Last weekend, with the rain pouring and the storm storming, I stayed inside and baked.
I made some bread rolls. I make these all the time, (usually halving the recipe because 24 is more rolls than one woman needs, using oil instead of butter and after I’ve mixed the ingredients together to form the dough, I don’t knead them, I try to avoid kneading at all costs!), this time I made them with honey instead of sugar and as a batch instead of separately. I like them this way, they are soft and seem to stay soft longer.
I also made up the batter for gingerbread but added 5 peeled on the edge of being over ripe pears and made 18 muffins instead of one loaf. They are really good, very moist but lovely and not as fiery and my usual gingerbread.
Ma and I have decided that we will take that money and build the beds ourselves. But it’s really frustrating because I could have done that four weeks ago and then I’d be done with the beds and all I’d have to do was the pond and the compost.
However, with this news and a visit on Wednesday, when Ma almost finished the last bit of weeding and I cut some kale, filled up the bird feeders and pulled up some grass (I was only there for an hour before I had to go back to work, Ma spent the afternoon) and the impending arrival of Storm Dennis, Ma and decided that a weekend off was the way forward.
We are no further on with the list but it does need some adjustment. I’m still hopeful that I’ll be done with most of this list (we are not going to get around to the compost buying this month) but the end of the month. We have two more working weekends until March!
I knew that but what I also understand now is Lent as a season of hope, as a time of preparation for joy. Because this time of year on the plot is rough. Not much is growing and I’ve spent a lot of time on preparation, more so this year with the new half, but this time of year is all about getting the plot ready for growing. It all looks bleak but I’m trying to create the right conditions for growth without any guarantee that anything will work. You can’t harvest in summer, if you don’t plant in spring but the act of planting, guarantees nothing. It could be too dry, or too wet or a cold snap might kill all the newly emerged shoots, or the seeds might be duds, or the birds and might might eat them, or there could be an aphid attack, or the fox could use your plants as cushions, the list of things that could go wrong is long and scary.
There is no choice if I want food except to try, to prepare the soil, to sow the seeds, to hope that it works. So during Lent, I can use the plot as mediation for my spiritual life. To see Jesus’ journey to the Cross in the same light. He’s sowing seeds, preparing the way, doing all this work and sacrifice, with no guarantee it’ll work and He’ll change us, that we’ll see more, do better, be God’s hands and help others.
Lent makes more sense to me, because I can understand how God feels about me because it’s what I’m trying to do to the plot.
On Wednesday, I trimmed the verbena and Ma and I finally sowed the broad beans and netted them, we also had to remove and encroaching raspberry runner. I love raspberries but they are little buggers, look at the size of that root!
Anyway the broad bean netting is a thing of allotment beauty!
On Saturday, while Ma was taming the weeds, I got on with other stuff. First I weeded the little bed that we’d put down next to one of the squash beds. Then I took up two of the flower circles at the top of the plot. They contained verbena and carnations and dianthus. The compost from the beds, went into the little bed and the plants when into the edge of the rose bed (verbena) and the flower bed (carnations and dianthus).
Then I moved a self seeded oregano and two lavenders into the rose bed and moved one of the verbenas in the middle of the old plot. We have narcissi flowering right now, when they are done, we’ll move that last circle bed and but the narcissi in the big bed at the top. The chard did really badly in there and we decided it will be a flower bed in future. (I did buy a lot of seeds in Wilko last week)
That done Ma and I had a discussion about the long beds, so the three we ordered haven’t arrived but I really wanted to split the autumn raspberries, so we decided to move what had been the boysenberry bed until last week to where one of the new beds was going to go and split the autumn raspberries into that. We also decided that the space left would be where our blueberries could go and that we’d only have three square beds instead of four.
Ma was nearly finished so I started to tidy up. I was worried about the impending storm and the rubbish pile (it’s all weeds and cuttings, not actual rubbish) when I hit on the genius idea of using the currently empty compost bin we found in the hedgerow. We put it at the back and loaded the pile into it, it can sit there forever and rot down and be tidy! 
I also spent a couple of minutes at the back of the plot, picking up rubbish, this is the area where the shed and other assorted rubbish was and people throw stuff over the fence, so I just want to pick stuff up every time we go to start to clean it up a bit. This rubbish got taken home! Finally we filled up the bird feeders…
