All Kinds of Everything

Aah, we’ve had two visits to the allotment this weekend. It was so sunny and beautiful. Well, not our plots, but the site in general is looking stunning because people have been furloughed and have had more time on their hands. The insect life is abundant, particularly on all the flowers.

Lots of different visitors on the leek flowers.

I think the two photos below are of the same type of bee - I think it's a Mining Bee but will add a comment if my id is corrected.

And I know these are two different hoverflies. I think the top one is a Epistrophe eligans.

And this little one in the next photo is a Marmalade Fly - one of our most common.

And this I'm sure is a Honey Bee - I hope our leek flowers don’t ruin the flavour of someone’s honey!

The site is full of butterflies, I saw lots of peacocks, tortoiseshells and skippers. This comma butterfly looks a bit the worse for wear, happily sharing the flower with a wasp.

It was such a rare pleasure to just be sitting out surrounded by nature and lovely to catch up with a few of our plotholder friends again. We actually managed to clear some rubbish from around the polytunnel, but you wouldn’t notice. This is what Plot 8 looks like at the moment :-(

I potted on the buddleia cuttings which I took from my sister’s beautiful butterfly bush last Summer. 

They've developed some great roots over the last 11 months and I now have 7 plants to find positions for around the site.

And I found this hazelnut sapling so potted it on.

There’s a plan for a Covid-19 memorial ‘Lockdown wood’ nearby - it's being organised by Newbury Friends of the Earth. Any tree seedlings we find should be saved for planting, I think it’s a lovely idea and there are hopefully going to be two sites so I hope one is close to Hungerford.

This is our main growing space this year - not many plants are there?! The Lizzano tomato looks ok, but the peppers look a bit sad, not surprisingly after the start they had and being planted out in the big wide World rather than a cosy greenhouse.

Ah well, we had a most enjoyable weekend. And I have another full week of working from home before I have a 10-day holiday - I’m hoping for lots of sunshine and some plot time, obviously!

The soppy song (originally by Dana, but not quite so gushy here by Sinead O'Connor and Terry Hall) is referring to all the different stripey insects we saw on site this weekend.

Something to Talk About

We had a visit to the plot at lunchtime today - to see if the windy weekend had done any damage. There isn't much to be damaged and it appeared to be ok. I spotted this excellent Mullein moth caterpillar - one of my favourites, they're just so photogenic!

I didn't do a blogpost at the weekend, last week was very dull. Even I couldn't think of something that was worth writing down, with just one meal that looked quite pretty - a lovely broad bean and roasted pepper salad.

Well, I have been concentrating on my embroidery. I won't do updates every week, but I thought I'd drop this photo in as I'm rather proud of my sweetcorn - they took me about 20minutes to sow each cob <it's so tricky> I don't think I'll embroider too many of them!

I'm finding myself noticing textures more and when I saw the flowers on our leeks (which have well and truly, and rather beautifully, gone to seed) I found that I was thinking 'I could sew those, with french knots and a bit of back-stitch' - Oh I've changed!

I was very pleased to see flowers on our runner beans and they're climbing now.

Not climbing quite so well are the Gigantes that Jamie sowed for me, but I think they'll latch on quite soon - if the windy weather stops blowing them away from the canes. I think only 3 of the plants will survive, but hopefully that'll produce enough beans for a few tasty meals.

A couple of the squash plants look happy, but the other two are being eaten by slugs so we'll see whether they survive... Ivan gave us a punnet of whitecurrants today - not as pretty as the red ones but they seem to taste a little sweeter - they're rather insect egg-like aren't they (and I'm pretty sure I could embroider that punnet) 😏.

Here's a picture of the frog - I'm sure there are two in our pond, this is the bigger one. That duckweed is a pain to get rid of but he doesn't mind, as it offers protection from the heat.

So, I've managed a blogpost and the title song is provided by Badly Drawn Boy.

Wow

I took Wednesday afternoon and all day Thursday off work, specifically because of the forecast heatwave and it was right. Phew, what a sweltering few days; over 30° in Hungerford and sunny. Lovely!

We spent some time at the allotment - it was so hot that there was only Jamie and me there much of the time. Us and the birds - just listen to that! What a joy to be back on the plot.

Neal said that we could have some of his lettuce seedlings. I chose the two red varieties - the green ones (Lobjoits Green cos) have all been nibbled - looks like by pigeons - whereas the red appear to be untouched (it's not that obvious in the photo, but trust me!)

I also planted the squash plants that Liz gave us (a patty pan and a spaghetti squash, I think) plus a courgette plant from Ivan - to replace one of ours that the slugs decimated. Jamie cleared some weeds from Plot3 and trimmed the long grass round the edges of Plot7, in the hope that it’ll keep the slugs away from our few plants - we don’t have enough to share this year! Unlike Ivan who always needs a wheelbarrow for his huge harvests - that’s the last of his strawberries.

He gave us a punnet of strawberries and a punnet of redcurrants. They were a colourful addition to my breakfast.

And I cooked the remaining redcurrants with sugar - they weren't as tart as I'd expected and only needed a couple of teaspoons of sugar.

I sieved the sauce - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall reckons you don't have to, but I wouldn't fancy eating all those seeds and skins.

It was delicious on ice cream and with scotch pancakes.

There were lots of butterflies on site, but they weren't in the mood for posing for photos unfortunately. I definitely saw some ringlets, tortoiseshells and peacocks among the usual whites. This Scarlet Tiger moth was easier to photograph as it came into our sitting room - dragging me away from my work :-)

As I write this we're in the middle of a hailstorm - the weather has changed: it's dazzling sunshine one moment then dark clouds covering the sky the next as the wind builds up - our poor plants, I wonder how they're doing. I hope to visit again during a lunchtime next week.

Jamie’s excited about my new project (NOT!). I saw this amazing embroidery of an allotment site (twitter.com/sewnbycollette) and was inspired, so immediately bought a selection of threads from Amazon.

Now, I haven’t embroidered for about 40 years, so mine is more, err, primitive, we’ll see how it goes... My sister kindly gave me some fabric and has lent me her old book. It’s our plot, as I’m sure you can see 😏 Well, I only started in yesterday {I wonder if it will ever be seen again on this blog :-D}

The ‘Wow’ of the title refers to various things from this week. I’m so glad that plot neighbour, Kate, told me about the stunning fields of white poppies which we could walk to from the allotment.

I didn’t expect to see so many fields of them - how beautiful! Having not walked far for weeks it was quite exhausting walking the slight incline, especially in the heat, but so worth it.

Shops and some restaurants are beginning to open up in England. Some people definitely seem to think that the time is right to get back to normal life, but I'm happy with just the occasional trip out and am not missing (non-internet) shopping one bit! Even the Government isn't suggesting a return to work for the likes of me yet - thank goodness! Great song from Kate Bush, obviously - sing along, or maybe just do the moves ;-)

The Chamber

This post is about my work, as the allotment barely had a look-in last week. I’ve mentioned before that I work for RALSpace, it’s a great place to work and over the last few years I've been supporting a very exciting new project, for the provision of a 'one-stop testing facility' for the space industry.

Literally heavy traffic on the A34

During the lockdown our site has been closed but some work had to continue, including the delivery of our huge Large Scale Test Chamber which was manufactured in Italy and shipped just as Covid-19 was beginning to affect our lives.

The A34

'Street furniture' had to be cleared in advance for the route from Southampton to Oxfordshire. As it happened lockdown was an unexpected benefit as it meant the huge convoy could do the journey in one phase, because it wasn't competing with much other road traffic at the beginning of April!

From lockdown, I was disappointed that I couldn't be taking photos from one of the bridges en-route but my colleague Isabel did such an amazing job with these shots. It must have been very exciting to see, with all the police vehicles escorting.

Once at RAL the 6 sections of chamber were stored on our empty car park for a while before the builders and engineers were ready for it to be put into its final spot in our enormous new building. It was interesting to watch over the webcam while I was working from home a few weeks ago.

There's the first section being manoeuvred into position and to start putting the 16m x 18m vacuum chamber back together...

..piece...

So shiny and beautiful

by...piece..

And voila!

Paul, Isabel and Vishal

There it is - the finished article, after so many months of preparation.

From the inside

And now the building can finish being built around it! There's a lot more work to do yet...before testing can start in 2022. I'm so pleased for the technical team that it all went so well. And special thanks to Vishal Francis and Isabel Martinez for the photos.

BBC Article, if you're interested

I only visited the allotment once last week - a quick lunchtime visit. I mostly sat in the sun and said hello to people, while Jamie planted out the courgette plants. We also put a bit of protection around the Gigantes  beans which have now germinated (hooray!). The peppers and tomato plants are also in the ground - good timing as we had some torrential rain after they were planted out. And on another visit Jamie saw our frog is still around; Can you spot him? He is in there :-)

This song is provided by The Last Shadow Puppets, I hadn't heard them before, it's the chap from the Arctic Monkeys.

Out of Control

I painted a rainbow tile for the allotment gate and we've got one for the front door :-) The rainbow has become the symbol of hope for the future (of the NHS and more) - I certainly live in hope.

I’m obviously sticking to the coronavirus advice for the clinically vulnerable, which remains in place at least until at least 30th June. I have no intention of going shopping anywhere but online for the foreseeable future.

I'm not expecting to return to the lab until next year, although some of my colleagues have already returned. The site is going to be very strange; I've seen the notices about stairways and corridors with one-way access - I'm so grateful that I can work from home, even though I miss the chit-chat with people in the corridors. It has meant that last week I was able to have a couple of visits to the allotment at lunchtimes - that's such a bonus!

Believe it or not, that is inside the polytunnel; the polytunnel with no cover - at least we didn't need to worry about damage from the windy weather last week! The courgettes, peppers and tomato are acclimatizing before they get planted out next week. What a mess :-( But not as bad as Plot3 - eek!

We were pleased to see a male bullfinch enjoying some of those seedheads though - apparently there are a couple of pairs on site this year. And our compost bins have also provided a home for wildlife ... ants - it must have got a little dry. Look at all those eggs, pupae and winged ants (they'd flown by my next visit). They've turned the compost into a lovely fine soil and won't cause any great problems, they should move on when we finally get back to doing proper composting again.

We had a little visit to the plot at lunchtime today, to feed the tomatoes and peppers. We saw a few more people (at a distance). It was so lovely to talk to some people I haven't seen in months! What a haven it is.

Our leeks from last year are going to flower as are our onions, they may not serve us this year but the bees and other insects will enjoy them and they look rather pretty too.

I was hoping to recover some more of my garlic but sadly I wasn't able to save any of the other bulbs, they had all re-sprouted and weren't worth saving. The dry weather at the crucial time when they wanted to bulb up put paid to them. But we're so pleased with the over-wintered broad beans - there are plenty more beans to harvest and they are so delicious. It's probably the best crop we've ever had.

We'll be having a broad bean curry this week and I'm trying to make Jamie believe that a broad bean casserole will be delicious - I may have to eat that all to myself - he's not convinced yet :-)

And my globe artichoke has actually grown this year, but I've missed the boat on harvesting this one. I'll probably chop it off and then there may be some more heads produced which I can eat, but it seems a shame not to leave it to flower as they are so beautiful.

This is a tiny rose that's in a pot. It's so pretty but it was the cinnabar moth that caught my eye on this visit.

The runner bean plants that Ivan gave us are looking happy, but no sign of the Gigantes beans having germinated yet. Someone has left us a selection of squash plants in the greenhouse, so I'll see about getting them planted up. We have some space on Plot7 and it would be good to have ground cover at least, so that all Neal's hard work doesn't revert to weed.

The poppies are looking beautiful, but they've seeded everywhere - this was my pot of buddleia cuttings! I'm hoping to be able to salvage at least a couple of them.

I haven't cooked anything new or interesting this week, but I thought this bruschetta lunch we had looked rather pretty - on nice seeded bread from Co-Op.

So that was my week - wholly enhanced by the plot visits. I'm looking forward to more next week, especially as I think the weather may improve. If I get too used to visiting the allotment at lunchtimes though I'll never want to go back to work!!

The great song is provided by the Chemical Brothers - make of the title what you will - the country or the plot, it's all a bit of a mess!