Just finished cooking

The runner bean chutney is now cooling down in the two jars - it took 1 hour 45 mins to boil down to the right consistency.
I guess this makes it pretty expensive chutney, but we think it's worth it.

Looks good and can be eaten in 3 months - well, ours will wait till Christmas :-)

Picking and Pickling

A quick visit to the plot today to pick some bits and see what's happened over the last few days. We only visited the plot to pick runner beans during the week.
I was pleased to see there actually is evidence of a butternut or two on the bushes - they're minute but it gives me some hope...

Tiny tiny butternut

There are also about 4 little squashes on the Cornells Bush Delicata. I really hope that we get some more sunshine in September so that we get some winter squashes. A couple of the days last week felt very autumnal and days really seem to be shortening rapidly :-(


Cornells Bush Delicata

We picked over 1kg of runner beans (no shortage of those at the moment - even though they're selling for nearly £4 per kg in the shops!) and another onion. The santeror F1 which have really proved to be worth growing - a number of fellow allotment holders are trying to get a local garden centre to buy some stock for us next year. Also picked another bunch sweetpeas.

We made runner bean chutney, using our usual recipe. After topping, tailing and taking the edges off the runners we had just over the 450g (1lb) that we needed and 3 of our onions trimmed back just about reached that weight too.
It's still boiling down as I type this and it smells so delicious!


The additional ingredients

We also dealt with the silverskin onions which we've been drying out at home for over a week. They're being pickled in sweet white wine vinegar but first need soaking in brine overnight. They do look lovely - so white and shiny. We may use these for our main supply of pickled onions next year.

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

A new record!

We've beaten last year's record of 7 items of home-grown veg in one meal :-)

We reached 9 last night:

1. Potato
2. Onion
3. Cabbage
4. Carrot
5. Lettuce
6. Tomatoes
7. Cucumber
8. Pepper
9. Spring Onions

The cabbage and carrot were made into coleslaw with salad cream - soooo tasty. I could eat buckets of it.

The cabbage had quite a lot of damage to the outside leaves, but plenty inside to cover a couple of meals.

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!

Red Tomatoes!

A very quick visit to the plot after work. The really bad rain in the week hadn't done any damage. The Lizzano F1 tomatoes needed watering and are leaning over - but they are trailers so I guess that's as intended! And we've finally got some red tomatoes to go with our amazing Rocky cucumbers - that's a salad for tomorrow then :-)

It's meant to be an extremely hot weekend so we should be able to spend a good few hours on the plot - lovely!

Bad potato news

We discovered something else about our potatoes yesterday - the kestrels. They appeared to have avoided internal slug damage but had fallen foul of the WET weather and succumbed to hollow heart which is most likely due to the wet weather we had this year. It is most likely caused by second growth in potatoes - this site gives a bit more info. We managed to cut round the dodgy bits and made mash which tasted lovely with broad beans. (Actually, to be honest, the broad beans had gone past their best too but they were still nice - even if I haven't sold the meal!) The Kestrel potatoes are a concern though as we've got another 8 plants - seems like we have a lot of meals coming up involving mash...

At least the tomatoes are beginning to change colour, gradually - there are masses of toms arriving if they can just beat the blight!
And here's evidence of squash flowers, but they're all male so far - they are not going to produce any Cornell's bush delicata winter squash so they'd better get a move on!!

At least the runner beans are paying out - these arrived within a day of us picking all the big ones - only 5 plants so we'll see how long they provide us for.

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 :-)

Weeding and Digging

Another lovely hot day! It was sunny but hazy so we were able to spend several hours on the plot. Lots of chat and sitting but also got some work done.


Calendula and sweet peas

Jamie very nearly managed to finish digging the new plot! So the whole plot has nearly been properly dug now but there are so many weeds about that dug areas are seeded within a few days!
I did a lot of weeding, particularly round the celeriac and the squashes which appear to be growing pretty well - though no signs of actual squashes yet... just lots of green buds.

Sprouting Rhubarb

There were also lots of insects including butterflies still desperately trying to get at our brassicas - but not succeeding.

There was fluff from groundsel and thistles blowing all over site today :-( The grass paths on our site look good but they sure do generate a lot of extra work. We mowed our paths and someone else was mowing the communal areas. The grass seed that's escaped on to the plot has grown well (grrr) and is a real pain to keep on top of.

Hot and Blighty!

We went to the plot after work as it's been a really hot day and was a lovely sunny evening. We found this mutant calendula - interesting look for a flower!

We had to cut down all the potato haulms (foliage) due to blight sweeping across the site - not at all surprising given the amount of water we've had this year and it's been very humid over the last couple of days - hopefully our tubers are mostly ok, but blighted spuds won't store. We stuck sticks in so we don't forget where each plant is!


Cleared spud plot

We also saw some exciting wildlife! Les and his son, Nathan, came down to our plot for a photo of the slow worm they found in their compost bins. It looked like it's tail had regrown at least once. We saw two frogs hopping round our plot.

Both of these are very welcome visitors.

A less welcome guest, but still interesting to see, was a mole! He was foraging through the grass, digging small holes for worms. Unfortunately my photo was too blurry to post.

As HEAT were on site for their weekly communal allotment evening there were drinks and biscuits provided, so we didn't leave till the sun had gone. HEAT (Hungerford Environment Action Team) really want more people to join in with their allotment - anyone who doesn't think they can handle a full allotment should come along to Marsh Lane on Thursdays at 7:30pm to talk to Suz or Catherine.