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 😌

This is the Day

Look at that! A month has passed. It’s been a busy month with lots of sowing, a bit of digging and some planting. The weather has been extremely dry and mostly sunny but a northerly wind has consistently caused irritation. Jamie has been walking a lot with regular allotment and shopping trips

We planted our potatoes in April - Kestrel and Duke of York in the ground, with a couple of Nicola in bags. They’ve been earthed up now, managed to avoid a couple of frosts earlier this month. They’re in front of these salsify plants - the flowers open in the morning, but close by lunchtime.

The hedgerow is full of life and we’re peppered with confetti whenever we sit on the bench as the May blossom is just going over, it’s been a good year for blossom, even with the wind.

We sowed our climbing beans (Scarlet Empire runners, borlotti and Gigantes) on 2nd May but only the Gigantes successfully germinated, so they’ve now been planted in a wigwam. We’ll re-sow the others.

The sweetcorn finally got planted out, I meant to do a block, but planted in two rows instead for ease of protection from frost. Lots of the parsnips germinated and I thinned them out this week. It’s so dry the watering is quite a chore, but essential at this time. We’re expecting some broad beans to be ready for harvesting soon, so keep them well-watered. We’ve sown carrots into a green crate and beets, lettuce and radish are sown. Chard and nasturtium are in the raised bed along with parsley, which was a supermarket-bought plant and divided into four.

The plots aren’t looking very tidy but things are growing and that’s the best we can achieve during this difficult year. The weeds are going to love that bare earth when the rain does arrive 😒 I’m fighting the bindweed in the orchard; the mulched ground makes it easy to spot the bindweed, but it just keeps coming back and our little apple and cherry trees got aphid attacked this year.

As long as we harvest a few crops, grow some pretty flowers and get time to sit in the sunshine amongst it I’ll be happy. Sadly, Jamie’s not really enjoying it at the moment, understandably, as he’s still so worn out and not feeling sociable but I hope that will improve along with his health.

The song title, provided by The The, is to mark my change to part-time working. Hopefully more free-time will help with everything!

So Here We Are

I had an early start on the plot this morning. The Sun arriving over the rooftop at 7am while Jamie slept on. It was a quite chilly 4° but ok once I started digging. There, that looks better. The 3 plants in the middle of that plot are salsify. I’ve left them to flower as Neal’s looked so good last year.

I’m tired now, but hopefully we’ll go up later as I want to pot on some seedlings. We ordered a couple of ‘basket collection’ packs of the tiniest plug plants and potted them on in the week; they grow so quickly and seemed like a bargain though I didn’t mean to order two packs 🤦‍♀️ There are petunia, lobelia, begonia and bacopa snowtopia.

We went for a lovely walk round Bowdown Woods (near Greenham Common) at the end of March. The wood anemones are so pretty carpeting the ground between the bare trees. Masses of bluebells are growing their leaves but no flowers yet.

It was certainly our longest walk for many months and possibly a bit too much for Jamie really, but it was such a beautiful day.

Many of the trees are coated in lichens, which I understood to be a sign of clean air - though I’m not sure how clean the air is around the old RAF Greenham Common Airbase 🧐

I’ve had some home-grown veg over the last couple of weeks. I’ve pulled some leeks and found an unexpected harvest of Brussels sprouts when I was chopping back the plants - they were delicious!

And I’ve had two harvests of our purple sprouting broccoli. It is worth the wait. This was tasty in a red pepper sauce with some fake bacon.

It’s felt like a good week, helped a lot by the warm sunny weather. The temperature was 23° when we visited the plot yesterday afternoon. Jamie’s feeling quite a lot better and sleeping is more comfortable some nights which helps with motivation. We drive to the plot for a quick visit most afternoons, even if we just sit down it’s a pleasure (if there’s no cold wind). Who wouldn’t want to sit under this beautiful blackthorn?

The polytunnel needs to be opened and closed each day because nights are very cold with sweltering days in there. Our seedlings seem to be enjoying it and they’ll be staying in for quite a while yet. I’ve got a lot more digging and clearing to do…

We planted the Red Sun shallots in the raised bed a week ago, there are 12 in there. No green shoots yet, but I’m sure their roots have already started moving down to find the well-rotted manure at the base of that bed and the soil must be pretty warm.

I sowed these flower seeds at home at the end of March; no sign of the cleome yet, but the tagetes minuta have germinated and have been moved into the polytunnel. We really need to start thinking about more veg seed sowing, but there are only so many hours in the day!

Our lives have changed so much since Jamie had his stroke 2 months ago. I was used to him doing all the shopping, washing up and most of the cooking. Well, it’s my turn now! Jamie had his fair share of caring when I was on dialysis. 17 years ago today I had my kidney transplant. I regularly thank the NHS for that life-saving opportunity and now we’re thanking them again for Jamie’s treatment and care. I know where we’d both be without the NHS and it’s a bleak picture. But we have a National Health Service and it may be struggling, it may not be ‘as good as it used to be’, it may let some people down but I am ever thankful for it and will always support it.

Title song is brought to us by Bloc Party - enjoy the fine weather if you can and make the most of where you are.

February Came and Went

February disappeared in a whirl of wind and rain - it wasn’t allotment weather but we weren’t available anyway….

3rd Feb: I was working from home when I heard Jamie drop something three times in the bedroom. I wondered what he was up to, so went through. That was the start of the nightmare. I couldn’t understand what he was saying and then I saw that his left side was paralysed. It was very clear that he was having a stroke so I knew to act fast. I called 999 - the first time I’ve ever had to - within 20 minutes the ambulance arrived.

After some initial tests the ambulance whisked us off to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon. In A&E there was a crowd of hospital staff asking Jamie questions and I had to answer most of them, as he couldn’t talk/think clearly.

Jamie was wheeled off for scans to see what had occurred. They determined that he had a blood clot on the right-hand side of his brain - an ischaemic stroke. The doctor advised of the treatments available, highlighting the worst case scenarios - I suppose it’s better to be forewarned, but it was extremely scary. We had to agree to the clot-busting medicine being pumped into Jamie’s arm. This thrombolysis can cause further brain damage for some patients but how could we refuse something that might clear the clot? They quickly started pumping the drug into him. Some time later staff crowded round to check whether Jamie could swallow and, thank goodness, he was able to.

After close monitoring it was decided to send him to the Hyper Acute Stroke Unit at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital. Six blurry hours after the 999 call Jamie was in surgery having a thrombectomy to remove as much of the clot as possible. We were informed of even more frightening possible effects of this surgery but we agreed that doing nothing wasn’t an option. While Jamie was in surgery I wandered the hospital corridors and attempted sleep in various communal areas. It’s a 10 year old hospital, beautifully designed, with lots of space, but not a great place to spend a night -  however our car was 60 miles away at home… I was waiting for a call from the surgery team after 10:30pm. They were long anxious hours - the worst night ever.

4th Feb: At 3:30am I finally received the call to say that most of the clot had been removed. Jamie was in recovery and I could go to see him. On the surgical ward the surgeon spoke to me and again warned that they couldn’t determine how much brain damage (ugh, that phrase) had been caused. I didn’t know what condition he’d be in so I couldn’t have been more relieved when he opened his eyes and actually spoke to me. I wasn’t allowed to stay long so left him to sleep. So grateful to my nephew and sister for collecting me at about 9am and taking me home, to sleep. 

Later that day I was being advised by my worried family that I should rest and stay home. We didn’t know how Jamie was or if he was conscious but I knew I had to see him so I drove back to Bristol in the evening. After such a terrible previous day, it was a very positive visit. Jamie was pretty chirpy and eating. Though he was dropping off to sleep mid-sentence, the nurses were already talking about him starting his recovery exercises!  I visited each day and, although confused, Jamie was talking and enjoying the food at Bristol.

6th Feb: Jamie was moved back to Swindon’s Great Western Hospital to the Hyper Acute Stroke ward. Just 20 minutes from home so it was great that I could visit him twice a day and work from home between visits. His speech and movement were improving at every visit. The nurses were moving him to the chair to eat and I chopped his food so he could eat, otherwise he ended up wearing most of his food! The doctors were confident of a full recovery in time.

A week after the stroke he took his first steps using the Zimmer frame and nearly ran off down the ward - I heard the physiotherapist shouting ‘Stop Jamie!’ 😊

14th February Jamie was moved to Reading’s Royal Berkshire Hospital for his final rehabilitation before he could be sent home. The therapists spent time working on his strength and movement along with speech and occupational therapy. They got him to make a cup of coffee and he was regularly doing a couple of miles on an exercise bike. 

19th February and he was walking with a stick. The therapists worked with him daily which was exhausting but improvements continued and he even practiced some walking in the gym without a stick, but his balance isn’t very good.

26th February: Jamie came home with me, a week earlier than expected. A day after our 37th anniversary, but still a celebration ❤️

So Jamie’s now under the care of the Early Supported Discharge (ESD) unit - thank goodness for the protection of our NHS. They’ll offer care and rehabilitation for up to six weeks. We’ve had four different therapists and a nurse to visit, along with deliveries of support equipment for ease of washing, etc. 

The cause of the stroke isn’t yet known but we are expecting some test results to help with that. The best thing is that he’s home and continuing to progress slowly but surely. With medication, exercise, care and a reasonable Spring and Summer we expect a return to full health. 💜