The rain, brought by Storm Henk, was so torrential that there has been serious flooding in nearby towns and Hungerford’s rivers and canal have all overflowed with some houses needing to be pumped out - not us I’m pleased to say. What a truly horrible way to start the new year 😞
Here's the River Dun by the war memorial, at least 1 metre higher than it should be, with water gushing through from flooded areas upstream. Thank goodness for the marshland around Hungerford to capture most of that excess water. Nearby Marlborough didn’t fair so well…We’ve had a few visits to the plot, mostly just to plod around thinking how nasty it looks, but our leeks have survived the drenching and continue to grow. This photo shows that there has been some very welcome sunshine this year - makes a nice change to see it on a weekend!And the broad beans have grown quite tall under their protection as the weather has been mostly mild so far this Winter. We’ll leave them protected for now as the weather has turned frosty and snow is threatening over the next week…The spindly garlic is the only other sign of good things to come on the allotment.Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention. Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire. A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me. From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
Saturday 13 January 2024
Bridge over Troubled Water
Tuesday 17 January 2023
The New Year
Two weeks in and Christmas feels long forgotten, what a shame. We had such a lovely break. Here's a post-Christmas snack I made, very tasty along with the home-made carrot and patty pan chutney.
This beanfeast was flavoured with Rose Harissa and smoked paprika - it covered a couple of easy meals. The leftover celery and olives were added to a can of shop-bought mixed beans (not as good as my home-dried, but did include green beans and sweetcorn) and a carton of passata.
Now it's back to work. Luckily the weather has been so foul - since November it seems! - that there is nothing tempting me out of doors. I have been out a few times this year and we did visit the plot a couple of times but it's just soggy and not very interesting. The rain has been incessant. All the tubs, ponds and rain gauges have been filled to over-flowing. We found a dead frog by our pond 😔
Jamie removed the bottle cloches from the broad beans but a week later the little plants had been blown sideways so we've put netted cloches over them now - normally we'd add them to protect from snow but any snow forecast for us seems to have moved on for the timebeing.
Eurgh, look how soggy it is. And it's been windy so the bench is blown over every time we've visited. The garlic and leeks need weeding but that's not possible until it dries out a bit. The leeks look rather sorry for themselves and the garlic is difficult to spot amongst the grass, but there is actually quite a lot there.
The tunnel is going to be a bean tunnel, rather than a squash tunnel, this year. We figure maybe the ground would appreciate a different type of crop. The squashes didn't survive the freezing December temperature drop and sadly I had to discard most of them. I'll try to eat them quicker this year. Planning and seed buying has begun. There are a couple of new things I've ordered which I'm looking forward to growing - more on them in later posts, I hope.
We just picked some veg this weekend on a quick visit. I was pleased to see that the parsnips don't have canker and the carrots may be small but most aren't slug/fly damaged. The cavolo nero is good, but still covered in whitefly that come back to life when they warm up.
And then we went home and I turned it into a chunky soup with added tomato paste, rosemary, thyme and smoked paprika. Delish!
As I tuck into the last of that soup it's a cold and frosty day which highlights some good things about working from home: no windscreen scraping required, no icy drive on the A34 and no need to go outside (unless I want to).
The song is provided by Death Cab for Cutie. Enjoy and Happy New Year!
Thursday 30 June 2022
First of the Year
The last couple of weeks have been mostly warm, with much less rain than was threatened so we had to water every day. And there have been really windy days with sun-cloud-sun. Stupid weather doesn’t know what month it is!
Friday 2 August 2019
Time is Running Out
We've enjoyed our first meal using the Pickwick dwarf runner beans. The beans weren't as long as climbing beans, but were tasty and so many beans per plant - well worth growing to get a slightly earlier crop I would say. And Jamie thinned out the carrots - look at those beauties!
We've had a few more broad beans but there were so many weevil grubs that it put us off eating them. We've decided to stick with over-Wintered beans in future, which grew much taller and arrived before the weevil. Shame, as I was intending to make broad bean hummus with this lot. (Do you like my mini-shopping basket? Cute isn't it!)
At the end of July we finally attached the netting to our brassica cage - we've only netted half of it this year. It's a great cage, really sturdy and about 6m x 3m and just tall enough so that I can walk in it.
You can see the mole deterrent (the small green item to the left) it beeps every 30seconds or so. The mole didn't touch the shallots but burrowed through the runner beans, so not sure how useful that was!!
And here's another comparison from 26th July and 5th July - just 3 weeks, lovely!
This is a little movie of some ants dealing with a mealworm that was intended for the birds. I looked away for a moment and it was gone - I'm not sure where they moved it to, maybe down that hole!
Great song title provided by Muse - singalong, if you can hit those high notes :-)
Sunday 13 January 2019
Taste it
I spoke to Roger, a fellow plotholder, and he's decided to take on another two plots - he and his family are excellent growers and are happy to take on a couple of plots which have horsetail growing on them. Our plot 3 has this stubborn, but interesting, pre-historic weed, but it can be contained with regular digging - we've found.
Not my photo |
Jamie and I picked a few vegetables for a couple of meals and I'm making soup for lunches. Jamie's going to make one of our favourites: leek and quorn (chicken-style) in a cheese sauce with mashed potato topping. He's also intending to make bubble and squeak (potato and sprout) patties. We were very pleased to see how long the leeks have grown - it seems I must have puddled them in pretty deep as there is a lovely long bit of blanching on them.
My soup is celeriac and leek. Mmmm, I so love the smell of celeriac.
I've used half a stock cube, lots of pepper and some of this seaweed (Kelp) seasoning from Ebb Tides - a Christmas gift from my sister who lives in Devon. Lucky we're just about to have dinner otherwise there may not be much soup left for my lunches next week!
The allotment site had a delivery this weekend - that should be encouragement enough for us to actually do some digging next weekend... hmm, we'll see what the weather is doing at that point...
£1 per wheelbarrow-load to plotholders - what a bargain! |