Heatwave - it's official!

Southern England has just moved into Level 3 Amber alert heatwave, according to the Met Office. This is because we've exceeded the threshold temperature of 30° by day and 15° overnight for at least 2 days - feels like 14 days to us!

The courgettes are making the most of all the watering we're doing - I had to put 2 big ones on the shares table today. We picked some more strawberries and I got a handful of mangetout - Malcolm provided a few more so that I've enough for my dinner tonight.

We've found more evidence of dust baths and today I found feathers - pretty sure these are pheasant feathers.

Talking of birds - take a look at the wildlife blog entry for today! Here's a teaser...the video is gruesome...



First Garlic

Another scorcher so just a couple of hours on the plot this afternoon. We walked there via Freemans Marsh and saw this lovely family of swans on the River Dun.

Whilst on the allotment we pulled our first garlic. It's still a bit green but we just had it with courgette,  tomatoes and peppers topped with cheese and pine nuts - delish!

The peppers and toms were shop-bought but we did eat our first red tomato yesterday. It didn't last long enough for a photo :-)

 

Pretty Clouds and Pretty Plants!

More sunshine and extreme temperatures over the last couple of days. It's so exhausting to move! Thank goodness for annual leave. The wildlife blog has been updated as there's so much more activity at the moment - nature seems pretty happy with the heat.

Beautiful Cirrus cloud formations on Monday when we were having a BBQ.
The asparagus pea on the HAHA plot has had a few flowers for a while and it's produced its first pod now. It's tiny at the moment; you're meant to eat them whole and raw but we're sure it should get a bit bigger first. The flowers are very pretty.

The clouds produced a nice effect with the sun - the photo doesn't quite do it justice. The evenings are warm and nights are staying in the high-teens.

 

Salad and Accent Potatoes for Dinner

Another boiling hot day meant an early morning visit, for watering the HAHA plot and Neal's plot (while he's on his hols) and then a late afternoon visit for watering our plots. It was beginning to get a bit cloudy in the afternoon but still sweltering and gorgeous!

We picked for our dinner - the first of our carrots - very skinny at the moment and super-sweet. Perfect for salad. The potato plant we pulled is Accent. Extremely tasty potatoes, but again not many tubers - though enough to cover a dinner and a lunch, so not too bad. The Atlantic turnips are delicious - they're the ones that are meant to taste of melon. We don't cook them, just have them sliced; they're peppery and so fresh tasting. Lovely.

 

Too hot to blog

Wow! The weather's been so fabulous over the last couple of weeks that I haven't had time to write a blog post! 34° in the shade today! Mrs B found it a bit hot too!

We've been going to the plot straight from work. These are the Summer evenings we missed last year.

We've been eating quite well from the allotment too - lots of salads, strawberries, a few raspberries today and the yellow Floridor squashes have started to pay out.

Our potato plan hasn't worked - the earlies are arriving later than we intended. We think they probably haven't bulked up because of the lack of rain. So we've been watering the plants a lot over the last week.

We pulled an Arran Pilot - only a very small amount of spuds (about 5 tubers) - lovely as potato salad for lunch! And we pulled a couple of the Pentland Javelins which were enough for two meals - very tasty, but in general we hope to get more than one meal per plant.

Here are some photos showing each quarter of Plot 7 - all growing nicely now!

And here's my one fennel which looks like it will actually get to grow to maturity - hope I haven't spoken too soon!

I have updated the wildlife blog as a few more insects are appearing on site.