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

Mmmm, lunch

With the few slices of beetroot which were left over I had a lovely lunch; with homegrown chard (red and yellow veins), spring onions, radish, lettuce and GranoVita vegetarian pepperoni - lovely!

Pickled Beetroot

Jamie prepared and pickled the beetroot today. We always bake them wrapped in foil, with the stems still attached to prevent bleeding; this keeps as much flavour in the beet as possible.
After an hour and a half at 190° they're ready and need removing from their skins. It usually slides off pretty easily but can get a bit messy!

25g of sugar was dissolved into 350ml of slightly heated Aspall Classic Red Wine vinegar. After the beets have cooled we like to cut them with the ridge slicer and Jamie packed them into the sterilised jar and covered them with the vinegar.

 There! Ready for Christmas!

It's August already!

What on earth has happened to the year? Can't believe it's August already - having said that, the weather is feeling a bit autumnal in the mornings :-(

We popped up the plot in the evening just to pick a couple of beets for Jamie to pickle. The beets are Moneta - a monogerm variety so only one beet per seed. The skin is very dark, which we think is due to the peaty-mix that we put in the raised bed where these were plucked from. Jamie found them to be much sweeter than ones grown in the normal earth last year, so should be perfect for pickling in red wine vinegar (should be able to post some details once Jamie has done the work tomorrow!)

I picked a few bits of salad - all the lettuces in the cloches have gone to seed but some of the leaves are still edible and I chop the chard leaves up to use as salad leaf too. Also (a bit cheeky) someone had left some lettuces for planting on the freebies table - I took a few of them to eat too ;-)

The squashes as expanding but the next two courgettes aren't quite big enough for picking just yet. It's rained today and yesterday so not much watering except for the tomatoes and the cucumber. Blight is pretty much all over the site. Lots of us have chopped the haulms down - we've only done our first earlies but will have to keep an eye on the other varieties too. We put bottle-cloche protection over the broad beans which have just sprouted; but no sign of the kohl rabi or carrots yet...

Then we had a long chat with Malcolm, discussed pickling and the Olympics, among other things, then went home while it was still light and not raining.

Pickled!

We pickled the shallots. They filled two large jars and two small ones. The shallots felt quite soft when we removed them from the brine so they should soak up the vinegar nicely.

We didn't do anything fancy - just used Sarson's pickling vinegar. Though we did add some dried chillies to two of the jars. We weren't sure how hot they'd be - we were given them by my sister a couple of years ago - but judging by the pain when I touched my eye later in the evening(!) I think they may be hot hot hot!

It's pickling time!

We nipped up the plot this afternoon, managing to avoid some serious showers, just to pick some bits for tonight and tomorrow. Tonight Jamie's making mash with the chopin potatoes and we're having our first crop of french beans with some broad beans and a quorn fricasee-type thing with one of our onions - great to be using four home-grown ingredients. And tomorrow I'm making a tofu, potato, carrot and onion layered dish with 3 home-growns - yum! The other bits are for salady lunches for a couple of days.

Includes first courgette, onions, carrots and green beans

When we got back home we prepared all the shallots for pickling - we should get four small jars and two larger ones. Some of the shallots were a bit dodgy, particularly where water had gone down the stems where the shallots had flowered.

When we'd finished peeling them we put them in strong brine (using hot water dissolve the salt) and they'll stay there until tomorrow or Tuesday when they get put into their sterilised jars till Christmas. The purpose of the brine is to remove water from the onions so that there's less water to dilute the vinegar once they're pickling thus getting crunchier onions - I still don't quite get how the water is removed when they're soaked in water, but it apparently works by osmosis... fair enough!

Onions in brine to remove water

Potatoes and beans

We had a couple of hours on the plot today. It was pretty sunny and warm still, though it's meant to be cooling down significantly with rain on the way - sad to say, we do actually need it!

We pulled our first chopin potatoes - I say pulled, we always excavate them. Can't bear it when we chop into one so definitely can't use a fork to lift them like some people do! The chopins are lovely looking white potatoes which are apparently good to use for mashing and even for roasting. We got about 1kg from one plant and I delved underneath the next plant to pull a couple of extra spuds from there.

We also picked our first beetroot - haven't had a lovely fresh beetroot for months; we've still got some pickled ones from last year at home. Also picked some more broad beans to have in a curry tonight. The broad bean pods look like the beans should be big but we're finding, as others are at Marsh Lane, that the beans aren't filling out much. We have to squeeze each pod to check what's in there before picking - there are still plenty left on the plants.

We took our bucketful of shallots home for pickling tomorrow as they've had time to dry out in the lovely sunshine this week.

I sowed a row of purple kohl rabi - they were really tasty when we tried some before but they are a favourite of slugs and pollen beetle so we've put a cover over them..

And I spotted this little moth - I took a photo of a very similar looking one in May. I am not absolutely certain, but I think they're related but different varieties of mint moth. This one appears to be Pyrausta purpuralis whereas I think the one in May was Pyrausta aurata - from what I've seen on the UK Moths website.

Not so blue but still hot

Yes, today was a little cooler with cloudy skies much of the time, but it still got incredibly hot when doing anything other than sitting! I dug over the patch where we'd taken the shallots and decided not to take on any of Plot 8 (though of course Jamie did some before flaking out).

I did some weeding - all around the onions, which are Santero F1. They're downy mildew resistant and have proved to be worthy of the title as they're looking good compared to a lot of other onions on site (including some of our salad onions).

Also weeded inside the mesh cloche where we planted a row of turnips and a row of radish - the turnips were devoured by pollen beetles and slugs but the radishes got away with it. Some are big and VERY pepper - I have some salad lunches planned for next week.

Our little cucumber won't quite be ready for that but it's getting there!

Jamie cut the haulms off all the Chopin potatoes because blight has got to them - probably due to all the slug damage.
Here are some pics of some of the other potatoes which are flowering at the moment - they're very pretty.

Kestrel flowers	Congo flowers

And finally, we saw this busy little bee on our calendula - shame he wasn't on our beans, but still good to see on the plot!

Another hot BBQ day

Another brilliant day for a barbecue, not quite as hot as yesterday but still way above average at about 28°!
I took this photo by attaching the camera to a 8-foot bamboo and then setting the 12 second timer before holding it high above my head - it looks really high up doesn't it? It makes for a good bird's eye view of the plots :-)

Overhead shot of our plots

We puddled our leeks in and put the Shallot cage over them as some protection against leek moth.
We had to do quite a lot of watering - although it's still damp under the surface we want our veggies, which are just fruiting, to have as much water as possible. The water poured into the leeks holes soon drained away.

Puddling in the leeks

Big Butterfly Count 2012

I did the butterfly count for Butterfly Conservation in the afternoon - it was easy to find 15 minutes and a sunny spot. I decided to do it at the top of site, outside the allotment boundary where there's a bit of wild ground with lovely long grass and some tall weeds. I didn't think 'allotment' fitted any of the other descriptions very well - it's a bit different from a garden, so I went with the easy option and chose 'field'.

By the allotment entrance

The butterflies are different varieties from what we see on the plot. There were no Red Admirals, of which we've seen lots this year, peacocks or tortoiseshells and not so many cabbage whites (which we've been chasing off our cabbages all week).
Here's what I recorded:
  2 x Green-veined White - I'm sure they were this type of white because of the greeny-closed wings
  7 x Ringlet
  2 x Meadow Brown
  3 x Marbled White
I only managed to snap the Ringlet butterfly. All the others were flitting around far too quickly - I got quite a few blurred brown blobs!

Ringlet butterfly