And It's Still Alright

I made these very tasty carrot and bean burgers on Saturday. I used this recipe for my dried borlotti and runner beans from last year and fresh carrot and shallots. Our shallots actually turned out better than we initially thought, so we’ve been using them instead of onions for a few weeks now. I used a little turmeric and cumin rather than coriander and cumin. I didn’t bother adding the flour, they held together well.

Now that we’re halfway through October we’ve not been visiting the plot every morning, it just depends if we need to pick anything, water the tomatoes and peppers or close down the polytunnel. Thursday morning we were swathed in a thick fog - thank goodness for no commute!

Two days before that we had a proper frost and another day to be grateful for working from home. We had to scrape ice off the car and just look at the grass on site. The lowest temperature in the zipped down polytunnel had been -2.8°

That finished off the zinnias and most other things which weren't in sheltered areas on the plot. We noticed that the hedge offered protection from frost as did Ivan's grapevine.

We've almost managed to eat all the sweetcorn this year - probably just one reasonable one left on the plants for this week. And we're taking Crimson Plum tomatoes home as they ripen (or get close). The Lizzano outdoor tomato got frosted so no more tiny toms from that bush - it's yield has been a bit disappointing this year with some of the tomatoes being the size of blackcurrants and a lot splitting - obviously the weather is getting the blame for that as it usually produces delicious cherry tomatoes.

The Love-Lies-Bleeding has also not enjoyed getting so cold. I was thinking of harvesting some of the 'grain' but I don't think I will now - I'll leave it for the birds, though I haven't seen anyone enjoying it so far.

One plant that hasn't been upset by the frost is our cavolo nero. I've seen it looking good in the frost on other people's plots in previous years. The white fly are crazy on site and you just have to touch any brassica leaf to be surrounded by the tiny moths. It seems that they are frost-resistant too.

I stripped a few leaves off yesterday and after much shaking to rid it of whitefly and a good wash I blanched it then stir fried it for a bit with olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. It was a delicious addition to my all-home-grown meal last night. I can see that it's far superiour to chard... It doesn't appear to have been affected by caterpillars/slugs so I wonder if it can be successfully grown outside of the netting - I see a few people on site have done this, I shall have to inspect their leaves!

Yesterday was warm when we visited in the afternoon. As with most visits now it was mostly about tidying. Jamie did some strimming, weeding and clearing the zinnia from the raised bed while I did a bit of digging. I do enjoy digging. Look how dry the earth is, we've had some rain but it disappears quickly. We haven't worked out our plan for next year so we're not sure what's going in this plot in front of the broad beans, but I wanted to clear all the grass and other weeds that were threatening a take-over, as you can see from around the Love-Lies-Bleeding. I couldn't bring myself to pull up the self-seeded broad beans and one of them has flowers on.

In the week Jamie bought me a celeriac and chestnuts to make soup. Unfortunately we had two apples left over and seeing this recipe, I thought I may as well use them up. The apple made it far too sweet for my taste and rather ruined what would have been a delicious soup 😒
My friend from work suggested adding chilli to detract from the sweetness. It worked, to a certain extent ...

So, another weekend passes in a blink of an eye 😔 Back to work, oh, I'm already here! Have a good week all and enjoy the song title provided by Nathanial Rateliff, because the year may be flying by but, no matter what's going on in this mad country we're currently living in, so far, it's still alright...

In A Moment

Hands up who else was flagging like this yesterday!

Sagging Patty Pan plant

“When leaves show their undersides, be very sure rain betides” says the Farmer’s Almanac. Well, the rain reached Swindon but missed Hungerford, so I think it was wishful thinking for the beans, or perhaps they wanted us to do some more watering. 

Watering just isn’t the same as rainfall, so we had to water twice on the hottest day in Britain EVER. Such hard work 🤭 

The temperature in the shade on the allotment was 37° But look at the polytunnel temperature - Ugh! Didn’t stay in there long.

On Monday we got to the allotment for sunrise (05:10am). It felt really cold at 8° but it’s always interesting to see the site waking up and to see how much dew forms on the plants. The magpie family were flying about like they were playing in the squash tunnel and then we saw 3 squirrels frolicking. Perhaps they were dashing about to warm up, as I was.

The sun reached the top of site first.

Jamie took the haulms off one potato plant which had died back - just one Nicola out of the row. We firkled to see how the tubers were doing - no sign of blight, so perhaps the plant just died due to lack of water. Anyway, the potatoes were lovely.

That courgette was one of Neal’s. We had a larger one than that another day and I stuffed it with shallots, garlic, baby carrots and cheese. Really delicious.

They weren’t home-grown shallots, though I have pulled ours now. Not a very impressive haul again this year.

On one of the less-hot days I sowed my seed paper that my clever cousin Jen made - I’m making sure I keep the pot well-watered and look forward to seeing what appears.

Talking of emerging, I found this shiny golden chrysalis on a lettuce. I think it may be a small tortoiseshell. 

Rain is threatening again, but I wonder if it’ll actually fall today. We’re back to our average temperature for now which is rather a relief but I have enjoyed the blue skies.

It’s raining!! The song is provided by The Stereophonics. Good video but I don’t like the thought of crunching sand in that bread. 😣

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep

November has blurred past me along with much of this year. Too much work and not enough play! I shouldn't complain, I like my job and I'm still working from home full-time - things could be so much worse!

 

Last week I was living off a Crown Prince squash. The beetroot noodles and peppers made a very pretty meal but I have to admit that I was rather disappointed with the pan-fried squash. It didn't have much flavour and certainly wasn't as sweet as I was expecting.

I added cayenne pepper and cumin to flavour the soup which I made with half the squash, which I roasted. Subsequent meals included more additional flavourings like this layered bake.

A tasty home-grown dish of beetroot, celeriac and squash flavoured with plenty of thyme, sage, garlic and topped off with cheese. It was meant to cater for me for 2 meals but was so tasty I scoffed the lot in one meal 😏

It was pretty cold at the weekend but we were pleased to see a bit of sunshine on Sunday. We put a small greenhouse up in the polytunnel. It's hoped that this will keep a few degrees higher so that we can start seeds a little earlier next year. So far it has shown to be 1.5° warmer than outside the little greenhouse, so that's a good start.

We had to cut the pipes down slightly so that it fit but it'll be good in the spring and there's still room for us to sit in the polytunnel 😊

We were extremely pleased to see that our Purple Sprouting Brocolli has already started producing; we weren't expecting it till February. There was only enough for one but I enjoyed it steamed with a seitan schnitzel that evening. We only have the one plant - all the others didn't make it beyond seedlings - so I hope we can keep harvesting to encourage more florets. 

Here are our shallots, growing in the raised bed. Some garlic have just sprouted too.

And here are the leeks and broad beans. Both should be fine through the Winter, they can survive low temperatures and we know from last year that broad beans can be frosted down to the ground and still perk up again.

We left the plot wih a few of our small carrots, some of Neal's chard and a Honey Boat squash (definitely the most tasty squash this year). Added to the last of our shallots and pre-soaked and cooked Borlotti beans I made my staple meal - with chopped tomatoes, smoked paprika and lots of garlic. This lot did serve me for two days and it really is my favourite kind of 'cooking' - all shoved in a pot in the oven for 40minutes and eaten with bread - yum.

So there's been quite a lot of cooking for me over the last couple of weeks - Jamie refuses to eat anything that looks like this 😀 so he's on veggie burgers for the days I cook for myself. And at lunchtime this week I have some scrumptious fennel and home-grown celeriac soup - based on the basic River Cottage recipe, it's the best! I hope next year that I'll have home-grown fennel to use.

So that's what I've been up to for the last two weekends - not much and not much planned for the next few, but I have my antibody test to do later. Whatever the result, I don't think I'll be venturing out too far for a while yet - well, the weather has gone too cold for me now anyway 😉
Jamie bought me this Tweetie-Pie mug, hence the song title by Middle of the Road - I know, I know, but I was struggling to find an appropriate song 😂

 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…