Courgette Cake

Another way to use courgettes, other than frying in butter which is always delicious, is in courgette cake. We made a chocolate one last year and it was far too heavy.
This one, from the Hairy Bikers website is really tasty and has walnuts in. You can still see the grated courgette so it's a bit interesting - but can't taste courgette at all!

Borscht

Made borscht (Beetroot soup) for tea, using a recipe from the Vegetarian magazine ('Recipes from Under The Lime Tree'). As well as beetroot it had apple, onion, garlic, ginger and orange juice.

Prior to blending

It was really nice but even better than the taste was the colour of it! Look at this, after blending - I can see why they call is 'Beautiful Borscht'!

The final product

Best made plans..

We got to the plot in the morning to avoid the rain - but didn't get there early enough and got soaked, before running for cover in the container!

We did manage to get some of the manure dug into (what was) the onion quarter - it's going to be the legume quarter next year so we plan to overwinter some broad beans in there. We covered the dug-in manure area with black plastic to encourage worms, etc.
It should mean we start getting broad beans a few weeks earlier - unless the frost strikes too soon...

Picked a couple of massive beetroot - we wanted 400g for cooking borscht for tonight. In fact the two we picked weigh more than 500g each :-} Really should have taken the scales with us!

I also picked about 250g more of raspberries to make up some more vodka...

Geese

I think these are Canada geese, which probably means they aren't actually migrating, but it looks quite a wintery scene with them heading off and the low sun :-( It's only August!! Hopefully we still will see some lovely sunshine!!

Vapourer Moth caterpillar

Went up the plot this evening to pick peas for tea - very pleased to find that these later-sown ones was much better than the early ones. That is, we only found 2 with pea moth larvae - much happier podding this lot!
I also had to pick a courgette which had grown too massive over the last 2 days so that'll be going to work!
We found this amazing looking caterpillar sitting (and eating) our basil. It's the vapourer moth caterpillar, but a bit disappointed to see the moth it develops into isn't anywhere near as interesting looking. Best looking caterpillar I've ever seen though!!

Raspberry Vodka

Well, now we know that the raspberries that we inherited when we took over plot 8A are Autumn ones - they're better than the harvest we got in Spring (not that we look after them at all). I picked as many as I could and we made up Raspberry vodka (raspberries, vodka and sugar) - should be good to drink in at least 3 months...

Manure and Compost

Nantes Carrots. Congo potato plants

We spent most of the morning on the plot. My friend gave us a big bucketful of well-rotted horse manure so we've put all the compost into the black composter - it's full to the brim now - and put the manure into the green one. There's a problem with some manures at the moment, due to contamination by herbicides. For this reason we're growing a bean in the manure before we risk spreading it across our plot.
Andy's confirmed that he's seen veggies growing in the manure without curled leaves so it should be fine - GOOD!
The Congo potato plants are still looking amazing. Jamie put his hand around the roots and didn't find any potatoes - hopefully they're there though!!

Some of the cabbages have got proper heads now but there's a lot of holes and I found another cabbage white caterpillar to flick off...

Picked some carrots and onions for carrot and coriander soup for tea and pulled another Orla potato. And Dave gave us a parsnip which we'll have along with a veg roast tomorrow. We've taken all the shallots home now and will make up another small jar of pickled onions.

Pickles and things

Here are our jars of chutney and pickles - stored away for a few months now so they should be lovely for Christmas.

The seasons seem ahead of themselves this year so hopefully we'll have some sloe gin to add to our store quite soon - though some say they need to be frosted before they can be used.... We DON'T want frost yet!!

Ladybirds & a spider

We've spotted (sorry for the pun!) these two ladybirds on the plot over the last couple of days and there are masses of 7-spot ones. There's a good ladybird website and they're surveying so I sent them some info.

22-spot 

14-spot

 Oh, and Jamie found this amongst our spuds... it's crawling up his tee-shirt sleeve!!

wolf spider

Walking round a damp allotment

We walked round some of the other plots and saw Jerry's globe artichokes which have flowered - really beautiful.

Our runner beans have a few beans which have set but still really tiny, so the plan's worked so far - we didn't want green beans, runners and broad beans all at the same time. The flowers are looking brilliant and keeping the bees happy.

The raindrops on the bottom pic are quite arty :-)

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