Recycling

A worn pair of jeans is my latest recycling experiment; the bin is cooling down a little due to the cold weather but I am still expecting them to be reduced to hearty compost before to long. Amazing that you can nourish your vegetables with old clothes.

Pumpkins Galore

This year turned into a great year for pumpkins and squash, fairly surprising given the lack of sunshine, I had planted 1 Ghost Rider pumpkin plant to get that perfect Halloween pumpkin and it surprised me by managing to produce 3 huge fruits. As you can see in the picture only 1 is properly ripe, hopefully the warmth of the shed will sort the other 2 out.

I also grew 4 Crown Prince plants, this is meant to be the tastiest squash variety, it certainly proved to be one of the most expensive at £2 for 4 seeds! Luckily all 4 seeds germinated and went on to be rampant plants, you can see 2 of the squash in the picture and there are another 4 still at the allotment, they have proved to be rather heavy so getting them home is a bit of a challenge.

Finally I planted 4 Baby Bear pumpkin plants which have proved to be fantastic, in total I had 15 pumpkins (4 have already been eaten). The small size is perfect for 2 so we have been enjoying lots of pumpkin roasted with cinnamon and mixed spice, don't bother peeling just wash, chop into smallish pieces and stick em in the oven for half an hour. Yummy.

Next year I am planning to grow even more squash and pumpkins, they are just so easy to grow, actually after planting them out I did absolutely nothing to them, they do need a lot of space and the seeds are very expensive so this lot of top of my seed saving list, but once you have them they taste great and should store for a few months. Failing that just turn them into soup.

Not a great picture, but I wanted to finish this post with some evidence that despite the weather, the darkness and now the clocks changing it isn't winter yet:

Allotment politics; part 2

Back in May I blogged about my antisocial nettles, now it seems I am in trouble again. Yesterday I received a letter from the council informing me that since my plot clearly hasn't been tended in some time I have been evicted!

After plenty of anger and shock I have managed to get hold of the Councilor and arrange a meeting for Tuesday so that she can convince me that it really is my plot she is talking about; I mean it is a bit messy but surely not so bad I should be evicted? Needless to say that this weekend has seen some frantic nettle clearing. I will let you know how it turns out.

Wish me luck.