Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
At last we have more variety in our harvests. That was our second potato bag with a better haul of (Rocket?) spuds. The Cavolo Nero was used as crispy seaweed in a Chinese meal. The warm and showery weather over the last couple of weeks has made the plot and this plotholder a lot happier as our beds are finally filling up a bit.
The climbing beans tunnel looks quite sparse but is producing a surprising amount of beans and lots more flowers too.
They were part of this early morning, pre-work harvest along with our first courgette (the plant has been sitting in a pot for months with the weather refusing to let its fruits mature!) and our first cucumber. Mmm, home-grown mini-cucumbers are so delicious.
The larger turnips were past their best so went to the compost, but the little ones were tasty roasted with potatoes.
And this trug has our first harvest of tomatoes (well, the first that have gone home), radishes, stripey courgette and some leggy carrots (purple and orange).
We had a tasty salad with 7 home-grown ingredients. The imperfect carrots in mayo made an excellent tasty coleslaw.
These ipomoea were from seeds from my Cousin Jen. Such beautiful colours and they’re beginning to climb the frame now. Related to the dreaded bindweed, which I’m still fighting on our plot. We had a HAHA workday this weekend where we cleared a plot which has been given up. It was completely covered in white-flowering bindweed. We’re not fooling ourselves into thinking the problem is gone but now it’s covered in a plastic sheet for a while it’s at least contained. It’s been a particularly good year for bindweed 😖
The female pheasant, with her remaining two chicks likes the un-loved plots, but they’re less popular with the neighbours! The pheasant herself also has her fans and her haters!
It was breezy and unexpectedly misty and perfect for a bit of digging, so I cleared the area on our plot where the broad beans were and the leeks will soon be planted.
You can see that the soil is actually bone dry as soon as the Sun appeared.
My brother gave me these bees for my birthday, thanks Tim, they look great on the toilet which we can see from our plot and the communal area.
At our Sunday picnic last week we made use of the donated Chiminea when the Sun had gone. It was lovely and we enjoyed seeing bats zipping about around us, such fun.
Which gives me the opportunity to use Paul Simon’s great song title - dance-along now!
It's the 1st August today so I'll be logging back into work a little later after a gloriously relaxing break - and when it's hot and sunny in England who needs to travel further than their allotment? 😌
Most days were spent on the allotment, with morning and afternoon visits. It's been extremely hot, with temperatures hitting 30° at least a couple of days. We've enjoyed various picnics including hot dogs ..
And a Cornish cream tea...
We've spent some lovely time with friends popping by.
Our plots are slowly growing, but there's so much bare soil compared to previous years. I hope there's enough Summer left to produce something for us to eat..!
Harvests are sparse - we're still waiting for our first courgette - but there are plenty of salad leaves, radish and flowers to create colourful lunches.
I did the Butterfly Count on 30th July - the sunny weather has certainly increased the fluttering and buzzing: 2 x Meadow Browns 4 x Large Whites 1 x Marbled White 1 x Red Admiral 1 x Holly Blue 1 x Brimstone Of course, most of them refused to pose, but here's a red admiral and a meadow brown - I would have seen more if I'd moved to the Wildlife Plot or the meadow at the top of site, but, well, I was on holiday 😉
We've greatly enjoyed watching the swallows darting across site practising their manoeuvres. They're gathering on the wires and when they all launch together it's fabulous - impossible for me to photograph.
Another entirely different enjoyment was the deafening roar of the B52 bomber which passed overhead on its way back from the Fairford Air Show - amazing. And the two F16 fighter jets that circled a couple of times - the noise was fantastic (in peacetime).
It wasn't a sunny day but no rain. Walking on the boardwalks we saw lizards and the giant horsetail was amazing to see - ours on the allotment is puny in comparison! It was a lovely place to walk and I look forward to having a similar site minutes away from our flat!
So now I had better get ready for work and it's just rained, perhaps we'll get a thunderstorm later.. The song is provided by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas - singalong, the sun will be back later 🌞
Summer arrived - just for a day, but it was tremendously hot and sunny. So I started my holiday early by taking Friday afternoon off and we enjoyed a lovely barbecue on the plot. It was a good start to my 10-day break where hopefully more of the days are like this…
Than this!
Actually those heavy-looking clouds didn’t produce any rain. That’s fine, we’ve had plenty.. and every time it rains the molluscs turn up and eat our plants 😩 Look at this sad display!
Not a leaf left so now they’ve moved onto the flowers. A few things are getting away with less damage and we managed a tasty salad with a tasty peppery turnip.
And we had our first new potatoes Swift with it. They look good and tasted good but that was from a bag where two seed potatoes were planted so it’s a pathetic harvest - lucky there’s only two of us!!
I ventured beneath the netting on the root vegetable plot last weekend and, once I’d cleared the weeds, I found one (yes one!) parsnip, five salsify and a rather weak couple of rows of carrots - ugh, what a year! The garlic harvest was more successful and dried out in the sunshine. Some bulbs have little additional bulblets, I’m blaming the wet Spring for that.
Now, I must stop moaning! A few bees and butterflies arrived with the sunshine.
And the verbena bonariensis is looking stunning alongside the red of the crocosmia.
On Saturday a group of us plotholders were given a tour of the site for the Kennet Valley Wetland Reservewhich is 40acres of ancient water meadow which we really hope will get planning permission in the next few weeks - it’s literally 5minutes walk from our front door and will be great for us, nature and the town. Exciting!
It’s been a great start to my holiday and yesterday we had a picnic, which included a birthday cake, too much wine and a lot of laughter.
Thanks to the Dropkick Murphys for the fabulous song, though I clearly don’t agree with the sentiment 🥳 it does make me laugh. Enjoy.
What a fabulous few days! This post is brought to you by the colour red ♥️
Friday morning-ish celebratory breakfast consisted of a delicious red gooseberry topping on icecream and pancakes. Yum yum, it’s fun having a special day off.
We had a very late night on Thursday, enjoying watching the General Election results come in and the demise of the hopeless party with Labour making a welcome return to Government after 14 painful years.🌹 Even our constituency isn’t blue anymore which has only happened once before in my lifetime! We haven’t gone red - can’t see that happening - but still worthy of celebration.
Unfortunately the weather hasn’t played ball and we’ve had a lot of (cold) rain - 35mm of rain over Friday/Saturday.
We got several drenchings over the long weekend and the slugs and snails emerged from their hiding places while we were thankful to have the polytunnel to hide in!
But there were some lovely warm sunny moments between the showers.
And the soil and flowers are looking much happier after the last couple of weeks with no rainfall.
I managed to plant up some marigolds and zinnia today as well as sowing a row of Speedy dwarf French beans. The climbing French and runner beans are being very slow. This is the only flowers produced so far - not quite the flush of scarlet we like to see…
We decided to work through the rain today, mostly, and chopped back the broad beans which have provided us with so many lovely meals this year.
We cut them, rather than pulling, to let the nitrogen nodules on the roots remain in the soil - the leeks will be planted there in a few weeks. We had the judging for Hungerford in Bloom this weekend but our plots are definitely not winning any prizes!
But hopefully July and August will encourage everything to catch up, as it usually does…
We just need a little positive thinking…
And we have even more reasons to celebrate and be positive as England made it through to the Euros semi-finals yesterday! ♥️
Green Day provide the perfect song title (ok, maybe not so positive) as we move into a new era, after all surely things can only get better (😉See what I did there 🤭).
Ohh I do love a wispy cloud - especially when the sky is that blue! No enhancement necessary, beautiful! That was Saturday - a perfect day for Hungerford's D-Day commemoration events. I walked up the High Street and enjoyed seeing all the visitors sitting by the canal and lining the road, which was bedecked with flags and ribbons.
I came back to our less-crowded end of town for the 60-vehicle convoy to pass by. It was a bit late as it got stuck behind a steam engine which was also heading for Hungerford - haha, it's happened to us all! But standing waiting in the sunshine was no chore.
This old 1930s fire engine is driving past Hungerford's old fire station 😊 It was fun watching all the vehicles pass by waving and honking their horns. Oh, here's another cloud photo.
Following that interesting interlude we went back to the allotment. Such a beautiful day to sit, watch and chat but we also had a lot of work to do this weekend. I finally managed to clear the final quarter of Plot7 - almost impossible to dig, but luckily Cavolo Nero doesn't need a soft base. Fellow plotholder Mari responded to my plea for plants (thanks Mari!) so now I have 3 planted. I've put a net over them for now but it will need to be higher than that when they start growing - I'm hoping that the enviromesh will prevent whitefly which kale is so prone to.
The radish and chard that I sowed last weekend have germinated and I've sowed a row of Yin Yang beans alongside the one plant that germinated at home. I think I'll direct-sow some dwarf french beans too as the french beans on the frame on Plot3 are a bit sluggish.
We've planted our brassica into the cage on Plot3: 4 brussels sprouts and 5 purple sprouting brocolli. The ground there was rock solid too but they should appreciate that...
There are 3 sunflowers (multi-headed) planted out in the sweetcorn patch along with the 2 Festival squash and some zinnia. I'm hoping this is the 'Before' photo and quite soon that will be a lovely lush-looking plot full of flowers and foliage.... We're expecting to finish the last of the broad beans this week - they've been excellent this year - and they'll make way for the leeks in a few weeks time.
The verbena bonariensis is looking good - prettier in real life, but the lower level of the flower bed is looking rather bare. I'm sure the zinnia, marigolds and snapdragons will pretty that up quite soon, if they get a chance to fill out - although, look! It's July already 😯 Looking at last years photo we seem to be about 2 weeks behind at the moment, really hoping we get an extension to the end of the growing season.
I'm sure it'll be fine - just like the England football team who put the fans through hell last night but went on to nick the match in the final minutes! Yay- come on England 🏴
And there's a pretty potato flower - Desiree. Now, enjoy the song by CW McCall - oh those seventies movies!
And don't forget to VOTE - unless you're voting for the wrong choice in which case don't bother! 😁
