Something for the Weekend

I've had a lovely Bank Holiday weekend. I visited my mum in her new care home in Devon staying with my sister, Carolyn, on the hottest bank holiday on record. As if Devonshire sunshine wasn't enough, the nursing home grounds were being used for a big party!

The live music, 1500+ people, a jug of Pimms and sunshine made for a fun afternoon.

My mum's room was very close to the stage so the music was incredibly loud but she enjoyed it and it didn't go on late into the evening. By the next day it was all cleared and there was little evidence of what had gone on the day before.

Before the party we went for a long walk along the Tarka Trail beside the tidal estuary of the River Taw.

Lovely scenery and interesting rock formations as well as lots of seabirds to look at - mostly gulls, oyster catchers and a curlew. We walked back past a lovely field of corn and sunflowers.

And an amazing field planted up with flowers for wildlife. Beautiful.

Both evenings we ate our meal in Carolyn and Paul's lovely garden.

They have a raised bed with veggies and I am envious of their nasturtiums which we must try growing on the allotment again next year.

The evening didn't exactly get cold but it was fun having the fire and watching the bats fly around us and the dark sky above North Devon was so clear that I saw two satellites (not the International Space Station). I've only seen them in Tenerife before.

Paul put his telescope up on the clearest night and we saw Saturn! Amazing to see it 'live' after seeing so many pictures of it. And, using his strong binoculars, we saw two of Jupiter's moons - another first for me, very exciting!

Then on my final day we took my mum out and, along with lots of other people, we watched The Legendary Grand Tour Mini rally as it drove past the manor - apparently the mini is 60 years old this year.

We think there were about 300 minis, decorated and tooting their horns.

My mum's hat blew off and went under a mini :-D Luckily it went between the wheels and survived' causing much amusement to onlookers :-)

But then I had to drive home. Luckily the journey home only took 3 hours, not the 5 hours it took to get there - the M5 was slightly less busy. Devon is so green compared to Berkshire; I couldn't resist stopping to take a photo of the stunning scenery.

And I do like to see windmills.

Today I planted up the cuttings from their beautiful buddleja which attracted so many butterflies in their garden - I hope they survive and we get more than just white butterflies on the allotment over the next few years..

Divine Comedy provide the song title.

Coming Around Again

We had a very busy weekend! Saturday was the Hungerford Horticultural Show - hosted by HAHA and the Royal British Legion.

Last Friday Jamie and I ventured to the plot to pick vegetables.
We were hampered by two things:
Not enough veg and torrential rain!

We had to pick masses of runner beans, french beans and carrots to find the necessary matching ones - how can every bean be unique?! Our runner beans have gone to seed rather quickly so most weren't suitable because the beans could be seen through the pods, but we managed to find 5 similar small ones... And one gnarly looo-oonnng one :-) So, we actually won the Longest Runner Bean category - the first time ever :-)

We also won a few other placings with potatoes, tomatoes (one had been eaten by the time we took the photo),

Carrots, onions, courgettes,

And quite a few photos, including these.

My favourite category is the 5 Different veg because it's easy to use up spares. So I made up two entries with leftovers!

In the evening we found that we came third in the Vegetables section and third in the Photography section - well, there's no prize for third place but no problem with that. I had the pleasure of awarding the RHS Banksian medal on behalf of HAHA (due to our RHS affiliation) to our chairman. I was happy to do it so I'm not sure why my face looks like that :-D

On Sunday we had our Plotholders Gathering which as always was a lot of fun. It poured in the morning but the sky cleared and we had a mostly sunny afternoon for our eating and drinking session.

The song is very appropriate as this post is very similar to this time last year. And probably this time next year - with a few more exhibitors we hope, though there were 250+ exhibits!

Sunflower

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!

Time is Running Out

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 :-)

Count it Up

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!

I retrieved this Gatekeeper from a polytunnel.

So the final count was:

• 2 x Large Whites
• 6 x Small Whites
• 2 x Gatekeepers
• 1 x Red Admiral

Shame it wasn't a bee count...

Song title provided by Field Music