Reasons to be Cheerful Pt3

England is in lockdown for a month and the weather is gloomy but ... on Tuesday, a little bit of Christmas cheer visited the site. Forbes hasn’t gone completely mad, there is a reason behind this photo, but I’m not revealing today! 😀

I used the last of the focaccia mix. It was supposed to represent the classic Day of the Dead skull, but it didn’t quite turn out as intended 😂 

Oh well, it still tasted ok, dipped in celeriac and squash (thanks Jim & Martine) soup. The squash was really delicious roasted. (I’m missing all our usual home-grown squashes). Jamie bought the celeriac and some braised fennel so I also made a soup with them - my favourite soup. It will be nice to grow our own ingredients again next year.

Anyway, no whinging, this is a cheerful post! Our garlic seedlings are growing well in this mostly-mild Autumn.

Though we did get a frost (-2.5°) which has seen off the runner bean plants and begonias.

Luckily Jamie picked the remaining Gigantes beans on Tuesday, so they’re drying in the polytunnel.

And the broad beans have avoided becoming mouse food in their little cloches.

Yesterday afternoon we visited the plot to just sit awhile in the last of the sunshine and Min gave us a couple of her interesting harvest of Yakon. I hadn’t heard of it before. It grows like Jerusalem artichoke but the flavour sounds quite different. We’re drying them out as that should apparently sweeten them up. It’s always good to get to try something new, don’t you agree?

And the main reason for using Ian Dury’s great song title is the US election Result. How relieved must the non-Trump supporters feel?! Just need to move the big orange baby on now...

This is Halloween

We always enjoy celebrating Halloween with a meal followed by a horror film. This is the first year in ages that we had to buy a pumpkin rather than growing our own. Of course, the pumpkin seeds weren’t wasted. I roasted these (about 20mins on 180°) with oak-smoked oil, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. So more-ish, but afterwards, as Jamie said, it is rather like having eaten a balsa wood model airplane 😂

We managed to avoid the rain when we popped to the allotment to leave our 2020-style Jack-o-Lantern on the bench to ward off evil spirits from our plot ;-)

The creepy couple from Plot7

We had a starter of green spicy parsnip soup and for the main had our favourite Stahly’s veggie haggis with roughly mashed roast Festival squash (thanks Kate!) and roast spuds.

And for dessert we had bloody lemoncello.

So that marks the end of October 2020. What a year and we’ve just learned that England is going back into lockdown for a month from next week. It won’t make much difference to my life, particularly as allotments are still able to remain open. The song music is provided from the Nightmare Before Christmas (great) film soundtrack.

Cake

Getting out of bed for the last couple of weeks has been a struggle. The mornings have been so dark. I'm glad the clocks have changed back to GMT today, at least there may be a few weeks of getting up in daylight rather than seeming like the middle of the night! I've mentioned before that working from home is a bit too intense - staring at the screen all day, even during meetings and catch-ups with work friends and colleagues. But at least I don’t have to get up so early and drive to work. Let alone those mornings when you need to scrape the ice from the windscreen, get petrol or sit in a traffic jam.

 

We ventured out to the allotment yesterday afternoon and got a drenching, but it was nice to be outside. And I was suprised to see the Anemone de Caen in bud (photo above). I'm sure it's meant to be a Springtime flower. The weather has been quite mild but the lowest temperature on the polytunnel thermometer was just below 2°.

You can see we’ve not had a frost because the begonias are still alive and flowering. I expected our broad beans to have germinated and broken through to the surface, but no sign of them yet. As soon as they pop up we'll protect them with plastic bottle cloches, otherwise mice will enjoy them.

This is the ash tree by our plot at the end of the site's central aisle. Sadly it has Ash dieback - a disease which is apparently infecting 80% of the ashes in the country. We have a couple of other ash trees which need to be removed - it’s more obvious in them as they’re completely dead. 'Our' big one is between the site and the canal towpath so there's a debate going on about who's responsible for it. Luckily we have a plotholder who is a tree surgeon so he can advise.

On Friday night Jamie and I had our own Oktoberfest evening, you see, we’re very good at social distancing :-) The Heck veggie sausages were very tasty and a nice selection of German beers (we didn’t drink them all - honest!) and bier nuts.

You may remember the huge Tromboncino squash that somebody gave us last week. I actually did make it into a cake - the last time I made a cake was 2011! I only needed to use the long stem (the bulbed end I fried in chilli and had with other veggies for cold lunches in the week). I grated the squash and squeezed out most of the water before weighing and mixing with the other ingredients.

I used this Hairy Bikers recipe. The only changes I made were using mixed nuts, instead of walnuts, and olive oil instead of vegetable. 

It‘s very tasty and I’ve enjoyed having it for breakfast (and snacks). I wonder if the next cake I make will be in 2029?!

The B52s provide the song title.

You Cross My Path

During our not-so-frequent visits to the plot these days we find the occasional offering from fellow plotholders. They are most welcome and look at the WHOPPER we found today! A giant tromboncino courgette - Thankyou to whoever left it in our polytunnel. I’m thinking of making a courgette cake with some of it.Today it was grey, but not cold or wet so we tackled the strawberry bed. It’ll need a bit more work in the Spring, hopefully the runners I planted up recently will survive the Winter in their little pots.

Left to their own devices the plants rather took over, as you can see. And we didn’t get to eat any of the strawberries, but I’m sure the birds enjoyed them.

There, that’s a bit better. That’s the path that the title refers to, we knew it was there somewhere! We need to re-cover it with weed suppressing fabric.

There’s another path which was blocked by the enormous bramble that we’ve been fighting with. Its prickles are so sharp they pierce my gloves and tear at my skin through my trousers. 

We got rid of much of it but there’s still plenty more to clear. I’d like to cut back the ever-spreading sage, but it’s a haven for over-wintering wildlife. We uncovered lots of interesting creatures today, including this 22-spot ladybird and super-shiny blue shield bug. And the frog in the pond is tiny, only about 6cm, so not our usual frog. We think we have three different-sized visitors which is great.

So after a couple of hours work we returned home feeling that we’d achieved something. Oh, and also, our garlic has sprouted which is always good to see. I had the day off work on Friday. I needed it after last week which was far too busy, I was even dreaming about spreadsheets - not good! We had a long walk in Savernake Forest. Loads of interesting fungi, here are a few pics, and we could hear the male fallow deer calling (sounds like a long belch actually!) and saw a couple of deer flit across a path ahead of us. Aah, long weekends are such a welcome break.

The song title is provided by The Charlatans.

There Will Be Time

Look at that nice little harvest - all home-grown but mostly by Neal :-) The lettuce and french beans are from our plot... Thank goodness for other plotholders growing too much veg!

This is our black kale, one of our two tiny plants. It has grown additional leaves since it was planted but it's not going to be the huge leafy greens that everyone else has on-site... Well, mini-veg is a thing, right?!

Another addition to our mini-veg range is this - 2 plants from Min planted today (thanks Min!). It's leaf cabbage, Winter Jewel. It's a bit late in the season to be planted out but maybe the weather will stay reasonable.

After all the rain we've had it was a lovely sunny day yesterday. Jamie sowed the broad beans - 2 rows of 8 plants, that'll be 17 plants then 😃 And I hoed all the tiny weedlings that are also enjoying the weather and chopped back more of the bramble and weeds which have taken over part of plot 7.

October 2020 

In the more than 6 months of working from home the view from our window has changed to Autumn - the horse chestnut is always the first to lose all it's leaves and the other tree (sycamore?) looks lovely and bright when the morning sun hits it.

April 2020 

By the time we made it to the plot this year, ants had fully colonised our hibiscus pot so it's been struggling, but yesterday it had managed to produce it's first pretty flower of the year.

The song title is provided by Mumford and Sons with Baaba Maal - I'm sending positive thoughts to all our plants that need a bit longer to grow.

Run for Cover

It sure is wet out there! But we needed french beans.

We’ve had hours of heavy rain, I don't think it stopped at all yesterday. At least the pond is full again.

Actually it may have overflowed judging by the amount of water in the buckets!

And this is why we wanted to get the polytunnel up again, though we didn’t stay for long today. The large raised bed in the photo is where I planted the garlic, the only sign is a tiny shoot but it looked like a root rather than a growing tip! I’m sure it’ll correct itself when the rain stops.

Yesterday I made some cherry crumbles. I didn’t realise how annoying it would be to de-stone the cherries! They make a tasty dessert, but I think I’ll stick to stoneless fruit in future.

These are the beans I got from the gnarly runners I picked last week. So pretty when they’re first removed from their pods ...

They’re certainly not so attractive once cooked but I like the flavour. I had a tomato, ‘not chicken’ and bean casserole and marinated the rest in liquid smoke, tomato juice and balsamic vinegar for a tasty lunch.

I also filtered my Parma violet gin, mmm, a delicious addition to a wet October evening.

The song title is courtesy of The Killers - what a great band x

Space Enough to Grow

We have a better outlook from Plot3 now. Not only do we have our own weed-free(ish) plot, a gas stove for a brew, but also a nearby plot has been converted from this mess ...

To this...

Four new mini-plots to help reduce our waiting list, which reached double figures during lockdown and continues to grow. We expect those 4 plots to have new tenants very soon.

I took Tuesday off work to join a few of the HAHA committee to clear the 4-pole plot, neaten the edges and make three grass-seeded paths. The plot has been unloved for several years, partly due to mares tail. We've found that mini-plots get tended more often so should keep it at bay. We have mares tail on Plot3 but it hasn’t caused us any trouble.

On Sunday I planted our garlic in the raised bed, sprinkled with a little 6x. Two Carcassonne Wight bulbs provided 30 cloves - I hope we get to look after them unlike last year's batch. We also harvested our first french beans - yay, delicious! I picked a few gnarly runners to eat the beans tonight - apparently it's pretty much only the British who eat the pods, the rest of the World grows them specifically for the beans.

So back in work for a short week - I don’t stand a chance of knowing what day it is 🙄 but I know that today it’s October. What a crazy year. The song title is courtesy of Of Mice and Men.

Whats the Buzz

I was very tempted to be lazy yesterday and remain inside but I'm so glad we ventured out. 

As you can see, my macro camera decided to work really well a few times. I love these photos of various insects (Green Bottle Fly, Ivy Mining Bee and Sun Fly) on the ivy flowers in the hedge, it really was full of life. (I’m going to update my wildlife blog with more info).There were lots of other creatures that the camera didn't capture, including wasps, spiders and various other hoverflies. 

We stayed for longer than expected. There was a chilly wind,  but Plot 3 was nicely protected so we got on with more clearing and enjoyed the Autumn sunshine for several hours. The area is cleared but not dug so, if it doesn’t go cold, it’s going to be covered in weeds again. I’m just going to keep hoeing it.

That's the old polytunnel frame and I intend to use it for a squash tunnel next year (if things work out better than 2020). So holes will be dug and filled with manure in the Spring. I‘ll need to add some more trellis for the squashes to hold on.

Work has been silly-busy and it makes the weeks whizz by. We managed to pop to the plot for a bit of fresh air on a couple of lunchtimes, just to pick the last of this year's meagre harvests. They’ve been very quick visits, but it wasn’t ‘sitting’ weather anyway.

I cut off the only spaghetti squash that grew on our plant - quite a big one. And Kate kindly let us have one of her lovely Festival squash. They can stay in the polytunnel for a bit.

We had a MacSween veggie haggis in the week. We used it as stuffing for a large courgette,  it needed a bit more flavouring for my taste (I prefer the Stahly haggis). But with the excess I made this layered dish, with potatoes and tomatoes, courtesy of my sister, and our courgette on top, topped with cheese. Now that was tasty!

We added fleece protection around our 3 Speedy French beans in the week. They're the only ones we grew so don't want to miss out on eating them. As it turned out,  we didn't get a frost, but the temperature dipped to about 3° on a couple of nights. 

The song title is from the film Jesus Christ Superstar. Man, I do love those hippies