Christmas

I've really enjoyed this Christmas, even though the weather hasn't provided any snow, or particularly cold days, the whole month has felt very Festive. Our living room is evidence that Jamie and I enjoy a bit of sparkle :-)

Brussels sprouts and carrots are the only veg we've had fresh from the allotment during the holiday and, I have to admit, that we bought some sprouts rather than going back to the plot.

We've discovered how delicious sprouts are roasted (with olive oil, salt and pepper). They need to be properly browned and are much more flavoursome than steamed.

They even taste good cold, squished onto a cheese cracker! So I intend to make some sprout pate, with the addition of seaweed flakes that my sister gave us for Christmas - I fancy the Dulse, smokey-flavoured one. Perhaps I'll make some carrot pate too...

We had our Christmas roast (Quorn) with all the trimmings at about 11:00pm on Christmas Eve and subsequent meals have mostly been snacky/tapas. The Granovita vegetable pate is so delicious - you should try it! I never ate meat pate so don't know how it compares.

We received lovely presents from family and friends including beautiful decorations, books and lots of food and drink to keep us going well into the new year.

I spent some time with my newest Great-Nephew, Isaac, at his Great-Grandma's (my mum) on Christmas Eve - he's such a cutie. Since then we've only set foot outside a couple of times and still no visit to the plot. We've been having too much fun watching films, playing games and doing quizzes in between eating and drinking - so much eating and drinking!

Next stop, new year's eve but first a Christmas song - I thought I'd struggle to find one (hohoho) but decided on this by The Who.

Missing

I've started this post off with a pretty Cosmos flower, because I have a few things to whinge about...

Last night the expected wonder of the blood moon was hidden behind thick cloud, so we missed out on our view of the "longest lunar eclipse of the century".

The overnight storms entirely missed Hungerford - unbelievably, just look at the lightning map from last night! We're the little white dot in the South of England and we heard one rumble of thunder and had about 3mm of rain... (I appreciate that not everyone likes a storm, but really?!)

The weather yesterday was overcast and today it's blowing a gale, with an occasional shower, so the butterflies have hidden away and I haven't done my Big Butterfly Count yet. I should have started it when I spotted this lovely Common Blue butterfly in the greenhouse, but it seems like my stats from the allotment may be missing this year - unless we get a sunny weekend in the next two weeks :-(

These are our sprouts. Are they going to grow? They don't look at all happy, but even they look happier than our cauliflowers which are really struggling with the heat and we think it's pollen beetles that are causing the problems with the leaves.

OK, whinging over. Look at our lovely harvest and the courgettes and aubergine were so tasty fried, chilled and added to a salad.

And the Chinese leaf is so delicious - it's a shame only 3 germinated and I had to chop a lot of the outside leaves off because of bug damage - but still, it is much tastier than the normal lettuce - I must sow/grow more next year.
Runner beans are setting on all the plants now and we'll probably be picking some tomorrow... in the meantime we have another supply from Ivan (swapped for an aubergine).

The squashes are growing okay- these are pumpkins, but the ones on my trellis are coming on too.We seem to be way behind a lot of people on site though, who have beachball-sized fruits already!

It's rather worrying that our Crookneck Summer squash is being severely beaten up by the wind today - revealing all the immature vegetables. I hope it doesn't snap off...we tried to secure it but the ground was too hard to do it properly.

We pulled all the shallots today as we don't want them getting wet. There are many more than we thought there were going to be from the 15 we planted. I think the variety is Longor.

The few onions are only just bulbing up so they can stay in the raised bed for as long as possible - but I don't think they'll be winning any 'largest onion' prizes!

The bell peppers in the greenhouse are a good size but aren't changing colour yet - they're all green. As are the tomatoes, but the huge trusses on the Aviditas are just starting to change.

The Lizzano are growing much larger fruits this year - presumably because it's been so hot in the greenhouse (~42°). They look standard size rather than cherries.

So, perhaps I'm just a bit grouchy because I'm going back to work next week and the temperature is about 10° lower today than it was yesterday. It's still been a beautiful Summer (so far) and anyway, I like this song by Everything But the Girl.

Little Things

Still no rain and as everything is growing it's getting thirstier. Small fruits are appearing in the greenhouse: a couple of cute aubergines

Each of the pepper plants have multiple peppers on them - all green at the moment, but we should have yellow, red and orange.

We're so pleased that we finally have some carrot seeds that have germinated - they took a long time coming but we can just see them in a couple of rows now. Much more speedy to grow were the Pink/Purple Sun radishes - these were only sowed a week ago.

And our little salad turnips are coming along nicely - I'll let them get a bit bigger.

Unfortunately the rows of radishes which looked so great a week ago have mostly got too big and are no longer tasty so they're destined for the compost bin. Fellow-plotholder, Neal, let me have some of his lettuce seedlings so I've put them in the ground - they look pretty dead, but they usually recover...

They're filling the gap between our carrots and our Brussels sprout plants - our three plants had become two after some beastie got into our nursery plot, so we had to fill the gap with one of Ivan's spare seedlings. We've also planted up some runners from our strawberry plants - they were delicious but rather short-lived - not sure whether it was the weather or the variety. We need some plants which will provide delicious fruit later in the season.

We bit the bullet and bought some chemicals to spray the broad bean plants which look like they may survive the aphid attack to produce full beans... We bought the pesticide because we noticed blackfly moving onto the leaves of some of our other beans and it doesn't seem like the natural deterrents are working...

These are our Edamame (soya) beans. And at last the Asparagus Pea plants are getting slightly bigger, but they're usually quicker to grow than this.

This is the structure for our Rocky cucumbers to climb up - one chicken wire door each. I wonder if the cucumbers will hang down like we want them to...

But I still haven't worked out the climbing frame for the squashes.... how long have I been talking about this?!

So lots of things are growing, but most are pretty small at the moment which is why they need so much water. But these clouds that were building towards each other just dissipated and brought us not a drop...

If you're in the area - come and visit us!

Here's a track about all these little things, which will hopefully not take too much longer to be big things! (from Danny Elfman)

From the Inside...

..it looks like a lovely day with blue sky and sunshine.. but then a weather app tells you it 'feels like -7°'. No thanks, so I'm not expecting a plot visit today. Instead, here's a post that I started last week. I had tasty carrot and coriander soup for lunches - I haven't had a smooth soup in a while because my stick blender broke. Now I have got the one back from my mum - I gave it to her a couple of Christmases ago, but she didn't get on with it.

It's a Russell Hobbs blender, it's certainly a bit more aggressive than the James Martin one I've been using for years. I hope I'll get used to it. Otherwise, perhaps I'll need to return to chunky soups...which are delicious but some soups really do need blitzing. Not necessarily this one though... look how tasty that looks, mmm.

I was looking through my blog to see what soups I've made since having an allotment, I know there have been a couple of horrible ones but mostly they've been tasty and an easy way of using up extra veg:

1. Carrot and Fennel - delicious
2. Tomato - only made once, rather wasteful unless you really need to use up a lot of toms
3. Thai Pumpkin - how adventurous of me, I even used coconut milk in it
4. Parsnip and Leek - I think I need to make that again before the parsnips rot away
5. Smokey Carrot - made with oak-smoked olive oil and smoked paprika
6. Leek and Chestnut - this year I discovered what an amazing addition chestnuts are
7. Vegetables with chestnuts - carrot, parsnip, swede, chestnuts and leeks
8. Vegetable - Chunky carrot, leek and parsnip
9. Parsnip and Pea - using frozen peas
10. Curried Pumpkin - pumpkin is best if roasted first so it's more time-consuming
11. Courgette and Fennel - peak courgette season!
12. Potato and Celery - The one year we managed to actually grow celery
13. Potato and Mangetout - FAIL! It was grey and disgusting!
14. Roast Festival Squash - the squash didn't taste as good as it looked
15. Celeriac and Fennel - so delicious. This soup is why I first started growing bulb fennel
16. Swede (and Leek) - nasty! Nearly all thrown away..
17. Carrot and Parsnip - I think this may be due next week too
18. Pumpkin and Carrot - we'll be growing big pumpkins again in 2018
19. Lettuce - well, it used up a lot of lettuces as they were going to seed
20. Leek and Butterbean - nice and creamy
21. Curried vegetable - curry powder cheers up a plain recipe

I also picked a couple of small swedes and had mashed carrot and swede with my frittata dinner last weekend. Jamie picked those sprouts from a plot which has been recently vacated - a perk of being on the committee? Well, they'd only go to waste otherwise. We generally say that anything left on an empty plot is free for use by other plotholders.

We both managed to do quite a lot of digging last weekend. Plot 7 is looking pretty good but we'll probably need to resort to weed-killer for some other parts of our plots. Jamie had laid bags on black plastic on the section shown above as that's where our sprouts are going this year - well away from the mole on Plot 3 we hope! We still need to do some proper planning of what we're planting where.
Linkin Park provide the title song...

This is the New Year

Welcome to 2018! This will mark our 9th year of growing our own and my 10 year transplant anniversary. Time really does fly when you're having fun, or is it when you're getting older? Well, there's no avoiding getting older, so we may as well have fun while we're at it!

We celebrated the arrival of the new year by having a lovely meal of Stahly's veggie haggis (the best) with home-grown vegetables, which we picked from a very wet plot yesterday. At midnight we opened the windows (even though it was a bit chilly) and heard the town hall clock chiming and then watched the fireworks. I do love fireworks.

As usual I picked too much for our evening meal, so I intend to make parsnip soup later - the same recipe as I used on 1st January 2017 as it happens! The parsnips are huge - each over 30cm long.We were pleased that the sprouts were so good. They look in a sorry state on the plant but were really tasty. The swede are great (I still haven't found the variety, but they were planted late, in July), although the one we ate had a small 'hollow heart', possibly due to the weather..? It was delicious mashed up with the carrot.

This year I'm recording our plot efforts with the MyHarvest diary. It's a University of Sheffield research project investigating the sustainability of allotment gardening, so I thought it would be interesting to join in. Also, it should help me remember to note the weather each visit, which I always intend to do, but often forget.

So, here we go again...
I can't help thinking of blogposts when I hear new songs that I like now. This was a new one to me and is by A Great Big World... enjoy and here's to a happy, healthy, productive 2018

Just

"It's just a cold" - I hate that phrase, I hate colds. I have a cold. It's hanging around and now Jamie's got it. But we thought we needed to venture out today, even though there had been a frost and it didn't look inviting..

Of course, we walked up to the allotment, it was cold, but not quite as awful as I'd expected because the sun was out and the wind wasn't very strong. It was 7° and Ivan was the only other person on the site. Our plots still look unloved, but there is food there, if you know where to look :-)
The leeks are looking good and when we have the inclination I'm sure we'll be having a tasty carrot and leek bake. There are also some good looking swede on Plot 46 which should be tasty.

Future promise in the form of the purple sprouting brocolli.

And some green Brussels sprouts, but the red ones have failed - the mole caused the plant to fall over and Brussels really hate that!

The parsnips are hopefully okay under the ground. The foliage on our plants very often dies back earlier than we see on other plots, but we've had some good ones (fingers crossed for no canker).
And the transplanted strawberries look very happy, we hope they produce fruits as tasty as the parent plants were.

So that was a very quick visit to the plot. We hope to be at the workday/BBQ tomorrow - well, it's just a cold... Great video by Radiohead

Its Raining Again

Such a grey and wet afternoon - what a shame we didn't get moving earlier!

We intended to get some weeding done today, but that didn't happen. We did manage to measure and mark out the new mini-plots at the front of the allotment. Our chairman has rotavated the 4-pole plot so it's nice and clear, but the weather wasn't right for sowing the grass paths.

The rain was being blown sideways by the strong winds and so were the sunflowers. One has already snapped off. We're glad we planted the Glass Gem corn behind the runner beans to offer them some protection. The cobs are forming quite well now - so many per stalk, not like our Lark sweetcorn, that is generally just one or two per stalk.

The asters are still providing some lovely colour to look at while we hid in the greenhouse drinking our coffee. And the hibiscus is finally flowering - not a great show, but it's something!

Our sprouts this year aren't looking great. We think the mole digging underneath the plants has caused the two green plants to 'blow' (e.g. flowery-looking sprouts, rather than nice tight ones) and the red plant seems to be going the same way, although the sprouts are just really tiny at the moment!

I had to chop the Tigerella tomato down in the greenhouse as blight had got into the stem. The Aviditas seem to be ok so far as are the Redcurrant but I'm sure they'll soon follow. I need to find a nice recipe to make a tomato sauce. This is the tasty meal we had earlier in the week - I love the ready-made puff pastry and just some pre-fried courgette, garlic, onion and tiny tomatoes, with a topping of cheese and basil.

Looks so much better once it's cooked!

And this was our quick lunch - if you haven't tried Granovita vegetable pate you really need to! It's so delicious!

The predictable song title is by Supertramp.