Borscht

Made borscht (Beetroot soup) for tea, using a recipe from the Vegetarian magazine ('Recipes from Under The Lime Tree'). As well as beetroot it had apple, onion, garlic, ginger and orange juice.

Prior to blending

It was really nice but even better than the taste was the colour of it! Look at this, after blending - I can see why they call is 'Beautiful Borscht'!

The final product

Best made plans..

We got to the plot in the morning to avoid the rain - but didn't get there early enough and got soaked, before running for cover in the container!

We did manage to get some of the manure dug into (what was) the onion quarter - it's going to be the legume quarter next year so we plan to overwinter some broad beans in there. We covered the dug-in manure area with black plastic to encourage worms, etc.
It should mean we start getting broad beans a few weeks earlier - unless the frost strikes too soon...

Picked a couple of massive beetroot - we wanted 400g for cooking borscht for tonight. In fact the two we picked weigh more than 500g each :-} Really should have taken the scales with us!

I also picked about 250g more of raspberries to make up some more vodka...

Geese

I think these are Canada geese, which probably means they aren't actually migrating, but it looks quite a wintery scene with them heading off and the low sun :-( It's only August!! Hopefully we still will see some lovely sunshine!!

Vapourer Moth caterpillar

Went up the plot this evening to pick peas for tea - very pleased to find that these later-sown ones was much better than the early ones. That is, we only found 2 with pea moth larvae - much happier podding this lot!
I also had to pick a courgette which had grown too massive over the last 2 days so that'll be going to work!
We found this amazing looking caterpillar sitting (and eating) our basil. It's the vapourer moth caterpillar, but a bit disappointed to see the moth it develops into isn't anywhere near as interesting looking. Best looking caterpillar I've ever seen though!!

Raspberry Vodka

Well, now we know that the raspberries that we inherited when we took over plot 8A are Autumn ones - they're better than the harvest we got in Spring (not that we look after them at all). I picked as many as I could and we made up Raspberry vodka (raspberries, vodka and sugar) - should be good to drink in at least 3 months...