What a Beautiful Day

A little off-topic but I had a day off work so we took a trip to Somerset to visit a lavender farm.

There were two large fields of lavender and a garden with many different varieties. It was interesting to see that the bees seemed to prefer the pinky coloured varieties (I preferred the purple).

The cream tea with a lavender scone was delicious! I feel inspired!

Apart from the scones I like the sound of  chocolate and lavender brownies or how about leek, potato and lavender soup? Yum!

I would have liked to buy one (or more) of their little plants to grow my own for culinary use next year, but didn't think the plants would appreciate the extreme heat of the car journey yesterday.

As you can see the farm had a lovely vegetable patch and look at those calendula, what a display!

After that lovely visit we made our way home via Farleigh Hungerford Castle - amazing remains of the 14th Century castle.

Thomas Hungerford who bought the original manor in 1369 was the son of Sir Robert de Hungerford who was buried in our Hungerford's St Lawrence Church in 1352. He was an MP and general bigwig in Berkshire. Interesting to know the link to our town and to wander through the castle remains, chapel and priest house.

 Thanks to The Levellers for the title song.

Growing Pains

It was such an amazing sky yesterday evening, I had to put this photo on the blog, but this post is mostly about pumpkins.

I'm preparing for the Pumpkin Competition at Hungerford Food Festival in October. I managed to get some Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds but none of them germinated. Fellow plotholder Jonathan left four pumpkin plants on our plot for us. I was so close to planting them on the empty plot that HAHA have commandeered for the competition when I remembered that they aren't pumpkins, they're Tromboncini squash plants! My "pumpkins" would have looked a bit strange compared to the others on that plot!!

So now the Tromboncini are on Plot 46A in the barrels and we're attempting to quickly germinate 2 more Atlantic Giants and 2 Jack of All Trades... We've got 3 months so hopefully we'll have something to show for it!
We've put two cucumber Mini Munch on that plot too, along with a row of swede under the netting.

At least I'm fairing a bit better with the flowers this year. We're having to water a lot as there's been no rain (apart from a few drops) for weeks. But the sunflowers and sweetpeas are doing ok. Also, I'm pleased to say that the asters got over their problem after I removed the crinkled leaves and I'm hoping the flowers will develop quite soon...

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are doing what they always do - but this year we're really trying to remove the side shoots! Flowers and a few tomatoes are appearing on the Aviditas plants and the Redcurrant, but nothing on the Tigerella yet.

My lunchtime salads will be more interesting when they have tomatoes on them, but the rogue potatoes from last week made fabulous potato salad!

So, we just have to wait for all these little plants to get bigger.. And I'm going to sow some more salady bits and beetroot to see if I can keep the production going for a bit longer this year.

Dwarf beans and sweetcorn

This song by Birdy seems appropriate at this point - enjoy!

Pretty in Pink

In May I started soaking chive flowers in white wine vinegar and now it's looking pretty in 5 small bottles with the remainder in our vinegar bottle.

It has a lovely mild onion flavour, much less over-powering than pickled onion vinegar, which makes it perfect for adding to salads. The chive flowers had faded completely in the bottle.

I strained the liquid into a jug to get rid of any loose bits of flower and dusty pollen.

And voila - looks like an apothecary! It needs to be kept out of sunlight though, otherwise the colour will fade.
The Psychedelic Furs provide the title song ...

Another Chance

We spent several hours yesterday weeding one of the mini-plots, which had to be given up by the tenant. We should have got in touch earlier and then the weeds wouldn't have been so high and the ground not so solid - it was hard work. But, we managed to clear the whole plot and cover it to avoid some future weeds appearing. So, we didn't get to work on any of our plots, but there was a reward..

That is a lot of new potatoes - at least 4 meals worth. They weren't planted by the latest plotholder, but were 'rogue potatoes' which were leftover and re-grew from potatoes growing at least two years ago!

The lettuce is lasting well as I always add chard to the salad too. As well as the mangetout which I'm barely managing to keep up with. And, look what we've got for dessert tonight...

Hooray! Our original strawberries have paid out so they can stay for a bit longer. The raspberries aren't quite so good yet - I thought I was going to find more ripe ones when I started picking them!

So, Roger Sanchez's song is for the mini-plot which gets another chance at having a growing season this year.. If we can find an interested person...

Unbelievable

Four full days (so far) of scorching temperatures (high 20s) and sunshine. Of course, we're now moaning that "it's just too hot"! Particularly in the greenhouse where it was 49.1! It also means that the watering each evening is a very busy time on the site, you've got to love a sunny evening on the plot with fellow plotholders.

 Potatoes have such pretty flowers, these are on our Desiree.

On Saturday we had another go at clearing our new plot (46a). It looked like this and our chairman thought it was abandoned and needed spraying - oops! It was just that the other plots took priority - honest!

So after a few hours in the heat on Saturday we had cleared a lot of the most bothersome weeds with seed heads. And Jamie found two blueberry bushes - bonus - and part of the plot now looks like this... Plenty more to do on there though...

I also showed two new plotholders around and they are both happily joining us along with their children, so that's a bonus - we like to see new plotholders!

I'm leaving the cage around the sunflowers, on as the stems will need some support when they reach their full height.

We've let ourselves down with the strawberries. We should have taken runners last Autumn and planted another row. We didn't and our remaining row is producing a pretty poor crop - delicious, but small fruits and ants/woodlice are tasting more than we are at the moment 🙁. Luckily there are also some strawberry plants on the new plot, so perhaps we'll get a few fruits from there...

I pulled one garlic, but it's a bit too early. I've hung it to dry out, as it'll still taste of garlic, but will leave the rest for a few more weeks.

Our Rocky cucumbers and pumpkins haven't germinated! But we bought some Mini Munch little cucumber seeds and two of those are now growing on a bit before they're ready to plant out. We're actually away for Halloween so don't really need pumpkins, but they always look nice and I'll miss the soup!
EMF singing It's Unbelievable, which is a phrase I heard on the plot about the current weather.