Chutney and Pickles

I know, we're a bit obsessed with preserving at the moment - I'm sure we're smelling rather sweet and vinegar-y too. I certainly know our flat is!
We picked this lot from the plot this morning - the silverskin onions are currently soaking in brine prior to being pickled tomorrow. Some of the courgettes will go to work but some are for dinner for the next two days as well as for the chutney. There are also a few leaves of perpetual spinach from fellow plotholder Geoff (Thanks Geoff).

Yesterday we made some runner bean chutney - the same recipe that we always use, as it's so delicious.
And today we've been making tomato and courgette chutney, with a different recipe - based on the one I found here, but with a few adjustments. This is the ingredients list we've used and we just put it all in the pan and cook until it thickens:

• 455g courgettes
• 284g onions
• 284g tomatoes
• 270g Demerara sugar
• ¼ pint malt vinegar
• ¼ pint pickling vinegar
• 4 cloves of garlic
• ½ tspn paprika
• ½ tspn salt

 It's smelling delicious as it simmers away so hopefully it'll taste just as good! We'll find out at Christmas.

This is the stage we figured it was ready - it's always a bit tricky; The spoon leaves a clear path through the mixture until the liquid slowly covers it again.

Here's the end result, along with the pickled silverskins and the two types of chutney. The courgette and tomato is far right, with the runner bean in the middle - mmm

Two Trugs of Goodies

Two visits to the plot over the weekend produced two trugfuls of lovely veggies. Both visits weren't very well timed and we got rained off on Saturday.

Onions attempting to dry out

We were pulling the  potatoes to make way for the leeks. Our various new potatoes have not been terribly successful. They are very tasty but we've had to resort to mashing them as they refuse to cook properly and quite a few are too big anyway. We did have a couple of the Red Duke of York ones baked in the week and which were delicious - lovely red crispy skins.

One of the potatoes we pulled was a Bonnie, a pretty red-patched potato which produced monster tubers but they are sadly very tasty to slugs. We also pulled a Casablanca and a Pentland Javelin. That trug is also packed with runner beans, french beans and mangetout. My mum got the mangetout and french beans and we had the runners.

On Sunday I finally got the leeks planted up. They're the biggest leeks we've ever planted - previous years they've looked rather spindly. They always say leeks should be 'pencil thickness'; ours were more like wax crayon width. They've been growing in their modules since 22nd April!

As usual, I chopped the roots and the top of the leaves back, made holes with a post and then dropped the leeks in. After puddling in they look a bit higgledy-piggledy but should end up the right position. We've got 26 plants and have put the shallot cage over the top of them to help them stay clear of leek moth.

 

We left on Sunday with a trug covering a few lunches and dinners. Fennel and carrot soup again for me, with home-grown onions this time! Dinner included stuffed courgette - done in a different way this time; in rings like burgers. They were very tasty. We used a Granose meat-free burger mix to make life a bit easier after an afternoon of weeding.

The BIGGEST caterpillar I've EVER held!! Not found on the allotment so shouldn't really be on the wildlife blog, but had to get a mention!

 

Too hot to blog

Wow! The weather's been so fabulous over the last couple of weeks that I haven't had time to write a blog post! 34° in the shade today! Mrs B found it a bit hot too!

We've been going to the plot straight from work. These are the Summer evenings we missed last year.

We've been eating quite well from the allotment too - lots of salads, strawberries, a few raspberries today and the yellow Floridor squashes have started to pay out.

Our potato plan hasn't worked - the earlies are arriving later than we intended. We think they probably haven't bulked up because of the lack of rain. So we've been watering the plants a lot over the last week.

We pulled an Arran Pilot - only a very small amount of spuds (about 5 tubers) - lovely as potato salad for lunch! And we pulled a couple of the Pentland Javelins which were enough for two meals - very tasty, but in general we hope to get more than one meal per plant.

Here are some photos showing each quarter of Plot 7 - all growing nicely now!

And here's my one fennel which looks like it will actually get to grow to maturity - hope I haven't spoken too soon!

I have updated the wildlife blog as a few more insects are appearing on site.

HAHA Plot

Another scorching day so we went to the allotment in the morning and went back in the afternoon - just too hot to stay out in the sun over midday too.

We were working on the HAHA Plot all day. It was meant to be 'unusual vegetables - the kinds the supermarkets don't sell' but it's getting less unusual as the weeks have moved on!

Having said that, we've planted/sown the following on there now:

• Uchiki Kuri - onion squash
• Golden Hubbard - Winter squash (donated by Liz & Ken)
• Jack-be-Little - small pumpkins
• Floridor Yellow - round yellow courgette
• Purple Haze - purple carrots
• Globe Artichoke (donated by Jonathan)

With two sides planted up with french marigolds it should look pretty and once the squashes start spreading it'll fill out.

We've still got a few more things to sow and still have 3 months till the Hungerford Food Festival so hopefully we'll have something to show on our stall or at least to share with other plotholders.

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I decided we should pull one of our potato plants (one of the International Kidneys)- it's been 10 weeks since they were planted so we thought there may be something to show....
Unfortunately I jumped the gun and in fact there were only 4 tiny spuds :-( So, Jamie pulled a plant on one of the vacant plots - these had been in the ground for over a year but look pretty good, so we will have dinner tonight after all :-)

And I'll have salad for lunch tomorrow!
 

Picking Bush Delicata squashes before the frost

Jamie visited the plot a couple of times during the week. It's been a grotty week weather-wise - basically living in a cloud, so everywhere is soaking.
Jamie said that the mouse or slugs have left empty hulls of the little butternuts, which came to nothing because they got going too late. They were Butterbush variety but did spread over the ground; possibly because they weren't confined to pots. I think the year's weather can be blamed for their poor show rather than the variety as each plant did produce several fruits. The squashes grew to about 10cm but were still green when the frost took them out :-(

More positively, Jamie picked all the good squashes from the Cornell's Bush Delicata - pretty good from one plant! He brought them home as we were expecting the weather to go very cold on Friday and it did - about 5° at work, though no frost on the car.

We're going up the plot later, after my flu jab, but still won't be able to burn the hedging day cuttings - they're probably wetter today than they were last week! As I look out the window now there's beautiful blue sky and sunshine but it sure looks cold - brrr. Where's our flask gone? I've a feeling we're going to need coffee!

Fruits and Diseases

We had a lovely few hours on the plot today. When we first arrived there were a lot of butterflies around as it was sunny and pleasant. Jamie got down on his knees for some serious weeding around our leeks.

Whilst weeding he noticed that we have rust appearing on quite a few of the leaves. Rust (Puccinia allii) on leeks is apparently quite common and the fungus spreads due to poor air circulation (the usual humidity problem on our plots) and is often worse on nitrogen-rich soils with low potassium - not sure whether this would be the case with our potato quarter... It doesn't look very nice but shouldn't have a big impact on the actual leeks - we may remove some of the worst affected leaves.

Rust

I was dead-heading and ripping up cardboard to add to the compost - we have so much green going in there at the moment and not very much brown. I also cleared yellowing leaves from the sprouts - this helps with air circulation and prevents disease - though we're a bit late with one of the plants which has gone really mouldy, but luckily hasn't spread to the other plants. We'll be pulling that this week or next weekend.

Strawberries round Marsh Lane have been great this year - and they're still going for it!

Sadly I can't say the same for my raspberries which I transplanted this year - they're very sporadic. Hopefully next year they'll be better...

 We've had some lovely peppers though and took some home with the last of our onions - not sure how much we'll get to eat from them - and Red Duke of York and Chopin spuds.

 

 

Food, frogs and children

It was a lovely sunny, warm day again yesterday - albeit rather windy. We managed to get the weed suppressant pegged down over the strawberry bed and it looks very tidy, ready and waiting for the little strawberry plants to bed down for the winter!



8 little strawberry plants

Jamie spotted a big brown frog today - can't be the same ones that we saw earlier in the year - unless they've eaten so many slugs they've grown really quickly - that could explain the colour too, ugh!

Refusing to pose for a photo, but you can see the colour

We didn't do much else, just a bit of dead-heading (yawn) and picking veggies. Including some courgettes from Neal's plot which I'll share at work.

Nice trugful of goodies

I forgot to say that on Saturday we had to do an impromptu tour of the plot for some visiting children. They were on their first field trip as part of the Cherry Grove Saturday morning club. I showed them around our plot and let them eat some raspberries, then led them to Geoff's plot to eat his raspberries too - Geoff's on holiday but did say we could pick any that were ripe :-}



More pickling and picking

Jamie pickled the silverskin onions this morning in 25g of Demerara sugar dissolved in 350ml of Aspall Classic white wine vinegar.

Later we visited the plot. We were the only ones there, it's a bit of a dull day with rain threatening.
We picked salad for lunches and today had those lovely tomatoes and silverskin onions for lunch on bruschetta - such a tasty snack. We got 3 cucumbers - I think one of them will be given away at work, along with one of the courgettes.

The cabbage should serve us for at least two meals. The beets are from the raised bed and were pickled in sweetened red wine vinegar when we got home. Luckily there are a few cut-offs which can be added to my salad tomorrow!

So very hot!

Extremely hot again - 28° according to the thermometer but it felt hotter. We spent a couple of hours on the plot. Watering and watering and dead-heading the bloomin' calendula!
Our sweetcorn seems to have enjoyed the weather for the last 2 weeks and now has some cobs forming - really hope they make it, they're so delicious!

Also the Cornells squash has a couple of tiny fruits growing. We've not been picking the beets as we should have and they've grown enormous, so I'm on beetroot salad most of next week I think. The Santero onions are still looking good; we've left them in the ground under their netting and just pick them a couple of days before we're going to cook with them.

We've seen blackfly on our radish which have gone to seed - we've hardly seen any aphids this year. I walked around the site trying to find ladybirds and only found one! That doesn't seem good - it seems the ladybird season is out of sync with the aphids this year :-(

We picked a huge trug load of goodies (including Kestrels and a load of runner beans for work colleagues) and escaped the heat.

By the way....
We haven't found any more of our potatoes with hollow hearts so far, but we're still not risking a baked spud

Plans for salad and sweet onions

We had a few hot hours on the plot this morning. Weeding, grass-cutting and dead-heading the calendula - every time you turn round another seed head appears. We really don't want them self-seeding everywhere again next year! They're beautiful but you can have too much of a good thing :-)


Silverskins

These are our roundest silverskin onions, have left loads in the ground in the hope that they will also grow more spherical. These ones are going into a little jar of sweet white pickling vinegar for Christmas martinis - haven't quite decided on the recipe yet.

The strawberries are having a second flush of fruits. Hopefully we'll get to eat some - we missed out on the first lot because the birds got them, well there were only about 5 that grew, and they weren't very good :-( Next year we plan to have a proper strawberry bed on Plot 8

Strawberries

We picked a great trugful of goodies today - the kestrel spuds look good (and no slug damage or hollow hearts in this crop so far), salad consists of lettuce, tomatoes, red spring onions, cucumber and even a little pepper. And we're going to have coleslaw made with our first cabbage - which is a bit nibbled but we can eat round that!

Potato (and slug) time

Had a lovely couple of hours on the plot today. We'd been expecting rain but still haven't needed to use our new brolly!!
We pottered around a bit. Jamie DID finish the digging on the new plot and fed the tomatoes, runner beans and peas with Growmore.  I earthed up the celeriac, some of them are bulbing up pretty well.


Celeriac

I took a few photos and pulled some potatoes; one Chopin plant and one Kestrel - both giving pretty good harvests of nice looking tubers (we forgot to weigh them before we'd cooked them) but there are a few holes.

Geophilus carpophagus

We did wonder whether this centipede had made the holes but it seems that it's slugs. (The centipede eats baby earthworms though, so isn't a particularly welcome guest.)

Slug hole

We weren't too concerned by these holes - they don't look too offensive and don't seem to be too deep, but when we cut into the spud it's a different story...


The inside story

Ugh, not nice.
NOTE TO US: Do not bake potatoes with small holes in them!!
Jamie's already talking about buying nematodes next year, though the problem is most likely because of the awful rain. The slugs that do this type of damage are Keel slugs - not the giants you see when you move anything outside at the moment, but fairly small ones (<6cm) which live under the ground.

Anyway, the potatoes tasted nice, just needed a few extra bits cut off! We also had lovely runner beans and the cucumber is for lunch - also great for a little snack whilst on the plot :-)

Sunshine and Showers

We had a nice couple of hours on the plot this morning - pretty warm and sunny but the wind was rather strong. Everything had grown a lot over the last 3 days! The sweet peas are looking very pretty and there are some runner beans growing long!

We pulled some potatoes:
The kestrel plant looked a bit sickly and clearly wasn't happy. We got 3 reasonably sized tubers (400g) from it, but the blight had got down into one of the tubers  :-(
The Chopin plant was the one that I had pilfered from before, but still got two lovely big healthy looking tubers (500g).
The Red Duke of York plant wasn't very happy looking but produced a fine harvest of lovely red spuds (1.3kg). It's been such a wet year, the tubers were caked in hard mud. It's hard to learn much about the different varieties this year, but Chopin really do seem to have been particularly successful... (hope I haven't spoken too soon!)

There are 4 Courgettes in the plant-uh-oh it's started :-) A couple of the sweetcorn have the male flower developing - the plants are very short though.

The kohl rabi has germinated and more of the broad beans needed cloching. I also had to cloche some parsley which I planted out last week - something has been nibbling it. We saw a tiny little froglet hopping about so hopefully he'll stay near our plot - he was smaller than the one we saw previously (only about 3cm big - aw!)

Took the netting off the parsnips as they were getting rather cramped.

We did some weeding, dead-heading and turned the compost before having to dash off because the light pitter-patter of rain turned into a torrential downpour. And look at the crowd we found in the communal shed!  :-)

Tony, Gill, Geoff and Kerry, with Jane & Derek hidden