Late in the Evening

At last we have more variety in our harvests. That was our second potato bag with a better haul of (Rocket?) spuds. The Cavolo Nero was used as crispy seaweed in a Chinese meal.  The warm and showery weather over the last couple of weeks has made the plot and this plotholder a lot happier as our beds are finally filling up a bit.

The climbing beans tunnel looks quite sparse but is producing a surprising amount of beans and lots more flowers too.

They were part of this early morning, pre-work harvest along with our first courgette (the plant has been sitting in a pot for months with the weather refusing to let its fruits mature!) and our first cucumber. Mmm, home-grown mini-cucumbers are so delicious.

The larger turnips were past their best so went to the compost, but the little ones were tasty roasted with potatoes.

And this trug has our first harvest of tomatoes (well, the first that have gone home), radishes, stripey courgette and some leggy carrots (purple and orange).

We had a tasty salad with 7 home-grown ingredients. The imperfect carrots in mayo made an excellent tasty coleslaw.

These ipomoea were from seeds from my Cousin Jen. Such beautiful colours and they’re beginning to climb the frame now. Related to the dreaded bindweed, which I’m still fighting on our plot. We had a HAHA workday this weekend where we cleared a plot which has been given up. It was completely covered in white-flowering bindweed. We’re not fooling ourselves into thinking the problem is gone but now it’s covered in a plastic sheet for a while it’s at least contained. It’s been a particularly good year for bindweed 😖

The female pheasant, with her remaining two chicks likes the un-loved plots, but they’re less popular with the neighbours! The pheasant herself also has her fans and her haters!

It was breezy and unexpectedly misty and perfect for a bit of digging, so I cleared the area on our plot where the broad beans were and the leeks will soon be planted.

You can see that the soil is actually bone dry as soon as the Sun appeared.

My brother gave me these bees for my birthday, thanks Tim, they look great on the toilet which we can see from our plot and the communal area.

At our Sunday picnic last week we made use of the donated Chiminea when the Sun had gone. It was lovely and we enjoyed seeing bats zipping about around us, such fun.

Which gives me the opportunity to use Paul Simon’s great song title - dance-along now!

HBDMF

Summer arrived - just for a day, but it was tremendously hot and sunny. So I started my holiday early by taking Friday afternoon off and we enjoyed a lovely barbecue on the plot. It was a good start to my 10-day break where hopefully more of the days are like this…

Than this!

Actually those heavy-looking clouds didn’t produce any rain. That’s fine, we’ve had plenty.. and every time it rains the molluscs turn up and eat our plants 😩 Look at this sad display!

Not a leaf left so now they’ve moved onto the flowers. A few things are getting away with less damage and we managed a tasty salad with a tasty peppery turnip.

And we had our first new potatoes Swift with it. They look good and tasted good but that was from a bag where two seed potatoes were planted so it’s a pathetic harvest - lucky there’s only two of us!!

I ventured beneath the netting on the root vegetable plot last weekend and, once I’d cleared the weeds, I found one (yes one!) parsnip, five salsify and a rather weak couple of rows of carrots - ugh, what a year! The garlic harvest was more successful and dried out in the sunshine. Some bulbs have little additional bulblets, I’m blaming the wet Spring for that.

Now, I must stop moaning! A few bees and butterflies arrived with the sunshine.

And the verbena bonariensis is looking stunning alongside the red of the crocosmia.

Also, our wildlife camera snapped a fox visiting the plot - hooray!

On Saturday a group of us plotholders were given a tour of the site for the Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve which is 40acres of ancient water meadow which we really hope will get planning permission in the next few weeks - it’s literally 5minutes walk from our front door and will be great for us, nature and the town. Exciting!

It’s been a great start to my holiday and yesterday we had a picnic, which included a birthday cake, too much wine and a lot of laughter.

Thanks to the Dropkick Murphys for the fabulous song, though I clearly don’t agree with the sentiment 🥳 it does make me laugh. Enjoy.