In the Cold, Cold Night

Frosted Geum

Coo, that’s chilly! I’ve never seen such spiky frost. Apparently it’s called Rime Ice and the freezing fog will have helped cause it, along with the arctic blast. It’s rather stunning, I hope you agree as here are a few more examples.

Frosted (not barbed) wire

All the wire on site was significantly thicker than usual.

And netting looked hairy.

The teasels were extra spiny.

Especially the stems!

The coreopsis flower was still just about recognisable.

And the chard… well!

Even the brassicas didn’t seem too happy, it may have been a bit too icy - even though they’re meant to taste even better after a frost (hmm, I wonder if the whitefly survived).

Cavolo Nero (top) & purple sprouting broccoli 

We enjoyed a few bubbles whilst on site.

You can see the bubble just beginning to freeze in this photo. Looks like craqueleur.

This beautiful one stayed stuck to the pot for ages.

Meanwhile Robbie enjoyed a few mealworms. Aww, poor little chap had to puff up his feathers to keep warm.

Anyway, that was quite enough playing in the cold - look at the thickness of the ice!

We’ve had a long day. We got up extra early to enjoy the Hungerford Christmas lights in a proper frosty, foggy Winter Wonderland at 4:30 this morning (4:30!). Only to find they switch the lights off at some point in the night - doh! But the super-frosted spiders webs everywhere were amazing, so it wasn’t too disappointing.

And a few lights were left on for us to enjoy.

So that was today, as the temperatures slip down again overnight….bbrrr. No snow so far, but maybe in the coming week. The White Stripes provide this perfect song title.

Golden Skans

I made the rosehip jelly - it was a bit of a palaver to be honest. Two little jars of gold - they look great, but I think they may just be super-sweet and maybe not worth the effort. We’ll find out in a couple of months… I used this recipe from LarderLove. We ended up having to buy the apples and then today someone has left bagfuls of crab apples on the freebies shelf - they would have been perfect for it. 🙄

I only had 250g of rosehips so used about 500g apples and 250g sugar plus a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice. I filtered it through coffee filter bags (I didn’t want to risk getting the itchy hairs in the jelly- yuk!) The juice was cloudy throughout the process so I was pleased when it went clear during the final part of boiling the juice with the sugar. All that sugar!

I picked the last of the squash as the temperature was forecast to fall last week. It did and reached 0.6°. I’m sorry that we only got those two Honeyboat squash, they’re usually one of my favourite squash varieties. The peppers have been delicious fried up on cheese toastie-lunches and there are plans to eat the remaining ones this week. They had to be picked because I snapped a branch off the plant by mistake. There are probably another 8 big ones that we’re still hoping will go red on the plant.

And finally the tomatoes are going red in (what’s now) the squash store. The cold nights have gone for the timebeing and we’ve had some good heavy showers. The sweetcorn is delicious but the pollination is a bit hit and miss as you can see.

We had a lovely few hours on a mostly-sunny 17° site this afternoon. My Czechmate Wight garlic arrived from DT Browns yesterday, so I planted it out. It’s a hardneck variety so hopefully we’ll get garlic scapes to eat ahead of the bulbs - two harvests from one planting 🙂

The two bulbs gave us 31 cloves! They’re on Plot3 by the leeks, in front of the squash tunnel. I’ve planted some of them a bit deeper this year, in the hope for bigger bulbs.

The squash tunnel is useful for storing the canes off the ground over Winter and we’re thinking we’ll grow our beans up the tunnel next year and have the squash elsewhere for a year.

The slugs have arrived with the rain and have found my Chinese cabbage, which is annoying! They don’t seem so keen on the pak choi so far. Jamie’s lettuce are still tiny but should provide us with a bit of salad in a few weeks if they don’t get decimated…

The chard was looking good in the sunshine. I’ll be having some more of that made into ‘crispy seaweed’, it’s my preferred way to eat chard now that the leaves are bigger.

You may remember the ugly warty Desiree potatoes from my last post. We’re pleased to report that they made delicious mashed potato and we’ll be having more tonight. We expect to have a few more courgettes this week and I’m hoping to have some roast veggies, including the smallest butternut squash - unless the courgettes get bigger than expected!

The zinnia and other flowers are still looking okay and still need deadheading, but windy weather in the week caused a bit of damage, so I have a bunch of flowers beside me. The Love-Lies-Bleeding is going to drop everywhere I think.

So that’s another weekend over, another new month begins and we had another COVID jab last week - my 6th one… I hope you can all have a good week. Here’s a great song by the Klaxons with ‘golden’ in the title, but don’t ask me what ‘skans ’ are, perhaps ‘scams’ is more apt in England at the moment.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

I remembered we have cucumber moulds, so the continuous supply of Baby cucumbers are now looking different. 

As long as they’re sealed in a plastic bag in the fridge they are still perfect after 3 days. I’ve seen some tasty recipes for them, but we’ve mostly been having them in sandwiches or with hummus dips. Jamie has made this soured cream salad with added tomatoes and salad onions a couple of times which we’ve enjoyed.

The big news this week is, of course, the weather. After the super extreme heat it actually rained - proper rain, with thunder and lightning two evenings in a row! The plots looked much healthier as a result.

On Tuesday morning we were greeted on site by a ‘flight’ of swallows (I prefer the collective noun ‘gulp’ actually) on the overhead cables and it was marvellous when they all swooped off together. And there was also a flock (a ‘charm’) of goldfinches. It was a beautiful morning actually, shame I only had an hour. The birds were clearly relieved that the rain had arrived and the extreme heat had past (thought it was still very warm).

Tuesday evening we had the most torrential downpour. We opened the windows to enjoy that welcome sound and smell.

The next morning the rain gauge showed it to have been a proper drenching - 25mm in one night.

Too late for the French beans (right) which seem to have gone over very quickly but the runners (left) are still producing flowers at the top and the borlotti/gigantes wigwam (centre) is looking bushy and healthy.

I needn’t have fretted last week. As Flighty pointed out, the cob tassels will soon arrive after the flowers start providing the pollen. And here they come on the Lark sweetcorn.

And look! The Lizzano outdoor tomato has given it’s first fruits - what a feast 😁 Well, it’s quality not quantity that counts! And you can see, there should soon be more…

Trugs are colourful at the moment with the chard and more of the Salad Blue potatoes. 

Also a Nicola potato and I podded those French beans to have with orzo (a pasta, which rather seemed like slippery rice on eating), What the Cluck and a sun-dried tomato pasta sauce.

Last night I used chard to make a sort of colcannon with the Nicola potatoes. It was very tasty, but I think I should have made sure there was less water in the chard before mixing with the spuds. Although it wasn’t sloppy, it didn’t quite mash properly. It’s served with What the Cluck and garlicky-shallots.

Today it’s feeding day for the plot, though it’s certainly beginning to feel a bit Autumnal which is sad. It’s still a lovely temperature and no rain expected today. Even the clouds in the photo below, from yesterday, didn’t produce rain. It’s probably just because we’ve got used to blue skies and sweltering heat. But there are plenty more flowers and veg on their way, lots of deadheading to do and surely more cucumbers and courgettes to pick!

Aah, this song will pretty much sum up today I think. And what a great song by the Small Faces! Can’t believe I haven’t used it before. For the rest of today, I shall be mostly speaking in cock-nay 😆

Sweet Harmony

What a month June has been. In the last week we’ve had beautiful blue skies and high temperatures (~30° on Friday) but night-time temperatures still fell to 3.4°! And now we’ve finally had some welcome rain. What a great growing-month.

So happy to have teasels on the wildlife plot

We had a couple of early morning visits to the plot in the week, to water and enjoy the sights and sounds of the waking allotment. So beautiful, but I only had an hour before returning home to start work 😔. A benefit of a morning visits is picking fresh veg to have for lunch. That scrummy salad included broad beans, radish and mangetout.

Other days we’ve had lunchtime plot visits. Aah, working from home definitely has benefits, but I have my fifth(!) COVID vaccination at the end of month so maybe things will change… we’ll see.

Those are some of the flower seedlings that I potted on a couple of weeks ago including lobelia, zinnia and love lies bleeding. In fact I planted some of them out yesterday and their roots had grown well in 2 weeks. I’m concerned for the zinnia as slugs apparently love the seedlings 😖 Will discover later whether they survived their first rainy night in the wild…

Okay, I agree, it doesn’t look much at the moment but I’m hoping that will be a riot of colour in front of our bench quite soon.. If you want colour you have to visit the wildlife plot which is looking lovely.

I’m pleased to say that the squash tunnel is now mostly planted: 2 x Honeyboat, 2 x Festival, 2 x Sunshine  and, thanks to plot-neighbour Kate, 1 x Butternut and 1 x Spaghetti.

I’ve left positions for the 2 x Winter Celebration squashes which have only just germinated, about 10 days after the other varieties. It seems that they may prefer the warmer temperatures.

The climbing beans (French, borlotti, runners and one Gigantes) are, well, climbing and yesterday I planted out the three Yin Yang dwarf French beans that managed to germinate. The mangetout have been providing small harvests for me, if they make it home, and I’ve been enjoying the Chinese Dragon radish. They’re peppery and crisp and, as you can see, much better than ‘normal’ radish.

The ‘normal’ radish have all been resigned to the compost bin as they’ve gone to seed - like they inevitably do. I don’t think I’ll bother in future; I’ll stick with the Chinese varieties.

Yesterday was a HAHA workday. We cleared the site of rubbish and surplus ‘junk’ followed by cake and a cuppa.

Which reminds me that I haven’t mentioned the HAHA stall at the jubilee picnic. I wasn’t interested in the party, but when I went along to help set-up I couldn’t resist staying to help with the stall. We made over £60 and gained three new members on the waiting list, so it was very worthwhile. Our site is currently full again, which is great.

And our plots are almost full too! We’ve planted 15 Lark sweetcorn, chard, a love lies bleeding and 2 sunflowers on the last quarter of Plot7.

So it’s been a busy month so far. I hope we get outside in some sunshine today so I’d better get off my butt!

We’ve been watching TOTP from the 1990s on BBC4, which is why the song is provided by Beloved and it refers to the DELICIOUS pairing of rhubarb and strawberries - mmmmm, that smell ❤️