Hot and Blighty!

We went to the plot after work as it's been a really hot day and was a lovely sunny evening. We found this mutant calendula - interesting look for a flower!

We had to cut down all the potato haulms (foliage) due to blight sweeping across the site - not at all surprising given the amount of water we've had this year and it's been very humid over the last couple of days - hopefully our tubers are mostly ok, but blighted spuds won't store. We stuck sticks in so we don't forget where each plant is!


Cleared spud plot

We also saw some exciting wildlife! Les and his son, Nathan, came down to our plot for a photo of the slow worm they found in their compost bins. It looked like it's tail had regrown at least once. We saw two frogs hopping round our plot.

Both of these are very welcome visitors.

A less welcome guest, but still interesting to see, was a mole! He was foraging through the grass, digging small holes for worms. Unfortunately my photo was too blurry to post.

As HEAT were on site for their weekly communal allotment evening there were drinks and biscuits provided, so we didn't leave till the sun had gone. HEAT (Hungerford Environment Action Team) really want more people to join in with their allotment - anyone who doesn't think they can handle a full allotment should come along to Marsh Lane on Thursdays at 7:30pm to talk to Suz or Catherine.

A brolly for a shed and leeks

We had some time to spend on the plot this afternoon, lovely and warm and quite sunny. We've bought a fishing umbrella. Hopefully for more sun protection as well as rain (I'm saying that quietly as we can do without rain for a few more days!).

Brolly/Shed beyond the coriander

We were offered some more leeks (thanks Malcolm!) and after losing all ours last year due to leek moth I figured it would be silly to refuse! So I puddled some into a space in the legume quarter - there was only room for 12 but if they get big that's plenty on top of the others that are growing pretty well so far under their enviromesh cover.

The sprouts have grown so tall that they were touching the top of the netting so we've added the extra struts back to the cage (we took them off when the cage blew off in the windy weather in June). We have replaced the netting but it's nice to see the sprouts looking so healthy - there's not much slug damage and no caterpillar problems so the enviromesh has done the trick so far.

There are already sprouts forming and on one of the plants they're really big - well, bigger than these little tiddlers.

When I removed the netting there were masses of spiders and beetles as well as centipedes and woodlouse but this was a prettier visitor (sorry, not you Dave!)

Shhh, no dogs allowed on the allotment!

Seasonal Firsts

It's been rainy and sunny throughout the day - torrential downpours then bright blue skies. We just a quick visit to the plot this afternoon to pick some food for a couple of dinners and to make some soup for lunches.
I was going to make cream of onion soup but once I got to the allotment I opted for my old favourite carrot and coriander as it meant I didn't have to buy any extra ingredients. This will be the first I've made from this season's carrots, so I picked 3 biggish ones, a nice big onion and some coriander leaves - the coriander has well and truly gone to seed so the leaves aren't really suitable though their smell is very strong.

Coriander, carrots, onion, french beans, courgette, broad beans & runners

We picked the first of our runners; only a handful, we're going to have mixed beans with our Quorn fillets and chivey-Kestrel mash tonight - something has been getting into the dwarf french beans, nibbling through the pods but not doing much damage.

We managed to get away before the next downpour started.

Sunshine and Showers

We had a nice couple of hours on the plot this morning - pretty warm and sunny but the wind was rather strong. Everything had grown a lot over the last 3 days! The sweet peas are looking very pretty and there are some runner beans growing long!

We pulled some potatoes:
The kestrel plant looked a bit sickly and clearly wasn't happy. We got 3 reasonably sized tubers (400g) from it, but the blight had got down into one of the tubers  :-(
The Chopin plant was the one that I had pilfered from before, but still got two lovely big healthy looking tubers (500g).
The Red Duke of York plant wasn't very happy looking but produced a fine harvest of lovely red spuds (1.3kg). It's been such a wet year, the tubers were caked in hard mud. It's hard to learn much about the different varieties this year, but Chopin really do seem to have been particularly successful... (hope I haven't spoken too soon!)

There are 4 Courgettes in the plant-uh-oh it's started :-) A couple of the sweetcorn have the male flower developing - the plants are very short though.

The kohl rabi has germinated and more of the broad beans needed cloching. I also had to cloche some parsley which I planted out last week - something has been nibbling it. We saw a tiny little froglet hopping about so hopefully he'll stay near our plot - he was smaller than the one we saw previously (only about 3cm big - aw!)

Took the netting off the parsnips as they were getting rather cramped.

We did some weeding, dead-heading and turned the compost before having to dash off because the light pitter-patter of rain turned into a torrential downpour. And look at the crowd we found in the communal shed!  :-)

Tony, Gill, Geoff and Kerry, with Jane & Derek hidden

Mmmm, lunch

With the few slices of beetroot which were left over I had a lovely lunch; with homegrown chard (red and yellow veins), spring onions, radish, lettuce and GranoVita vegetarian pepperoni - lovely!