Spread Your Wings

My 10 days off work started well, with some lovely, albeit windy, weather. Jamie and I lazed under the blue sky and had a barbecue on Friday.

It really was too hot to work - not that we were intending to do any. Instead, we were delighted to watch the great tits fledge. Jamie noticed that the chirping had changed. We saw a parent fly to the nesting site with a green caterpillar which it ate rather than taking it to the nest. Then we watched as four chicks flew out in turn - rather wobbly flying, but not bad for the first trip out. Then one of the parents returned to the nest site, chirped a bit and flew off. Finally, the last of the brood made its way to the edge of the crate and flew over us to join its siblings and parents in the hedge. Such a pleasure to watch and perfect timing for us!

The rest of the afternoon I mostly looked up at the beautiful blue sky and sweltered.

Aah, blue sky! How happy it makes me!

Saturday was still mostly sunny and warm so we managed to do some digging on plot3. Jamie’s dug and manured the hole for the melon, which is growing on in the polytunnel for the timebeing. I’ve dug the first trench for one side of the squash tunnel and filled it with manure. I’ve sowed the seeds in pots at home under the grow-light: Honeyboat, Festival, Winter Celebration and Sunshine. 

Talking of seeds, I’ve got some parsnips Sabre (hopefully) germinating on some paper towel so I can plant out if the seed proves viable… perhaps I’ll manage to grow more than 8!

I showed some newcomers around site yesterday - such a pleasure to show the site off when it’s looking so beautiful. Of course, they were enamoured with Ivan’s irises, so I can’t resist sharing some of the fabulous blooms here again. Just stunning.

And HAHA has its first iris in the bog garden on the wildlife plot. There are plenty more buds to follow that one.

And the foxgloves have flowered. Loads of evening primrose is growing, so that will be good for moths, which will in turn be good for bats. We’ll have to have a Summer night visit with the bat detector.

Our Cleor pepper has arrived so is growing on a bit at home, along with the tomatoes. The temperature dipped to 3° In the polytunnel the other night, so we're still playing it safe and not planting everything out yet. The song title, provided by Queen, is dedicated to those five little great tits. Out in the wide world for the first time, how frightening and a frost is threatened for tonight 😖 They should go back to their cosy nest, poor little things.

Red Alert

Day 70 indoors and Jamie & I have reverted to our former selves and spent yesterday playing video games - Landstalker, if anyone remembers that blast from the past! We'd rather be outside nowadays but will stick with the shielding plan, even if this ridiculous government doesn't understand its own vague advice "ooh, little bit of politics".

Today we have more gorgeous blue skies and sunshine. We really have had beautiful Spring weather, but I know our fellow gardeners are crying out for some rain. We had a tiny shower yesterday, but it was cleared away swiftly by the strong winds we've been experiencing in the last week. 

I've been playing with my 'microscope camera'. The images aren't as good as I'd hoped (not exactly microscopic!), but the spikey just-emerging tomato flowers are pretty amazing.

We now have two pepper plants in the kitchen windowsill too. Jamie is still hoping to visit the plot at some point, to plant them out. And he's said he'll sow some of my Gigantes beans too. Another fellow plotholder, Kate, very kindly offered to plant up our allotment now that Neal has dug it. It's a tempting offer, but it'll be good if Jamie gets up there so we've said no, for now.

A bit droopy on arrival. They're happy now

Both our allotment sites are fully leased now, with our biggest waiting lists we've had since the beginning. It's really good to show there's a strong need for communal growing spaces in Hungerford - I wish I was there to meet some of our newcomers, but at least I've seen some great photos of their activity, on social media.

I've done a bit of cooking, I used up some celery sticks to make cream of celery soup on Saturday. I used this recipe, using milk and flour instead of cream.

I fried the finely chopped onion and celery in oak-smoked oil. It's amazing, just like Campbell's condensed soup - it needs scooping out of the jug! Even Jamie likes it - he never normally likes my home-made soup :-)

We're still eating a lot of rhubarb. We actually have brown sugar to bake it and the syrup is delicious. We've discovered that chocolate icecream goes particularly well with rhubarb.

The title is highlighting the fact that this government think we can 'stay alert' to a virus, rather than stay home to protect ourselves and others - Basement Jaxx provide the great song.

April Skies

Day 41 of lockdown - these weeks seem be whizzing by. I guess because they're rather samey... thank goodness I can fill my days with work though it's not as good as being at the lab when the days are more varied.

I was inspired by Shaheen to make this colourful pasta salad. I thought the animation that Google produced was rather funny - it looks like a fly is landing in it, but it wasn't. This one included raw chard leaves from the allotment - lovely!

Nothing home-grown, but pretty and tasty. I was glad that Jamie is managing to buy peppers, celery and tomatoes. We bought these two packs of rice fusilli last month, from a health store. At that time, my last shopping trip, there was no pasta left on supermarket shelves.

I don't think it tastes any different from normal pasta. Although, last week I decided to cook the pasta for lunch before I started my first Zoom meeting of the working day.

Look how colourful it is pre-cooked

Then, at lunchtime I remembered it had been simmering for more than 2 hours!! It smelled like rice pudding and I had to throw it away. 🙁 My next batch was fine I'm pleased to say!

We received another vegbox from our plot, thanks to Neal, hence the chard.

He's cleared another quarter of our plot for us! So pleased, it won't be such a horrible mess when we finally get back there!

Having just passed the dreadful UK milestone of 20,000 deaths, with over 800 dying in hospital yesterday, I am surprised that some people are thinking of reducing lockdown. It seems far too soon. Having said that, Thames Valley Police have confirmed that it's ok for people to drive to our allotment so we (HAHA) have lifted the 'no driving to site' restriction. I hope people take the sensible precautions to protect others, as well as themselves, and continue to stay home.

 

Besides working from home, I've been looking out of the window a lot - seeing the rapid changes in nature and getting my vitamin D top-up :-)

Look at the flowers on the horse chestnut tree!

This is the closest I can zoom to with my camera, they really are pretty flowers up close.

And I saw my first swallows and house martins this week. I didn't manage to get their photo - just blue, blue sky. I still have to check the shape of what I'm seeing.

We were also looking to the sky in the evening. I counted 33 of the SpaceX Starlink satellites. I thought it was very exciting as one after the other they came into view. We didn't attempt a viewing of the Lyrids meteor shower - it's difficult enough to spot a meteor with a full-sky-view!

I did actually step outside the front door this week - only on to the doorstep because I spotted this one lone bluebell in our front 'garden' - it's not a garden, it's just dirt as our neighbours have a plan for it and we told them that we don't mind what they do as we're always up the allotment - that was true when we said it more than a year ago!

This great song is by The Jesus and Mary Chain.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

A mostly grey January has moved on to a white February. We had snowfall literally all day yesterday. That really doesn't happen often in West Berkshire, so it was very exciting. We had more than 16cm of snow by the end of the day.

I didn't want to risk the 25 mile journey to work (lucky I didn't as the roads became the usual mess) so I worked from home, keeping a close eye out the window with much repetition of the phrase "It's still snowing!".

Finally I'd worked enough hours so Jamie and I went for a walk through the Winter Wonderland...

..to the allotment, obviously. Crossing the slippery bridge over the part-frozen canal. All the ducks were hiding somewhere.

Passing by the Corn Exchange with the clock looking a bit special with its covering of snow

 

and along snow-filled roads to the allotment site.

We had to clear snow so that we could open the allotment gates and when we got to our plot we had to knock lots of snow off our polytunnel and netted cages.

Our plots look tidier with a blanket of snow on them!

Luckily there wasn't much damage but the squashes in the greenhouse are looking less edible than they did last week - I think they've finally succumbed to the cold.

And our poor broad beans ☹️ We knew they'd grown too much over the thus far mild Winter and we thought they'd get frost damage, but this was a bit extreme. At least half of the plants were squashed flat under that heavy weight of snow. There's a slim chance that they may re-grow - we'll see...

Look at all these goldfinches! They were flying around the allotment all the while - shame they didn't turn out for the Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend. And, do you know what a flock of goldfinches is called? A charm! Isn't that pretty? There were probably about 30 birds and one kestrel keeping close watch.

We didn't sit down....(!) but it was nice to trudge through the crunchy snow and release a pheasant that was stuck in someone's brassica cage...

With frozen fingers we walked home past other frozen people and children with very rosy cheeks pulling sledges. Such a lot of fun - if you don't need to travel.

And I wanted to share my photo, from January 31st at 7:30am. That's Venus on the left of the moon and Jupiter on the right - they were so bright (much brighter than this photo shows) in the clear morning sky, quite beautiful.

And the song title - Procol Harum of course, aah sing-a-long everyone :-)

Growing Pains

It was such an amazing sky yesterday evening, I had to put this photo on the blog, but this post is mostly about pumpkins.

I'm preparing for the Pumpkin Competition at Hungerford Food Festival in October. I managed to get some Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds but none of them germinated. Fellow plotholder Jonathan left four pumpkin plants on our plot for us. I was so close to planting them on the empty plot that HAHA have commandeered for the competition when I remembered that they aren't pumpkins, they're Tromboncini squash plants! My "pumpkins" would have looked a bit strange compared to the others on that plot!!

So now the Tromboncini are on Plot 46A in the barrels and we're attempting to quickly germinate 2 more Atlantic Giants and 2 Jack of All Trades... We've got 3 months so hopefully we'll have something to show for it!
We've put two cucumber Mini Munch on that plot too, along with a row of swede under the netting.

At least I'm fairing a bit better with the flowers this year. We're having to water a lot as there's been no rain (apart from a few drops) for weeks. But the sunflowers and sweetpeas are doing ok. Also, I'm pleased to say that the asters got over their problem after I removed the crinkled leaves and I'm hoping the flowers will develop quite soon...

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are doing what they always do - but this year we're really trying to remove the side shoots! Flowers and a few tomatoes are appearing on the Aviditas plants and the Redcurrant, but nothing on the Tigerella yet.

My lunchtime salads will be more interesting when they have tomatoes on them, but the rogue potatoes from last week made fabulous potato salad!

So, we just have to wait for all these little plants to get bigger.. And I'm going to sow some more salady bits and beetroot to see if I can keep the production going for a bit longer this year.

Dwarf beans and sweetcorn

This song by Birdy seems appropriate at this point - enjoy!