Admin and sweet, sweet, sweetcorn

I was on leave today so spent the morning doing allotment computing stuff. I'm back on the HAHA (Hungerford Allotment Holders Association) committee as communications officer so had some stuff to do following yesterday's event; I updated the HAHA website and waiting list - we had a new person to add to the list (we've got 13 waiting for a Marsh Lane plot now) and updated the Marsh Lane Facebook page.

I also needed to contact the plotholders and a couple of visitors to the HAHA stall.
Ellie Thompson, a wood turner from The Treen Workshop was interested in the paper pot maker. We always get a lot of interest in it at events. However, we've found that our pot maker is a bit too small so we were talking about a larger one and I asked her if she could make a longer one suitable for sweetpeas.

In the afternoon I joined Jamie at the rather cold plot. He'd been deadheading and watered the strawberries - which sounds rather odd given the amount of rain we've had, but they are newly planted so need a bit of help! He also picked as many orangey tomatoes as he could find and we're redding them up at home under our LED grow-light.

I took a load of cardboard up and added to the compost with kitchen waste. I picked some carrots and courgettes and a couple of onions to make some soup. The onions are ones that flowered. Although the tops were chopped off as soon as possible the stems are weird and bulbous - it gives the onions a hard centre (Steve's information from yesterday) but I can chop round that for my soup.

Finally, we picked the two biggest sweetcorn and rushed home to get them boiled as quickly as possible. They really are super-sweet and so delicious with butter - mmmm

There were a few missing kernels but not many!

 

A Busy Weekend

Apart from work I try to avoid having busy days, so having two busy days over a weekend is very unusual for me. My idea of 'busy' on Saturday actually meant spending a few hours at a great family party!

The Garston Gallopers with party-goers

On Sunday it was the Hungerford Food Festival where HAHA had a stall so Jamie and I were there to help Ted and Kerry set up.


Wet weather didn't deter the crowds

Hundreds of people turned up even though the weather was absolutely awful; pouring with rain and chilly. The HAHA stall was placed at the top of some busy stairs so had a lot of passing visitors and it was a fun day. We had plenty of veg and jars of pickles, chutneys and jams from plotholders to show off. We also had out usual paper potters for people to make a pot - previously we've had runner beans to sow but yesterday we had 'pot up a viola'.

Julia, Jamie, my mum, Jen and Steve

During time away from the stall Jamie and I met up with my cousins from Sussex who had been to the party. Jen, Steve (who work the Freshwinds Garden), Paula, Jamie and Julia braved the awful weather and had a tour of the plot. I should have taken a photo but was too cold (hopefully Jen will let me use one our two of hers ~ Jen?!!) They've seen the plot through the blog and I was concerned that my photos make it look more impressive than it is! Luckily it was looking ok though, with quite a few veggies still growing, like the sweetcorn, celeriac, squash, calendula, kohl rabi and even the sweetpeas are still in flower. Our squashes have survived the cold temperatures so far (except the cucumber), though other squashes on site have died back.

After the site tour we returned to the food festival - I won a prize in the raffle! - and then we went home to have salsify (thanks Jerry!). I liked it, it had quite a subtle flavour -we had it with parsley sauce. You have to soak in acidified water after peeling and chopping to stop it going black and slimy. It's back on my planting list for next year  :-)

Avast me hearties!

Hoist the Jolly Roger!

It's international talk like a pirate day!
And there was frost on the caarrr in Hungerford - yaarrr, but only down to 5 degrees at t'plot - Aarrg, so all the veggies are fine aye!

Strawberries are in and first celeriac is out!

Another couple of hours on the plot today. Not sunny but pretty warm and there were a few friends to chat to for a while.
We put our strawberry plants in. Very pleased to see how much the runners had rooted in just 3 weeks!


Well-rooted strawberry runners

Managed to get the eight plants in with plenty of room for spreading and the weed suppressant hump should mean that water runs away from the strawberries... that's the plan...

We pulled our first celeriac. There were a lot more roots than I expected! Once I'd cut them back there is rather less celeriac than I've seen in shops, but plenty for our mash this evening! It smells lovely and I tasted a bit of the root - it's like a slightly more subtle celery.

Hairy celeriac

Picked lots of tomatoes and other bits for a lovely bruschetta lunch, salad for work lunches and I'm going to do a ratatouille in the week - will need at least one courgette for that but that won't be a problem!
We're really pleased with the tomatoes. We've just got the 3 plants in tubs on the plot but they're producing masses of toms. Lots of people seem to have had problems this year with blight but our tumbling variety has managed to avoid the worst of it. They have collapsed and a few toms and branches are clearly succumbing now but this is the best year so far with regards to tomatoes on our plot - we'll be looking to buy Lizzano plants again next year!

Lovely veggies!

Like a summer's day!

We had a lovely few hours in the sun today. Some fair weather cloud developed throughout the afternoon but it stayed at about 19°. You can see in the photo below how red the hedgerow has gone with all the berries. It certainly feels autumnal in the mornings but during the day it's been lovely over the last week.

There were masses of white butterflies around today and were enjoying our radishes which have seriously gone to seed but are very pretty! Talking of butterflies, the results of the 2012 Big Butterfly Count are in - my record compared fairly well with the national results, but the whites and the peacocks arrived just too late for the count - they're certainly around in abundance now!


Small white on radish flowers

And this silver y moth was enjoying the radishes too.



The big orange frog was back so looks like he's going to look after our plot for us  :-) Here's a lesson learnt though - don't leave your plastic trays around, the snails have moved in!!


Snail Hotel

I collected some of the coriander seeds - shame we're not going to have enough carrots to make soup with! There are still plenty, like these ones,which aren't dry enough to collect yet.

The Cornells bush delicata squash is developing it's stripes and the plant is still looking healthy. But the Rocky cucumber is dying off.

After a lot of weeding, scoffing a few strawberries and raspberries and some more dead-heading we went home with the plot looking pretty and tidy!

Planes, beans, parsnips

Had a walk up the plot this afternoon for some fresh air during my recuperation day. I didn't do anything strenuous, just watched Jamie watering everything. We saw two big Hercules aircraft fly over - pretty impressive.

We picked all the big runners, this may encourage new ones to grow that won't be stringy Hmm, hope so but not too sure. The nights are still getting down to 5° Such a waste otherwise. I took some home intending to freeze the podded beans - they're nice added to dishes like cottage pies and casseroles.

Our parsnips really don't look happy - don't know why the leaves have collapsed. The one I ate last week tasted ok but not too convinced that they'll last till Christmas with leaves like that!

Collapsed parsnips

 

Food, frogs and children

It was a lovely sunny, warm day again yesterday - albeit rather windy. We managed to get the weed suppressant pegged down over the strawberry bed and it looks very tidy, ready and waiting for the little strawberry plants to bed down for the winter!



8 little strawberry plants

Jamie spotted a big brown frog today - can't be the same ones that we saw earlier in the year - unless they've eaten so many slugs they've grown really quickly - that could explain the colour too, ugh!

Refusing to pose for a photo, but you can see the colour

We didn't do much else, just a bit of dead-heading (yawn) and picking veggies. Including some courgettes from Neal's plot which I'll share at work.

Nice trugful of goodies

I forgot to say that on Saturday we had to do an impromptu tour of the plot for some visiting children. They were on their first field trip as part of the Cherry Grove Saturday morning club. I showed them around our plot and let them eat some raspberries, then led them to Geoff's plot to eat his raspberries too - Geoff's on holiday but did say we could pick any that were ripe :-}



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.