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.

Not a vegetable

But my current favourite sight in the garden; this is my Yucca in flower, I think it looks pretty impressive and certainly adds some much needed colour to the garden.

Strawberry confusion

I seem to have a very confused strawberry plant, either the changeable weather has caused it to think it is July (well it is hotter now than it was in July) or the label that says Cambridge Favourite is sadly mistaken. I'm not aware of an variety, apart from the Alpine ones, that should be fruiting at this time of year

But either way I have strawberry flowers so I am keeping my fingers crossed for a few weeks of sun, who knows, I might have fresh strawberries in October!

Blighty

Life suddenly turned busy and a weekend trip to Edinburgh last weekend (yes very nice thank you) contributed to the lapse in posts but the allotment never sleeps so plenty has been going on.

The tomatoes have succumbed to blight, disappointing but fairly expected given the amount of rain we have had. I was lucky and did have some fairly hefty harvests before the blight arrived. About 50 semi-ripe tomatoes are now covering the windowsills and actually seem to be ripening up quite nicely. The Sungold variety were the outright winners this year, the small size meant they ripened up very quickly and tasted great.

I was concerned that my potatoes would also be affected by blight so I have pulled all the plants up but left the potatoes in the ground. I am hoping that they will store in the soil over winter without problems, but just in case I have a large supply stored in the shed. The Pixie potatoes are a bit bland but the Arran Victory are stunning, they are a purple skinned variety so look lovely and they taste divine. Hopefully they have also succeeded in suppressing the weeds too.

Courgettes are still going mad, I harvested 14 this week from just 2 plants! I am running out of recipes for them now, especially the marrow sized ones which are a bit too sqidgy for my liking. Luckily I have uncovered some courgette lovers at work so I am going to palm them off.

The globe artichokes are fantastic, the plants are huge and look lovely, even when rising out of a nettle patch. I have decided to let the remaining buds flower because they look so nice. Isn't it a shame that courgettes don't spoil into something so pretty?

Carrot disaster

Many months ago (well maybe 3) I sowed a row of carrots under a fleece tunnel in an attempt to avoid the dreaded carrot root fly, well today with huge anticipation I pulled up the crop and got this...

5 pitiful little carrots full of holes! It seems that the fleece provided all the other pests with a nice place to live and from the irregular growth it seems water doesn't seem to go through fleece as well as I expected.

So far this year the carrots have been the most troublesome crop, first refusing the germinate and then growing very weakly. Still at least with this lot I avoided the carrot root fly...

On the plus side there was more sweetcorn, tomatoes, courgettes (phew!) and raspberries to pick and also the first of many globe artichokes


Later...All 3 artichokes have now been eaten, simply trimmed, boiled, and accompanied by a lemon and herb butter. Yum.

National Allotment week

Today marks the beginning of National Allotment week which is great news. Sadly there are no events taking place on my plots but it is good to see that interest is high, last year there were 4 empty plots (until I grabbed mine) and now there is a waiting list as long as me arm (well maybe).

According to the BBC we can all expect our allotments to be highly productive where a "Typical annual yield is £300 of produce", or maybe not...

Still enjoy the week everyone, I think I will make a special effort to make a mid-week visit just to celebrate.

Tomatoes, sweetcorn and more

This weekend saw the first harvest of tomatoes, 16 sungold, and 3 cobs of sweetcorn, there were also a few raspberries, runner beans and plenty more courgettes. This is the first real harvest where more than 1 thing has been ready at the same time so I am very excited. The tomatoes are my first experience of a home grown tomatoes and they taste fantastic, hopefully the rest will ripen soon.

One rather normal pumpkin fruit has somehow morphed into this monster, see the pic below for some scale, I think it must be the Ghost Rider which I planted for a real Halloween pumpkin, the alternative it that is one of my baby bear pumpkins but that seems just a little unlikely. Just behind the pumpkin you can see one of the Crown Prince squash which is also growing pretty quickly. I am repeatedly being told that the soil on my allotment isn't that good, I think these two prove something rather different.

Souper allotment (abridged)

Thanks to Rach@The big sofa I now have a Wordle:

Try it yourself here