Setting Sun

It’s an hour before sunset and it’s only about 3:30. Time is moving too fast for me at the moment.

After doing a bit of HAHA admin this morning, we got to the plot after lunch to do some November tidying. It felt cold but it was sunny and, after moving about a bit, I soon needed to remove my big coat. The temperature was about 10° today. During the week it dropped to -2.8° and was very frosty; We only visited the plot one lunchtime to collect a honeyboat squash, pick some sage and chard to make this delicious meal. It includes re-hydrated Borlotti, Gigantes and runner beans, shallots and garlic from the allotment too, but I had to buy the chopped tomatoes and it has smoked paprika. 

The honeyboat squash is so delicious and the dish has served me for three meals. Final night tonight and I added red chard and also made some crispy seaweed-style chard with sesame oil and seeds. (Neal, if you’re reading this, I owe you some red chard ☺️)

The broad beans have grown well over the last 3 weeks. We’ll leave their cloches on for a bit longer but don’t want them to grow too tall. The shallot bulbs have begun to sprout, but no sign of the garlic yet, although popping one back into the soil (probably a bird pulled it out) I could feel that the roots had started to grow.

The polytunnel is clear now, apart from stored squashes and now there’s room for our chairs. While Jamie was riddling the soil from the peppers grow-bags I was collecting Kestrel potatoes; one plant from a bag and one from the ground. I expect the ground-grown ones to have a few slug holes, but they all look pretty good.

We had celeriac for Halloween and this one I used in a chestnut and celeriac soup. It’s very tasty and will cover a few lunches. There are a few chunks of chestnut remaining for a bit of added interest. Yum!

Another job today was to cut off the strawberry runners which have rooted into their pots. They’ll be happy left outside, behind the polytunnel, over Winter and can be planted in the spring.

So another weekend is over. We’ve had our flu jabs and my 3rd, not booster, third COVID jab is booked for next week. Kidney transplant patients are to have two of the Pfizer jabs this time… hope they do the trick so that life can be a bit more varied and perhaps that will slow time down a bit! The song title is provided by the excellent Chemical Brothers.

The Ballad of Peter Pumpkin-head

There goes October, flying by and ending with a pumpkin-filled Halloween weekend.

On Saturday we spent much of the day cooking. Jamie made a roasted red pepper and pumpkin soup, with shallots, garlic and onion.

A great colour for a Halloween starter.

I used the other half of the pumpkin for pumpkin pie. I used this recipe, but baked the pumpkin rather than boiling it.

I was pleased to see how much pumpkin purée it produced.

The pie case was bought rather than home-made. I think it could have been a bit deeper.

I was pleased with it. A very tasty dessert…and breakfast…and lunch.

For the main course of our Halloween meal we had Veggie haggis with mushed-up roast potato and celeriac. We used the celeriac that I grew from seed. Although they were extremely slow to grow they eventually produced some pretty good veg - though nothing like the size they sell in shops. We got these two chunks from two plants.

We visited the allotment to leave two Jack-o-lanterns on the site. We carved these three.

At the plot it was sunny and warm with a clear blue sky, but an hour earlier the wind was howling and there was torrential rain. In fact it took down several trees in the area and blew a whole roof off a barn just down the road.

Luckily there was little damage on site; just a few branches, the usual compost bin lids and a couple of cages in unusual positions!

So the weekend ended with the film ‘Young Frankenstein’ (I do love Gene Wilder) whilst chomping on roasted spiced pumpkin seeds and today I have a day off work. Yay!

I expect we’ll visit the plot later. Here is XTC for the song title.

A Forest

So that's the last of this year's squash tunnel photos - I hope I didn’t hear a little cheer - the area is cleared and waiting for the trenches to be re-dug in time for the manure delivery so that I can prepare the bed for next year.

The watering funnels for the squashes do help ensure the water aims for the roots once the foliage makes it hard to tell where the plant starts, but the snails do rather take advantage!

This was last weekend. We found lots of ladybirds enjoying the last heat of the year and a lot of wasps were about too.

It was nice to have another warm weekend, but the weeds will love it if the weather doesn't cool down. We planted the Mersey White garlic bulbs and the Jermor shallots into the raised bed and they got well rained in during the past week.

I removed the remainder of the runner beans, Gigantes and Borlotti from the polytunnel roof drying area and took them home in their pods to dry out a bit more. I podded them today and was interested to find a few pods contained these plain black runner beans. They look lovely; so smooth and shiny. It seems they’re just an aberration of the parent plants, which were Scarlet Empire so I didn’t bother keeping for sowing next year - the pods didn’t look any different.

I’m keeping the beans in a paper bag in the warm for a while to completely dry out. I’ve decided not to bother drying the Gaia soya beans; they’re just too tiny to bother with.

A couple of the Festival squash seemed too small to bother with too, but today I’ve made soup using them. I roasted them first with a bit of oil and cayenne pepper.

There was more flesh than I expected when I scraped them out.

And it’s made a lovely creamy soup. I’ve added some cardamom seed which I hope will give an interesting flavour.

I’m making a pumpkin pie for the first time for Halloween next weekend. I hope it’s easy/tasty so I can use up more of our amassed New England Pie pumpkins. I definitely want the Crown Princes roasted, as they’re such a tasty variety. Not sure what I’ll do with the final green tromboncino - soup probably!

I had an afternoon off in the week. Work has been so busy and I’ve been revising for an exam on Tuesday (I know! An exam at my time of life 🙀) so it was nice to have a bit of time away from the screen. Our planned little walk around Savernake Forest, just down the road in Wiltshire, turned into a 10km walk! 

Our unused-to-walking legs were protesting by the time we reached the car and we never did find the ‘Giant Beech’ but we found the 700 year old ‘Cathedral Oak’ and other very impressive trees and fungi. I was surprised to see that most of the trees are still green.

It’s the time of year for sitting enjoying the last rays of sunshine, with a hot drink - although I was watching Jamie weeding and cutting the edges at the time 😄

The song title is provided by The Cure, there aren’t enough songs by The Cure featured in this blog!

Time of the Season

The mornings have been foggy and dark this week, but this weekend has been mostly warm and sunny. I’ve been prepping for future meals. I do enjoy seeing jars of stored beans.

The Borlotti and Gigantes came from all these pods, which have mostly been drying in the polytunnel. The Gigantes are drying slower than the other beans and haven’t produced so many pods this year.

I filled the trug yesterday, with the intention of doing the podding at home. But it was so sunny that I did it on the plot and it was very relaxing. The Borlotti lingua di fuoco 2 are great; they basically just unzip and the beans pop out. The runners, Scarlet Empire were podded last week and taken home with the peppers. The slugs definitely enjoyed more peppers than us. We’ll probably grow a smaller variety (peppers, not slugs) next year so they’re ready for picking earlier.

I had some of the podded runner beans in a dish covering a couple of meals, along with the orange pepper, chard, garlic and shallots - a fully home-grown meal. Very tasty and even better eaten a couple of days later when the flavours were enhanced. It’s apparently a peculiarly British-thing to eat the pods of runner beans, with most other nationalities growing them for the beans. And, I was surprised to see that in the US they are predominantly grown as an ornamental plant (hummingbirds love them) and are not even considered for food. See this blog, The Sharing Gardens, which is an interesting read.

My chard is looking better now than it’s looked all year, so I roasted some with sesame seeds yesterday, to eat as ‘crispy seaweed’ along with roasted veg - another fully home-grown meal, which up till now have been infrequent this year.

Jamie has some sort of flu (not COVID-19) so I’ve been to the allotment on my own a couple of times recently. I always think I don’t want to go, but am so pleased when I do. It’s such a lovely spot and there’s always someone to talk to.

Yesterday I moved all the ripe squash into the polytunnel, there are still a few more to pick as they may still further ripen. 

Now that the foliage has died back, it’s clear that we didn’t keep up with the Rocky cucumber production! That lot will go in our compost bins so it’s not really wasted and we did eat a LOT of cucumbers this year.

The kohl rabi are beginning to bulb up. I’m concerned for them because the purple sprouting broccoli (single plant) and Chinese cabbage are being chomped by something - it looks like caterpillar damage but I haven’t found the culprit yet…

We also didn’t see who tucked into the sunflower seeds, but they’ve nearly cleared all of them now.

I had a couple of hours on the sunny plot again this afternoon. I took down the runner bean and Borlotti bean plants and poles. All the foliage will go in a trench under the squash tunnel once the plants are cleared and we’re expecting a HAHA manure delivery in a week or two.

And the cycle starts again with the Aqua dulce broad beans sown under their bottle cloches.

We’re hoping the garlic and shallots will be delivered in the week so can get them planted into their prepared beds. The title song is provided by The Zombies because, well, it really is that time…

In the End

 Like other plotholders, I decided to pick the ripest squashes before the rain came.

The two blue Crown Prince aren’t very big and I was disappointed that the plants only produced one fruit each, but there will be enough for at least two meals from each squash, so I shouldn’t complain. The green stripeys are Honey Boat. I picked three and there should be more to harvest probably in a couple of weeks. They’re my second favourite tasting squash. The fancy multi-coloured Festival are my favourite for looks and taste pretty good too, there are a few more of them to come. The two round yellow squash have been confirmed as Spaghetti squash by Kate, our plot neighbour who gave us the plants. We’ve never seen fruits like that before, but they’ll be fine, just for me as Jamie doesn’t like them. 

In fact, I like them so much that I took one from our site’s ‘Freebies shelf’ the other week and had these two lovely meals. I’ve used fresh Borlotti beans in both these dishes. They are so tasty. They're boiled on the hob for 40minutes, which is the same amount of time I cook the spaghetti squash in the oven (open-side down). Then bits and bobs are added before returning to the oven for 15minutes. 

That second meal has the tiniest Nicola potatoes. I couldn’t bear to throw them away and they cooked up nicely in the oven with the tomatoes, garlic and shallots before I added the beans.

We got a good haul of Nicola potatoes from that bag.

There’s my handful of Borlotti beans, I only used 6 pods for each meal. And look how pretty the fresh beans are, though they are rather dull-looking when cooked.

Most of the beans I’m going to dry and, because of the forecast rain, I picked the semi-dried ones and have put them in the netting attached to the top of the polytunnel. There are still loads more Borlotti to pick and the Gigantes have hardly started drying on the plants yet.

The edamame are the same, they were slow to start but have podded up now and are just beginning to go over.

As well as plants dying back, there are signs of things to come.

The raised bed has been prepared for the garlic and shallots which should be delivered next week (if such deliveries aren’t affected by the HGV crisis we’re now in the middle of 🙄)

The bed is prepared and holes prepped for popping the broad beans in next month. And at the weekend we potted on some strawberry runners. The strawberry bed is a mess but we'll sort that out sometime...

So the polytunnel is looking like a storage area now for a few things and we're hoping to get a few more ripened peppers before the plants get removed.

The song is provided by Linkin Park - great song!