I gotta Feeling

The blackthorn is in flower and look at the black sky beyond. We had a sudden sharp shower in the middle of a rather lovely warm day last weekend. By the way, in case I ever remember … Blackthorn blossoms before its leaves start to show, whereas hawthorn flowers after its leaves have emerged.

Here are the seedlings. 1 week after sowing, the redcurrant tomatoes and most of the lark sweetcorn had germinated; the courgette emerged a couple of days later. We wrapped them in fleece and they’re now in the polytunnel, getting over the shock of the move.

Zinnia Forecast were sown into window sill modules on 23rd March and those seedlings look like cress so they’re also protected in the polytunnel. I’ve sown Penstemon into modules. They’re a bit more tricksy and need to germinate at 4° before being brought back into the warmth. They’re on our cold doorstep, no sign of life yet.

I’ve been logging into work really early (before 6:30am 🥱) and then we can have a couple of hours on the plot after work - that’s the plan but it doesn’t always work out. We’ve lit the chiminea but a cold wind has meant we’ve had to cut visits short. Jamie is suffering some bad neuropathic pain down his left side, he’s on pills but we hope the warm weather will soon arrive which may encourage a bit more movement.

Jamie started a bit of weeding of the garlic and the plants definitely look happier now, especially with a bit of added garlic fertiliser. Luckily we’ve had a little rain after the photos were taken; the ground is surprisingly dry after our drenching Winter. The area beside them will be for the potatoes in a few weeks, so that’s on the list for clearing soon!

We reclaimed some pallet collars which make excellent raised beds. This will be for some shallots. After not moving for a few months I’m finding the exercise to be quite <erm> challenging! But allotment visits are definitely good for mental well-being.

I popped up to unzip the polytunnel the other day and I really wanted to stay. Look how many birds were singing during a 30second recording! So beautiful.

Our broad beans really didn’t enjoy our Winter this year, so we’ve popped seeds directly into the soil to fill the gaps.

Ok, I realise there are more gaps than plants at the moment! But there are flowers, so hopefully we’ll achieve a bit of succession harvesting…

And finally. Some PSB is appearing! Such a slow harvest, but I do think it’s worth the wait. There are more florets than that!

And now I think I’d better go up to open the polytunnel. It’s been a cold night but bright sunshine will now be heating those little seedlings up too much. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the partial solar eclipse later. It does look beautiful out there, but I gotta feeling it’s going to be cold!

Black Eyed Peas give us the song title - dance around, keep warm!

Start the Healing

After losing February - details here - we’re ready to start now. Looking on the bright side, at least we were out of action through a dreadfully wet month so we probably didn’t miss that much plot-time. It’s been great to have a few short visits to the plot during this warm start to March.

These anemones are the only colour on the plot so far. We were pleasantly surprised that the weeds haven’t grown too wild in our absence. The leeks haven’t grown either, which is rather disappointing, so we’ll probably pull them quite soon but there may be a few worth harvesting.

There are a few signs of Spring in the hedge, but it’s still early. The new growth on the sedum is appearing at the base of last year’s stems. I’ll chop the old stems off at our next visit. A little bit of weeding needed in that pot too - maybe Jamie can do that to help his rehabilitation (I’m not sure I’ll get away with that suggestion too often 😉)

Yesterday (8th March) we sowed the following and they’re under the grow-light in the hallway:

5 x Redcurrant Tomatoes (several seeds per pot)

20 x Lark Sweetcorn (in root trainers)

1x All Green Bush courgette

Hoping for better germination of the sweetcorn than we had last year, but we’ve started early just in case. If everything grows well we’ll move it to the polytunnel and can offer some additional frost protection if needed. It is feeling very Springlike, with lovely misty mornings and the birds are very active.

The weather is meant to go cold again, but this lovely gift parcel from Cousin Jen includes fingerless mittens which will be most useful and the seeds for scattering should provide a bitof extra colour to our flower bed. What a lovely treat to find when we returned home from an exhausting A&E day, when we discovered Jamie has a chest infection 🙁  Lucky I have a few more days of leave already booked.

Korn provide the song title.

These Days

There’s a spot of colour from when we had some welcome sunshine on Saturday afternoon. That little robin is full of song at the moment. Perhaps like us he was relieved that the rain had stopped! October has continued the extremely wet theme of this Autumn. The ground doesn’t get a chance to dry out between torrential rain or drizzle so it’s difficult to do any clearing.

We’ve also had a couple of frosty nights with temperatures dipping below freezing but some flowers are surviving. My little hazel tree’s leaves are changing colour and there are some buds - Ooh, I wonder if it’ll produce catkins this year 🤞

Our sunflowers are looking less happy and sadly the seedheads have gone mouldy so maybe not ideal for birds to eat.

The birds have been enjoying the teasels though they’ve missed a few seeds on this one - I had to remind myself of what the word for this is - VIVIPARY.

The Wildlife Plot is looking extremely overgrown and, until the most recent frost, it was literally buzzing with activity. There were loads of bees and other insects and Jamie saw a little vole in one of the woodpiles. 

This daddy long legs had found a nice soft new teasel head to warm up on. The grass was full of these crane flies last week; reminded me of filling my desk up with them at primary school - I’m not sure why I did that 🤨

I’ve had fleece protecting my butternut squash but yesterday I decided to pick them now that the foliage has died back. I’m glad the slugs and snails all picked on just the one fruit!

And left the others untouched - they’re very small but just right for individual meals.

We’re still picking tomatoes if they show any coloured blush and they soon ripen at home. The peppers we pick as we need them because they’re in the polytunnel which we’ve been zipping up on the cold nights.

The Halloween peppers are tasty and orange ones were part of this halloumi meal, along with our last sweetcorn, potatoes and some parsley.

We were pleased to see that our garlic didn’t drown and a few green shoots have appeared - that’s about 3 weeks since the cloves were planted. And we’ve spotted some fungi appearing on the plot -  I’m not sure of the type; it may be there because of the manured soil.

I’m pleased to say it hasn’t rained yet today (Sunday) but these days our bodies are moving much slower than the clock so it’ll be an afternoon plot visit. The song title is provided by Nico.

Rhythm of the Rain

Mmm, is there anything tastier than freshly picked, cooked, buttered, peppered corn on the cob? These Lark variety really are delicious although germination was rather poor this year with only 10 from a whole packet of 25 seeds, but with 1 or 2 cobs per plant we have enough to enjoy for lunches.

Here are the Orca or Yin Yang beans, they’re so fabulous aren’t they! I need to check if any of the other plants have managed to produce any beans for storing. We had another frost this weekend but not too severe and I had netted the dwarf beans so they may continue to mature. The climbing tunnel beans are looking awful after far too much rain so sadly I don’t think I’ll be able to store any of them. Have I mentioned the rain?…

The rain continued to be torrential at the beginning of last week - cheered up a bit when I returned to work on Thursday 🙄. We did go to the allotment most days though, at least to pick a bit of veg and check how the plot was faring. 

We saw plenty of slugs and snails - I thought that snail above was rather pretty and this tiny specimen is an interesting one. I don’t recall seeing a conical one like this before and am still looking for an id.

I picked my two Festival squashes ahead of the frost - they’re quite large and I hope they’re ripe enough. They can stay in the polytunnel for a bit before I eat them. I fleeced the butternuts again as they haven’t had a very long season and the foliage is still looking reasonably healthy.

These tomatoes finally went red so we’re enjoying them in various meals. 

The pretty chard was used in a layered bake which fed me for two evenings: 1. Chard layer 2. Butternut & sage pesto with a few shallots 3. Slices of tomato 4. Quorn ‘ham’ layer, topped with the pesto 5. Thinly sliced Desiree potatoes on top. It was extremely tasty. Took about an hour to cook and, although there was a lot, the chard pretty much disappeared.

We’ve picked lots more tomatoes- ones that have any slight colour change, so hopefully they’ll ripen at home.

We’re pleased to see that the Halloween peppers have actually started going orange. They’re strange. They went from green to black then back to green before going orange!

So, although it’s been so wet we have had some lovely, chilly, blue sky mornings the clouds have soon built up - I thought this was a rather impressive take-over bid! I think the cloud won the day. We’re just going into yet another yellow weather warning for wind and rain overnight.

And, talking of our September weather, there was at least another 57mm of rain last week over 3 days! I mustn’t complain compared to how other towns have been so badly affected though. And a friend, who has recently got an allotment in Abingdon, reported floating squashes on their site 😩. So, that’s why I’ve selected this song by The Cascades - a golden oldie.

Fire

Special delivery! Plotholders are always pleased with a manure delivery - it’s just a shame our plot is at the other end of the site from the manure heap 😩 I only managed three barrow-loads before collapsing, but we’ll get a few more.  HAHA charges £1.50 per barrowful. We pulled the last of our Desiree spuds to use that plot as a storage area until we’ve worked out next year’s planting plan.

I need to pull the courgette from that plot. We’ve had probably our last fruit from it - looks great, but unfortunately it had a hollow heart so no good for eating sadly. But we’re pleased that the Lark sweetcorn are providing us with some delicious cobs, they’re such a sweet variety.

We’ve had some proper stormy weather over the last two days. The early morning lightning was great yesterday (Saturday) as it was still dark when it was lighting up the sky. The rain was torrential and measured 22mm on the allotment. I planted the garlic on Friday - 22 cloves of Carcassonne Wight - so I hope that appreciated the drenching.

We were on site for another torrential downpour but stayed in the polytunnel - it was so loud but no thunder or lightning.

Within an hour we were soaking up the warm rays of dazzling sunshine!

This dandelion looked so pretty drying out in the sunshine and there’s Jamie doing the same on the bench by the extremely overgrown wildlife plot. 😎 

I did a bit of baking last weekend - another ‘floral focaccia’ with a garlic flour mix. Pretty and tasty!

And the plot flowers are still looking pretty - these zinnia were mostly not touched by the frost. Such lovely colours, but the flowers were a bit slow to arrive this year so we haven’t got the flowerbed display I was hoping for. This post is sounding a bit depressed - it’s not meant to be! It’s been a pretty good year, all things considered! And I have a few days off work next week.

Last Sunday we didn’t picnic because we went to see an art event ‘Ablaze’ in Newbury, with fire and music along the canal and in Victoria Park. It was good with lots of people enjoying the metalwork and flaming sculptures.

Which provides the opportunity to use this great track by Kasabian.

Bad Day

That is the top of the allotment site on Friday 13th September - you may not be able to see it, but there’s frost on the ground! And it’s steaming in the bright early morning sunshine. The temperature dropped to 0.8° and walking through the site it was clear that flowers and plants, particularly squashes, had been frosted. By the next day their leaves were black 😖 Too early! We were hoping for an extended growing season after the rough start! It’s the earliest frost we’ve seen since having a plot. I’m pleased I put fleece round my butternut squash, they may be small but I hope they are worth saving. 

I chopped all the excess growth and tiny fruits off the other week so the plant could concentrate its energy into these few squashes.

We may have had the last of our Summer squashes now. These have been quite tasty, but a bit too large a seed cavity so not much firm flesh for cooking. The chard is really pretty this year, great stems!

Those lovely spring onions are from fellow-plotholder David. I can never grow them but he has too many! They are really spicy too - delicious. The cucumbers succumbed to the frost and we’re not too unhappy about it - we still have some in the fridge 😀

I’ve started drying my beans in the roof of the polytunnel. I now know why my borlotti beans didn’t grow very tall or turn red - they were dwarf Yin Yang beans 🙄 It seems my labelling got a bit muddled and none of my borlotti survived the Spring slug-fest. I have more Yin Yang beans which I protected on the frosty night as the plants are still green. I’m going to dry the runner and French beans too this year, but they’re not ready to pick yet; they need to start drying on the plant first.

We’ve cleared and dug that area in front of the bean-tunnel for over-Wintering our broad beans. And this area is ready for the garlic to be planted quite soon. It looked straighter than that while I was digging and edging 🫣

September has thrown a lot of weather at us. Thunder was rumbling round for days and we’ve had some torrential rain but it’s really hot again when the Sun re-appears. Have seen some excellent clouds.

I think we left just in time before that storm broke. And this was an interesting sky. I think this was on one of the rumbling days when it was really muggy.

But the sunshine days have been glorious!

There are so many bees and butterflies around. Making the most of the buddleia…

The sunflowers…

And the Autumn Joy sedum.

Harvests continue including our first delicious sweetcorn last night which was added to this halloumi meal. Served with our Desiree potatoes with garlic, shallots and red pepper tapenade - so delicious.

And either kale or chard has been added to a variety of different bean dishes that I’ve made using the last of last year’s beans and our carrots.

This was the last harvest of runner beans for this year. They were just on the edge of going stringy, which is why I’m going to dry them - too many on the plants to waste. And that was the only lettuce I got to pick before slugs and caterpillars had a field day!

Tomatoes are providing meagre pickings but I’m glad the frost didn’t take them out…there are plenty to come if they get a chance to mature..

Song title is a blast from the past (1983) to celebrate Friday 13th - a good song though I had almost forgotten about it and the singer, Carmel.