Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
Last weekend I decided to pull up all the broad bean stalks and put them in the compost bin but I couldn't be so hasty to throw the remaining beans away and I actually made the broad bean hummus that I've been talking about for a while..
It was very straightforward:
Pod the beans, boil for 10mins, plunge into cold water and take the bean-skins off.
Blitz along with crushed garlic, pepper, lemon juice and a small amount of water. Add a little chilli powder. Voila - very tasty with crudites for lunch, including a cucumber from Ivan and carrot-thinnings from our plot.
We pulled our first potato Foremost from one of the bags - a lovely supply of spuds; some big but lots of little ones for salads too, they're so delicious.
And, of course, we've had plenty of courgettes. The green ones Sure Thing are very tasty; much more so than the yellow ones.
The patty pan went to work as we wouldn't have time to eat it this week.
Liz has harvested a spaghetti squash and given it to us - ours are not ready to harvest yet but let's hope we like them! We have another plant on Plot3..
The flowers are growing nicely - such beautiful colours. And we have some tomatoes just beginning to go red in the polytunnel. Last weekend I joined fellow plotholders to pick up our prizes for the Hungerford in Bloom competition - £20 garden vouchers, nice!
We've had a lot of rain this week, interspersed with sunshine. Hopefully
we'll get some time on the plot this weekend to do a bit of weeding... And then we need to start preparing for the Horticultural Show next weekend followed by a plotholder's get-together.
The song choice by Lenny Kravitz.... well, those sunflowers are our efforts for the HAHA Tallest Sunflower competition - we're not going to win, but they look nice, nodding their heads in that photo!
Wait! What? Now it's August - blimey, time is moving quickly these days!
What a great month July was though. The photo above is from 26th July and this photo below is from 5th July - such changes, with the help of a lot of sunshine and, thankfully, a final bit of torrential rain so we had a couple of days when we didn't need to water.
We've enjoyed our first meal using the Pickwick dwarf runner beans. The beans weren't as long as climbing beans, but were tasty and so many beans per plant - well worth growing to get a slightly earlier crop I would say. And Jamie thinned out the carrots - look at those beauties!
We've had a few more broad beans but there were so many weevil grubs that it put us off eating them. We've decided to stick with over-Wintered beans in future, which grew much taller and arrived before the weevil. Shame, as I was intending to make broad bean hummus with this lot. (Do you like my mini-shopping basket? Cute isn't it!)
At the end of July we finally attached the netting to our brassica cage - we've only netted half of it this year. It's a great cage, really sturdy and about 6m x 3m and just tall enough so that I can walk in it.
And then the next day we actually planted up our brassicas - Autumn cabbage, Nelson sprouts and Amazing cauliflowers. They were looking rather sad in the polytunnel - a cabbage white had discovered them - so we'll see how they do.
We have some space in there to plant some more stuff - maybe kohl rabi and some chinese vegetables for the Autumn/Winter. If we have time of course! We've lifted the shallots, which have finally bulbed up a bit more but they've been rained on so I'll pull them for storage on the next available sunny/dry day.
You can see the mole deterrent (the small green item to the left) it beeps every 30seconds or so. The mole didn't touch the shallots but burrowed through the runner beans, so not sure how useful that was!!
And here's another comparison from 26th July and 5th July - just 3 weeks, lovely!
This is a little movie of some ants dealing with a mealworm that was intended for the birds. I looked away for a moment and it was gone - I'm not sure where they moved it to, maybe down that hole!
Great song title provided by Muse - singalong, if you can hit those high notes :-)
This was a great week to have off work - amazing weather and now we've also had some very welcome rain. During sunny-ish Friday I chose an hour from 1pm to do this year's Big Butterfly Count for Butterfly Conservation.
I sat near our mass of Common Knapweed, which the bees love.
Raggedy Red Admiral
The butterflies weren't as numerous as I'd hoped. Apart from lots of cabbage whites!
We've finally planted everything, (oh, excet the brassicas): the Rocky cucumbers are in the tall pots in the front of the photo and a Jack Be Little pumpkin is to the right. This is Plot3 and we've put the mesh up for the spaghetti squash and the Cucamelon to clamber up. My sister gave it to Jamie for his birthday. It's such a tiny plant, hope it grabs the mesh soon and holds on tight!
We've had no rain, lots of heat and plenty of sunshine so have needed to water every day, but it's worth it with everything growing well. The Pickwick dwarf runners have produced masses of flowers and the beans are on their way now...
I wore Jamie's pedometer and walk about 5km everytime we have a watering session, so good practice for the 5km Race for Life walk I did in Oxford with my workmate Ruth on Sunday - I wasn't going to attempt running it. I so love Oxford that I had to take a few photos. Looks good with all the walkers wearing pink (not quite all). It supports all cancers now, not only breast cancer and these events raise a huge amount of money for research.
After having an amazing Paneer naan wrap from Kebab Kid on the Cowley Road I went home and, you guessed it, we needed to water the allotment. The High Street was closed off for Hungerford Carnival so we wandered up and stayed to watch the floats. We saw a few of our plotholder friends in the parade and watching it. Maybe next year we'll be organised enough to have a HAHA float...
We watered everything in the hot evening air, everything looking beautiful around us.
There were 7 Red Kites flying overhead! And so many butterflies fluttering by.
So pleased that some of the freesia bulbs, planted in Spring, have flowered. The fragrance is amazing.
Ivan has stripped down all his pea plants, so gave us his "left-overs". We made a delicious pea soup with garlic, onion and vegetable stock.
So that's another long weekend over - I took Monday off as a recovery day. This hot weather is so gorgeous but it wears me down a bit these days, luckily I have a week off very soon!
The song is by Dire Straits, with such a ground-breaking video in its day!
