I’m pleased to see the verbena bonariensis has started to put on its show amongst the feverfew flowers, just as the valerian oficinalis is going over. Zinnia and pot marigolds are on their way too and I hope to have some hollyhocks photos very soon…

I’m also happy to see more ladybirds arrive with the heat. I’ve been collecting them from our stinging nettle pot (it started out as a raspberry pot) and placing them on my Gigantes beans which are climbing well, but the blackfly have found them.

So, today is the longest day and it’s meant to be the hottest. I expect we’ll be doing a lot of watering, a lot of bindweed pulling and a lot of sitting for much of the 16hours and 37minutes of daylight. Enjoy the song by David Kushner.

Early Days

The last couple of weeks we’ve had a mix of hot sunny days, frosty nights and more recently strong winds. We had a couple of showers but not enough rain to make much difference to the dry soil.

I’ve had a lingering cold and had my Covid booster so haven’t felt like working or plotting, but perhaps I’ll manage some today before rain is due this afternoon and I have a week off work after Easter so I hope there are some reasonable days for catching up. On a couple of quick visits we managed to hastily sow a row of parsnips - if they germinate I have a feeling there may be some wonky veg growing there!

And I dug a small plot and sowed mangetout. They’re usually one of our first harvests, but I’ve been a bit slow this year. I’ve put some protection round now they’ve popped up or the pigeons will clear the lot. The shallots in the raised bed have all got healthy looking green shoots now.

The purple sprouting broccoli has been producing lovely shoots - so delicious.

I’ve sown some asparagus pea and chard in modules in the polytunnel. I’ll choose the coloured chard stems to plant out, once an area has been dug.

The seedlings are growing quite slowly because of the fluctuating temperature but that is suiting our slower pace of life at the moment. Jamie’s walking without a stick most of the time, but the fatigue still makes things difficult, but slowly, slowly…

The broad bean gap-fillers that we sowed last month have sprouted and I’m hoping the blossom will be out in our ‘orchard’ when I go up in a bit - shame the sky isn’t this lovely blue today.

Blog title provided by Paul McCartney. Because it is…early days.