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!

In the Meantime

These weekends are flying by; the weeks are too, but I don't mind that so much! The previous weekend was warm and dull, but last weekend was mostly sunny and very warm. That’s when we saw this interesting cloud formation (cirrus uncinus?)

We had some rain in the week but have still needed to water, but as crops are dying back we have less watering to do (thank goodness!)

All those pumpkins, plus at least two more which have crept into the tunnel, are all on one plant! They're New England Pie variety so I'll have to try making a pumpkin pie this year. 

Some of the other squash foliage is dying back and un-ripe fruits are beginning to shrivel. The Festival still has the greenest foliage and started to produce later than the others. There aren't as many fruits as I expected; I don't know whether the Tromboncino hogged the water or whether making the plants climb used more energy. Anyway, they have a few more weeks to do their thing before they get composted if they haven’t ripened. On Sunday I decided to measure the longest tromboncino (drum roll please)… 134.5cm! It’s not a record breaker; it’s 42cm shorter than the European record!

We’ve been harvesting the sweetcorn over the last few weeks.

They are so tasty, I think I prefer the cobs grilled rather than boiled. The pollination was a bit hit and miss, with probably half of the cobs not being fully pollinated. Still enough kernels to slather in butter though 😋 

We’ve also been enjoying the Nicola potatoes, which were grown in bags. They’re very versatile and have been good roasted, baked, mashed or boiled.

Cold or hot.

Finally a couple of peppers; one red, one orange, have ripened and we’re having them in a meal tonight. I hope we get more than two peppers from the plants, but the slugs have enjoyed them sooo much 🙄

Up till now I’ve had to make do with bought peppers for lovely dishes like this (with Naked Glory soya-based strips). There are still a few more french beans to eat, but the runners have gone over.

I’ve had the last of the patty pans and I think the courgettes, which are now marrow-sized are past their best. So the year is certainly moving swiftly on. I’ve updated my allotment wildlife blog as there are so many interesting creatures about at the moment. This weekend the Ivy hedge was full of life so I made use of the macro settings on our camera, still need a bit of practice but some shots I was pleased with.

I sadly missed out on the Horticultural & Handicrafts Show this weekend because I’m still basically shielding until I get my third COVID jab. Well done to all who joined in - especially plot neighbour, Neal, who won the Banksian medal. We’ll be back next year… (hope, hope hope!) but in the meantime Neal can wear the crown 😄 Only joking, but here’s the song title by Spacehog.

So Long

I'm so happy that September has brought the heat and sunshine with it - aah, it's so welcome!

The cosmos flowers are doing weird things, as you can see. They started out with normal petals, but now they have something like an angry frill-necked lizard! Still looking beautiful though.

We emptied one of the potato bags yesterday - the haulms were chopped down a few weeks ago because of the blight. These are Nicola potatoes (2 plants). A quick rummage in the top showed that it could be a good haul.

Look at that lovely lot! Delicious small potatoes. They're very good as salad potatoes but we've enjoyed them mashed and roasted too. A couple had a bit of blight so they won't keep, but we don't intend to store them for long anyway. Talking of blight, here are the tomatoes that we saved from the blighted crop.

Lizzano are such a tasty tomato, such a shame that the growth was cut short. We're pleased that all of these semi-ripe fruits reddened up under our grow-lamp at home. Unlike the peppers which just went rotten! Clearly a fruit will only ripen if it's ready to. I'm having to make do with purchased peppers while ours are being mostly eaten by slugs in the polytunnel 😔

This lovely dish is roasted peppers, garlic and onions with olive oil and a bit of chilly with basil to make it look pretty. It's so delicious with a salad or in sandwiches and lasts for 2-3 days. I'm having it with a potato salad for lunch today, mmm, I'm looking forward to it already and it's only breakfast time 😋

We have started our first sweetcorn now. We plucked two large cobs. One was rather better pollinated than the other but still plenty of tasty kernels covered in butter. These are Early Bird. I don't think they're as tasty as the Lark that we usually grow but they are still good.

I'm back working from home after a few days off. More of my colleagues are returning to the lab but still in fairly small numbers - so many of us have found working from home to be beneficial to our work and home-life, as well as reducing our carbon footprints. I'm expecting a 3rd COVID jab to be offered in the next few weeks which could improve the immunity for immunosuppressed people. For now we're relying on other people to have the jab and take the test every now and then. Thank goodness for the allotment so I'm not desperate to travel further afield.

There's me with our longest tromboncino squash and it's still growing! I may have to enter it into our Horticultural Show just because it's so amazing 😏 There were 4 of us standing around talking about it the other day, it certainly draws attention! And that's the reason for this song title by Maya Hawke.

Monster

Well, that’s August finished.

We took home this colourful selection of veggies yesterday. The yellow courgettes are from Neal’s plot (thanks Neal) and they’re now part of a very yellow soup, along with that carrot (Five for the price of one 😄), shallots, garlic and flavoured with turmeric and sweet smoked paprika. I remembered to remove the courgette cores this time so it’s thick and creamy.

The radish are the best we’ve grown for a long time. Jamie sowed them later than we normally would.

They’ve avoided the pest damage that they usually get, but…. that may change quite soon… as I found these 3 large white butterfly caterpillars in the cage 🙄

We picked the last of the tomatoes, as you can see the blight was well and truly into the stems. The red(ish) tomatoes are under the grow lamp at home to ripen (hopefully) and the remains of the plants have gone into the green bin at home.

And I’m sorry to report another crop fail - one of the Boston squashes has succumbed to blossom end rot. Probably because of the lack of rainfall during fruit development and, although we’ve been watering a lot, clearly not enough so the plant has suffered calcium deficiency. Some of the tromboncino have also suffered, but nobody minds cutting 20cm off the bottom of them! I’ll add some lime when preparing the plot for next year.

Things aren’t all doom and gloom, though the mood isn’t helped by the weather - look at the grey sky and there was a north-easterly wind chill.

The Borlotti beans are colouring up nicely. I don’t think I’d bother with the dwarf ones again which seem to be growing at the same speed as the climbers and aren’t so prolific.

I’ve also decided to keep them all for drying as we have plenty of runner beans and dwarf french beans to eat fresh, at least for the timebeing. Borlotti are my favourite dried beans but the Gigantes are also beginning to fatten up now.

The plants are still looking very much alive, with only the foliage on the squash (not all of them) dying back. You can see the courgette plants in the background.

So, that was the last day of August and the song title is provided by The Automatic. It’s mostly referring to the carrot but it also makes me think of Winter 😩

Living in the Past

With a few days off last week I was lucky enough for them to be the sunniest we’ve had in a while. We had a barbecue at the plot. The sunshine ripened up some of our tomatoes before blight got them. Not many, but happy to have had some!

The peppers are still green and we may not get any if the slugs have their way. Each visit to the plot we check the plants and invariable another healthy looking pepper has been ruined by slug or snail damage…and sometimes we catch them in the act 😖

Eurgh, so many slugs and they’re so big!! We don’t help ourselves really, with so many hiding places on our plots. At least we’ve finally cleared a rotten raised bed that was sheltering at least 15 big orange slugs and Jamie dug through the area. There, that looks better. Our broad beans will over-Winter there.

At least most of the beans are avoiding damage and runners or french beans are part of most meals at the moment.

And there’s plenty more to make a proper meal these days.

That green squash is a tromboncino. One of the plants has produced these green fruits. The flesh is slightly more yellow than the usual light green fruits; the taste is the same, pretty bland. Quite a few of the fruits are really long but are rotting at the flower end and aren’t forming the bulbous seed end; seemingly because they haven’t been pollinated.

Our carrots wouldn’t be winning any prizes in the Horticultural Show on 18th September! Sadly we won’t be joining in this year due to my shielding from COVID-19 but at least it means we don’t have to worry about “Don’t eat that! Keep it for the show” 😄

We’ve pulled our first Kestrel potato plant. They seem to have escaped slug damage too, which is quite unusual for our potato harvests.

The song title is specifically chosen for Neal who requested some Jethro Tull. As he won the ‘HAHA Tallest sunflower’ competition last week and he insists on using imperial (10ft 3 inches) rather than metric (3.12 metres) I opted for this song title.

😄 Well done Neal! This song will be with you for days!