Face the Crowd

Hungerford was at its busiest and best again yesterday - for Hungerford Food Festival.

HAHA had our usual spot upstairs in the corner of the Town Hall room as well as having a display on the landing.

This year, we were offering free samples of makes & bakes containing veg - it was a great addition to the stand as visitors stayed talking for longer while they tasted things with unexpected ingredients! Examples were Chocolate Aubergine brownies, Parsnip, Carrot and Orange cake and, my favourite of the unusual bakes, the Celeriac  & Lemon flapjack. Ted, Liz and Kerry even managed to win prizes in the cookery competitions for their offerings - that's how tasty they were!

Kerry's Cheese and Chive scones and Jamie's Carrot Lox (vegan smoked salmon) provided the savoury choice and Karen's Ginger, Lemon and Marrow jam was very popular. Elderflower cordial and Rhubarb cordial provided delicious refreshment. Here we are in our fancy HAHA aprons.

Downstairs, the Corn Exchange was so busy that they had to restrict entry for a while so that people could actually move round the hall.

But there was lots going on outside too.

We had a delicious wood-fired pizza when I took a break from the stand.

Such fun seeing food stalls lining the High Street. And the smells were very tempting!

I bought some tasty cheeses, an almondy croissant and some Oak-smoked Chilli oil and then back up to our stand for a few more hours. We were giving away dried bay leaves and wildflower seeds as well as the recipes - everyone definitely likes a freebie!

And at the end of the afternoon, we accepted donations for the veg. Of course, I came home with plenty - some was ours but other stuff I swapped - hooray! Now I have a butternut squash. And I have a beautiful bunch of dahlias which have done so well on the allotment this year.

I'm on annual leave today to recover. Using Ivan's enormous celery (which is very green and full of flavour) and a few of our carrots and shallots I've just made some soup, with added turmeric. 

I blitzed the carrots after removing the celery - it would have been too stringy as well as a bit sharp.

It's very tasty and should cover a couple of lunches even though I couldn't resist a bowlful of it whilst writing this. The whole flat smells of celery - delicious!

So that's this year's events finished - just normal ones like skittles and workdays now until next year. Oh, and of course we've got the plots to look after!

The song title is provided by Beady Eye.

September

I see that my last post mentioned the arrival of some "welcome rain". We've had rather more than that over the last week, with some torrential downpours. I decided to do a bit of clearing indoors, but didn't get farther than looking up some recipes - for someone who rarely cooks I have quite a lot of recipe books!

We've been eating the Kestrel potatoes over the last week - very good for mash and also spicy potato wedges (which I'm preparing to have cold as I write this - olive oil, paprika, turmeric, chilli powder, chives, salt & pepper all mixed up in a bag before emptying onto the roasting tray) and tonight we're having them baked.

I made some more of the smokey marinade for the Gigantes beans which lasted a couple of weekday lunches - so tasty.

The weather has been sunshine and showers all week so we've been treated to some beautiful rainbows (this was from my window at work - the photo doesn't do it justice).

Today we got another soaking on the plot. This is the view from the polytunnel where we had to shelter - it's not obvious from the photo exactly how heavy the rain was. And it seems that next week is also going to be wet with some stronger winds thrown into the mix - hope those polytunnels and sweetcorn are still standing by next weekend! And I hope it's not too wet for the Food Festival next Sunday :-{
Luckily I had my fancy new boots on - a gift (thanks Alfie!) I certainly wouldn't pay that much for wellies, but they are lovely and comfy as well as looking great.

We only went up today to get rid of some kitchen waste to the compost bin and to pick more sweetcorn and beans.

Mmm, cooked sweetcorn with butter - nothing better, but you can see here that not all of the kernels formed on one of the cobs - we clearly should have done a bit more hand-pollination on these. We think the cobs on the other side of the block will have got more of the pollen because the wind more often blows that direction.

Here's something you don't normally expect to find at the end of September - the birds are certainly enjoying this unexpected treat!

My next post will be in October so I thought this song finishes off the month nicely, by Earth, Wind and Fire (don't even try not to sing-along).

Picture This

This has got to be the most photographed view in Hungerford this year, so I thought I'd put my version on the blog - the new planters on the bridge, provided by a voluntary group, have been so successful.

Look at that beautiful blue sky which we enjoyed yesterday with Summertime temperatures - not quite the same today, with some welcome rain.

Jamie pulled the last of the Kestrel potatoes yesterday; quite a few with slug damage but not too bad, especially as there are some massive spuds in that trug. He's sprinkled lime over the patch that he dug over yesterday and we're going to plant our onions in there for over-wintering along with Aquadulce broad beans.

I weeded two of the raised beds - ready for garlic - and the patch where the shallots were this year. I found quite a few that are in good condition to be eaten, but it wasn't a good year for our shallots. (it was a good year for thistles though!)

We've been picking tomatoes at every visit and this has been our largest red pepper.

There are still lot of peppers on the plants; they're still green but tasty even if they don't get a chance to change colour - everyone is saying that yesterday was the last day of sunshine for the year :-(

That's the last of the cucumbers, which all arrived a bit too late and mostly at the same time so they are bound for the compost bin - this one tasted ok, but was split in the middle and the skin was a bit tough.

I've picked some of the Gigantes beans and had some in a salad - dressed with soy sauce, oak-smoked olive oil, spring onion and mustard seeds. It was so delicious, I must make it again.

I'm soaking some more overnight to cook tomorrow for a tomato & bean-based lunch. It seems that they shouldn't need overnight soaking because they aren't completely dried out, but I'm playing it safe. They look good anyway as they're soaking up the water and getting even more gigantic!

We've picked a couple more Lark sweetcorn; one for inclusion in tonight's meal (along with potato and cabbage patties) and the other for my lunch tomorrow. Something is nibbling them - not sure if it's birds or mammals but the ants are enjoying them once the kernels are open to the air.

I've planted some houseleek into the giant boot from Jamie's dad's garden - I remember his mum had it overflowing with houseleeks when I first saw it and I want it to look like that again. The pond needs a bit of work, the frogs still seem happy but the weed has rather taken over.

Meanwhile, we're slowly moving to Autumn and after the HAHA AGM next week we'll be thinking about Hungerford Food Festival where we'll have our HAHA stand as usual - do come and visit us on Sunday 6th October!

The song title is provided by Blondie.

Colours

Autumn has brought the usual misty mornings with a slight chill on the air, but the last three days have (almost) returned to Summer temperatures, which is most welcome. We've been busy the last couple of weekends but have been visiting the plot most days to water and pick veg.

Cucumelon don't seem to be that popular, but I quite like them - as long as they're picked small. Anyway, they look nice and provide an interesting addition to my packed lunches occasionally.

Above is the cucumelon plant - it grows very happily outside and has rather taken over, but the little fruits are so tricky to find! Lots of immature fruits are beginning to drop off now, so I don't think there will be many more harvests.

A couple of the courgette plants have stopped producing and the leaves have developed the usual powdery mildew. We're pleased to see some of our peppers are going red; so many of them are being nibbled by something or get so heavy that the branches snap :-(

This is what the Yard Long Beans look like - that's different isn't it! They've appeared a bit late in the season. What a shame, as they look very interesting. I hope the few that have appeared get long enough and aren't too tough to at least try.

The free tomato plant that we put in the hanging basket has produced quite a lot of fruits and they're nice to eat while we're visiting Plot3 but the Aviditas in the polytunnel are providing us with all the tomatoes we need for lunches and dinners and they're still the best tomatoes we've ever tasted.

I'm still hoping for a long growing season so that my Double Red sweetcorn swell.... but it will surely not be long enough for the Glass Gem sweetcorn, which have only just developed tassles - another one to try again next year... But for lunch today I have our first Lark sweetcorn of the year - not really ripe, but we had to pick one to be sure and it tastes lovely and sweet though the kernels are a bit small.

The song, by The Prodigy, is apt because of the lovely colours our harvests are giving us at the moment.

Summer Moved On

The weekend moved us from August to Autumn. Don't be too sad, September and October can still  offer some lovely warm days.

The weekend was variable; one moment needing my raincoat and the next needing to sit down as it was so warm when the sun shone. There were also some strong winds which brought the occasional sharp shower.

The main aim of the weekend was to dig up a couple of Kestrel plants - providing us with ~7.5kg of potatoes (~16lb).

That's cleared enough space for us to get our leeks planted - I'm making the holes for leeks in the red-raincoat photo - it's easy using that big pole and leaves enough space around the tiny leek seedlings to 'puddle in'. This method should stop too much dirt getting into the leeks as they grow - eurgh, gritty leeks - yuk!

That should keep us going for a while. We have more left in the seedling pot. We'll probably fill other gaps with some of them.

The Lark sweetcorn is coming on well, should be ready in a couple of weeks I reckon. Hopefully the birds and wasps will stay off for a while longer.

As is the Double Red sweetcorn (below) but the Glass Gem has only just developed it's first male flowers - we'll be extremely lucky if we get anything off those plants before the temperature falls too low.

Another crop which has been too slow to produce is the Yard Long Beans, they're only just flowering! I sowed them at the same time as the other runner beans. I don't think they've got time to produce any beans let alone a yard long one!

The Gigantes have been more successful, producing lots of large pods. Currently no sign of them drying off which is how the beans are to be eaten.

The cucumbers have caught up with the Summer squashes now - we're trying to catch them before they get too large, but there's only so many two people can eat. Still waiting for more tomatoes to go red, but I can't resist eating some each time I visit the plot to water.

And we lost the battle with the courgettes so I cut all these off to encourage the plants to keep producing smaller ones for us to actually eat!

The Summer flowers are still looking beautiful - so pleased with the begonias which we grew from mini-plugs in March and the snapdragons that Ivan gave us as tiny skinny seedlings.

So Summer has officially moved on (song provided by A-Ha) but it's still pleasant for a little while yet..