Strawberry prep

What a fabulous sunny day! We were at the plot for hours but had a break at lunchtime as it was just too hot to stay out.


Strawberry bed taking shape

Jamie dug a bag of our riddled compost into the strawberry bed and then we added some Farmyard manure and banked it up a bit.
That should keep the worms happy - they'll have a couple of weeks to work the manure through the earth and then the strawberry plants will go in on top of the weed suppressant.

Strawberry bed finished

I took all the dead leaves from the bottom of the sprout plants. It's looking rather crowded in the netted area - we really should have only put 4 in there rather than 5 plants. They are in different states of growth even though they all went in together; one has produced big sprouts already and another is half the size of the others.

Tiny sprouts just starting out

Sprouts big enough to eat

We also did a lot of dead-heading and a bit of mowing - round our plots and Neal's. We used the big power mower - certainly easier than our little push-along but I found myself fighting against it a lot of the time and I did run down the plot markers several times :-}

We left at about 7:30 but it felt later. It's dark by 8:30 now :-( But look at that great sky with all the contrails - beautiful!



Stringy beans and other stuff

Quick visit to the plot after work as it was a lovely sunny afternoon and we wanted to water the tomatoes and celeriac. The aster we were given by Katherine on the HEAT plot are very pretty - you get different coloured flowers on each plant.


Lovely Asters

We picked a couple of Courgettes (including a yellow one) from Neal's plot, as he's on holiday, and one from our plant too.
These are just two of the Cornells squashes. Some are getting pretty big but they're still very light green when they should be darker with light stripes...

Cornells Bush squash

The petit pois Jamie sowed on 7th July actually have a few pods on them and there are still some French beans to eat and the peppers have grown enough to make them a bit more juicy. There are also enough autumn raspberries to snack on each visit, but probably not enough to bother taking them home :-)

However some of the last runner beans we ate are stringy (ugh, ruins a meal I think) so we probably won't risk any more, though there are loads still on the plants. What a waste!
We think the stringy-ness is due to the falling night temperatures - it got down to 5° during the week  :-(
I took a peek in the sweetcorn but it's not quite ready yet - shame I fancied that this weekend!

 

Roast veggies

Had roast veggies last night - with lovely toasty buttered bread. Mmmm, so delicious. I didn't think I was going to finish it all but I managed to force it down :-)

This is a before photo - didn't get a chance to photograph it after it was cooked as I just needed to eat it! It's beetroot, parsnip, courgette, carrot, onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme - only the garlic and olive oil weren't grown by us. Nice.

Royal British Legion Horticultural Show

Hey! This is my 200th post!
For some of the time on the plot yesterday I was trying to find a funny-shaped vegetable for the Hungerford Royal British Legion horticultural show. Unfortunately, although the carrots I pulled didn't actually look like carrots - they were the original 'Early Nantes' and had all split - they weren't actually funny, so I couldn't enter that category.

The only thing I managed to enter from the plot was a runner bean that was as long as my forearm - but I got pipped to first place by Chris' which was about 1cm longer. Never mind :-) I got some 1st, 2nd and 3rd places for some of my photos.
These are my photos that got 1st place:



"Close-up" category

"Winter" category

"Any wildlife" category

There wasn't a very good turnout for the event which we're going to try to encourage allotment-holders to join in with next year. There were a few of us there from Marsh Lane and the competition between us made it quite fun.

Flowers and wildlife

We had a bit of time on the allotment today but although Jamie was digging I was just faffing about (as is so often the case!).


Aster - such a pretty colour!

I was, of course, dead-heading and weeding. We were a bit worried by the look of our parsnips so pulled one with the grottiest looking leaves, it was looooonng and looks ok so will be having that in tomorrow's dinner.
I managed to snap a Peacock butterfly - got to be one of my faves and this is the first one this year that was willing to sit still for me.

Peacock butterfly

I also took some photos of bumblebees as there are a lot around at the moment - we could have done with a few more at the beginning of the season - they've not got much to work on at this time of year.


Bumblebees love the marigolds

I also found this little chap - it's a common green shield bug nymph. According to this amazing website it shouldn't cause us any problems on the allotment - just seemed happy hanging round the raspberry bush.


Palomena prasina Common Green Shieldbug

Then we took this trug of goodies home with us.

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!

Planes, plans and potatoes

We spent a few hours working on the plot this afternoon, it actually got pretty warm. There were lots of fellow plot-holders on site today too so there were plenty of reasons for breaks :-)
We had our own air show while we were on the site. Didn't get any photos but it was great to see the red arrows, 2 spitfires and a hercules. It seems they were flying back from an airshow near Cambridge.

Jamie finished digging out the grass on Plot8. We've decided that we'll put our strawberry bed in there, near the rhubarb - straight across where we were going to move the seating. So the bench can (probably) stay where it is - unless we definitely get another (at least) 4 years on the site in which case I want a pond and then the bench will need to be near that - but that can be decided on next year...

Anyway, where was I? So, the strawberries... we only want 8 plants as we know Geoff's did brilliantly this year and grew big bushy plants which will fill the space we've planned for them. I potted 8 of Geoff's runners - they're still attached to his plants and secured with wire until they've rooted.

We're going to plant them like Geoff's done - on that weed suppressant that you can see in the picture above.

I cut off the tops of the original broad bean plants which have succombed badly to chocolate spot - we leave the roots in the ground to add nutrients to the soil - mainly nitrogen. There's also a chance that we may get a further crop from them, but it's a bit late now really.
We got a whole bagful of dead-heads from the calendula! And riddled a bagful of lovely compost from our green bin which is now half-full of all the broad bean tops - we'll add some cardboard to that tomorrow.

Jamie found these two snails mating. Didn't have the heart to split them up but sent them to do their love-making elsewhere!
We pulled some potatoes, one of each plant:

• Orla - top left. This was one of the few Orla plants which actually survived this year. Disappointing though as there were only 3 reasonable tubers.
• Kestrel - top right. This had quite a few tubers, including a giant but one of the tubers had either slug damage or blight on it. A couple have deep ridges where they've grown against stones, but the potato should be alright for cooking.
• Chopin - bottom. Produced 7 even-sized tubers. The chopins have definitely been my favourites this year. There are a few small holes in some of them but generally they come out of the ground looking lovely and smooth with few blemishes.

We also got some more french beans and the last few broad beans from the original plants - not sure if they'll be edible.

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