Strawberry prep

What a fabulous sunny day! We were at the plot for hours but had a break at lunchtime as it was just too hot to stay out.


Strawberry bed taking shape

Jamie dug a bag of our riddled compost into the strawberry bed and then we added some Farmyard manure and banked it up a bit.
That should keep the worms happy - they'll have a couple of weeks to work the manure through the earth and then the strawberry plants will go in on top of the weed suppressant.

Strawberry bed finished

I took all the dead leaves from the bottom of the sprout plants. It's looking rather crowded in the netted area - we really should have only put 4 in there rather than 5 plants. They are in different states of growth even though they all went in together; one has produced big sprouts already and another is half the size of the others.

Tiny sprouts just starting out

Sprouts big enough to eat

We also did a lot of dead-heading and a bit of mowing - round our plots and Neal's. We used the big power mower - certainly easier than our little push-along but I found myself fighting against it a lot of the time and I did run down the plot markers several times :-}

We left at about 7:30 but it felt later. It's dark by 8:30 now :-( But look at that great sky with all the contrails - beautiful!



Stringy beans and other stuff

Quick visit to the plot after work as it was a lovely sunny afternoon and we wanted to water the tomatoes and celeriac. The aster we were given by Katherine on the HEAT plot are very pretty - you get different coloured flowers on each plant.


Lovely Asters

We picked a couple of Courgettes (including a yellow one) from Neal's plot, as he's on holiday, and one from our plant too.
These are just two of the Cornells squashes. Some are getting pretty big but they're still very light green when they should be darker with light stripes...

Cornells Bush squash

The petit pois Jamie sowed on 7th July actually have a few pods on them and there are still some French beans to eat and the peppers have grown enough to make them a bit more juicy. There are also enough autumn raspberries to snack on each visit, but probably not enough to bother taking them home :-)

However some of the last runner beans we ate are stringy (ugh, ruins a meal I think) so we probably won't risk any more, though there are loads still on the plants. What a waste!
We think the stringy-ness is due to the falling night temperatures - it got down to 5° during the week  :-(
I took a peek in the sweetcorn but it's not quite ready yet - shame I fancied that this weekend!

 

Roast veggies

Had roast veggies last night - with lovely toasty buttered bread. Mmmm, so delicious. I didn't think I was going to finish it all but I managed to force it down :-)

This is a before photo - didn't get a chance to photograph it after it was cooked as I just needed to eat it! It's beetroot, parsnip, courgette, carrot, onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme - only the garlic and olive oil weren't grown by us. Nice.

Royal British Legion Horticultural Show

Hey! This is my 200th post!
For some of the time on the plot yesterday I was trying to find a funny-shaped vegetable for the Hungerford Royal British Legion horticultural show. Unfortunately, although the carrots I pulled didn't actually look like carrots - they were the original 'Early Nantes' and had all split - they weren't actually funny, so I couldn't enter that category.

The only thing I managed to enter from the plot was a runner bean that was as long as my forearm - but I got pipped to first place by Chris' which was about 1cm longer. Never mind :-) I got some 1st, 2nd and 3rd places for some of my photos.
These are my photos that got 1st place:



"Close-up" category

"Winter" category

"Any wildlife" category

There wasn't a very good turnout for the event which we're going to try to encourage allotment-holders to join in with next year. There were a few of us there from Marsh Lane and the competition between us made it quite fun.

Flowers and wildlife

We had a bit of time on the allotment today but although Jamie was digging I was just faffing about (as is so often the case!).


Aster - such a pretty colour!

I was, of course, dead-heading and weeding. We were a bit worried by the look of our parsnips so pulled one with the grottiest looking leaves, it was looooonng and looks ok so will be having that in tomorrow's dinner.
I managed to snap a Peacock butterfly - got to be one of my faves and this is the first one this year that was willing to sit still for me.

Peacock butterfly

I also took some photos of bumblebees as there are a lot around at the moment - we could have done with a few more at the beginning of the season - they've not got much to work on at this time of year.


Bumblebees love the marigolds

I also found this little chap - it's a common green shield bug nymph. According to this amazing website it shouldn't cause us any problems on the allotment - just seemed happy hanging round the raspberry bush.


Palomena prasina Common Green Shieldbug

Then we took this trug of goodies home with us.