Admin and sweet, sweet, sweetcorn

I was on leave today so spent the morning doing allotment computing stuff. I'm back on the HAHA (Hungerford Allotment Holders Association) committee as communications officer so had some stuff to do following yesterday's event; I updated the HAHA website and waiting list - we had a new person to add to the list (we've got 13 waiting for a Marsh Lane plot now) and updated the Marsh Lane Facebook page.

I also needed to contact the plotholders and a couple of visitors to the HAHA stall.
Ellie Thompson, a wood turner from The Treen Workshop was interested in the paper pot maker. We always get a lot of interest in it at events. However, we've found that our pot maker is a bit too small so we were talking about a larger one and I asked her if she could make a longer one suitable for sweetpeas.

In the afternoon I joined Jamie at the rather cold plot. He'd been deadheading and watered the strawberries - which sounds rather odd given the amount of rain we've had, but they are newly planted so need a bit of help! He also picked as many orangey tomatoes as he could find and we're redding them up at home under our LED grow-light.

I took a load of cardboard up and added to the compost with kitchen waste. I picked some carrots and courgettes and a couple of onions to make some soup. The onions are ones that flowered. Although the tops were chopped off as soon as possible the stems are weird and bulbous - it gives the onions a hard centre (Steve's information from yesterday) but I can chop round that for my soup.

Finally, we picked the two biggest sweetcorn and rushed home to get them boiled as quickly as possible. They really are super-sweet and so delicious with butter - mmmm

There were a few missing kernels but not many!

 

A Busy Weekend

Apart from work I try to avoid having busy days, so having two busy days over a weekend is very unusual for me. My idea of 'busy' on Saturday actually meant spending a few hours at a great family party!

The Garston Gallopers with party-goers

On Sunday it was the Hungerford Food Festival where HAHA had a stall so Jamie and I were there to help Ted and Kerry set up.


Wet weather didn't deter the crowds

Hundreds of people turned up even though the weather was absolutely awful; pouring with rain and chilly. The HAHA stall was placed at the top of some busy stairs so had a lot of passing visitors and it was a fun day. We had plenty of veg and jars of pickles, chutneys and jams from plotholders to show off. We also had out usual paper potters for people to make a pot - previously we've had runner beans to sow but yesterday we had 'pot up a viola'.

Julia, Jamie, my mum, Jen and Steve

During time away from the stall Jamie and I met up with my cousins from Sussex who had been to the party. Jen, Steve (who work the Freshwinds Garden), Paula, Jamie and Julia braved the awful weather and had a tour of the plot. I should have taken a photo but was too cold (hopefully Jen will let me use one our two of hers ~ Jen?!!) They've seen the plot through the blog and I was concerned that my photos make it look more impressive than it is! Luckily it was looking ok though, with quite a few veggies still growing, like the sweetcorn, celeriac, squash, calendula, kohl rabi and even the sweetpeas are still in flower. Our squashes have survived the cold temperatures so far (except the cucumber), though other squashes on site have died back.

After the site tour we returned to the food festival - I won a prize in the raffle! - and then we went home to have salsify (thanks Jerry!). I liked it, it had quite a subtle flavour -we had it with parsley sauce. You have to soak in acidified water after peeling and chopping to stop it going black and slimy. It's back on my planting list for next year  :-)

Avast me hearties!

Hoist the Jolly Roger!

It's international talk like a pirate day!
And there was frost on the caarrr in Hungerford - yaarrr, but only down to 5 degrees at t'plot - Aarrg, so all the veggies are fine aye!

Strawberries are in and first celeriac is out!

Another couple of hours on the plot today. Not sunny but pretty warm and there were a few friends to chat to for a while.
We put our strawberry plants in. Very pleased to see how much the runners had rooted in just 3 weeks!


Well-rooted strawberry runners

Managed to get the eight plants in with plenty of room for spreading and the weed suppressant hump should mean that water runs away from the strawberries... that's the plan...

We pulled our first celeriac. There were a lot more roots than I expected! Once I'd cut them back there is rather less celeriac than I've seen in shops, but plenty for our mash this evening! It smells lovely and I tasted a bit of the root - it's like a slightly more subtle celery.

Hairy celeriac

Picked lots of tomatoes and other bits for a lovely bruschetta lunch, salad for work lunches and I'm going to do a ratatouille in the week - will need at least one courgette for that but that won't be a problem!
We're really pleased with the tomatoes. We've just got the 3 plants in tubs on the plot but they're producing masses of toms. Lots of people seem to have had problems this year with blight but our tumbling variety has managed to avoid the worst of it. They have collapsed and a few toms and branches are clearly succumbing now but this is the best year so far with regards to tomatoes on our plot - we'll be looking to buy Lizzano plants again next year!

Lovely veggies!

Like a summer's day!

We had a lovely few hours in the sun today. Some fair weather cloud developed throughout the afternoon but it stayed at about 19°. You can see in the photo below how red the hedgerow has gone with all the berries. It certainly feels autumnal in the mornings but during the day it's been lovely over the last week.

There were masses of white butterflies around today and were enjoying our radishes which have seriously gone to seed but are very pretty! Talking of butterflies, the results of the 2012 Big Butterfly Count are in - my record compared fairly well with the national results, but the whites and the peacocks arrived just too late for the count - they're certainly around in abundance now!


Small white on radish flowers

And this silver y moth was enjoying the radishes too.



The big orange frog was back so looks like he's going to look after our plot for us  :-) Here's a lesson learnt though - don't leave your plastic trays around, the snails have moved in!!


Snail Hotel

I collected some of the coriander seeds - shame we're not going to have enough carrots to make soup with! There are still plenty, like these ones,which aren't dry enough to collect yet.

The Cornells bush delicata squash is developing it's stripes and the plant is still looking healthy. But the Rocky cucumber is dying off.

After a lot of weeding, scoffing a few strawberries and raspberries and some more dead-heading we went home with the plot looking pretty and tidy!