Allotment Adventures: Worrying

Posted on July 19, 2017 by nicdempsey

I’m a complete basket case right now and worried about every little thing, I know it’s going ok and it looks lovely.But I have the creeping fear that it’s all going to go wrong and everything will die. Let’s start with the winter squash. This is probably my fault. The ‘squash in the box’ were I thought both Baby Blue Hubbards. This is not true one is a baby blue, the other is a Boston Squash. Ok, so all was going well, and then the bloody aphids had a go and all the baby squash got brown and died. And then this happened.

I have one massive boston squash and one baby blue that so far seem unaffected but I have about 7 weeks before they’re ready and I’m not holding out hope, except of course I am and it’s agonising!

Aphids are also the reason for the massive pick of rhubarb, did you know that rhubarb can get aphids, nope I didn’t either. But I stripped the plant and am now drowning ants on it on a regular basis. We pulled up sweetpeas next to the greenhouse because they got greenfly. The french beans have aphids too and the cucumbers have mildew. I’m a wreck of worry because I’m I am worried about tomato blight and why the patty pan has yet to produce one fruit (the ones in the produce photo are gifts from a plot neighbour.) Then Ma points out that the carrots are ok, we’ve had over two kilos of beans from three rows of plants (half a bed), that the crookneck plant is doing well, that the butternut squash plant has six squash and is a monster, that we had blight last year and got tomatoes, that we grew beetroot, that the leek and salad beds are fine, that the cucumbers are still producing, there was even kale this week and “really Nic, you just need to stop being so negative”.Easy for her to say, she ate the first ripe tomato! However, she’s right, she often is, so here are the produce pictures from last week (minus that tomato!)On Monday, I sent Kathy home with a courgette, a cucumber and a crookneck, some parsley and basil. The plums are almost ready as are the tomatoes and I need to stop being so anxious about it (especially given that yesterday I was just talking about the problem of expecting perfection!)So last weekend, we weeded, we watered, we picked and we built a new brassica cage.We also viewed the rain from the shed while having a cup of teaIt’s all ok. Some of it will go wrong and that’s ok too.

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The Problem with Perfection

Posted on July 18, 2017 by nicdempsey

I’m not a perfectionist. I like to have control over my immediate environment but I’m all about good enough. Mostly because perfection is hard work but also because perfection is unattainable. Good enough is good enough.I’ve been thinking about this recently in regards to mental health. There has been a lot in the news about the strain on the NHS, the increase in children and young adults dealing with mental health issues. CAMHS is very underfunded as is mental health care generally in the NHS and young people aren’t getting the help they need. At the same time I’ve noticed a whole raft of people posting stuff about having mental health issues most generally anxiety and depression. Also lots of what not to say to a depressed person posts (I get it, don’t tell them to pull themselves together or go for a run!)

I think that if I was 25 years younger, I’d be one of those people. I was a very unhappy teenager and young adult for absolutely no reason I could see. Ok home life wasn’t great but also it wasn’t terrible either. Fortunately, I was also rubbish at being a teenager, I did drama but I didn’t really do staying out late, getting drunk or being unsafe. I was a sensible unhappy teenager who spent most of her weekends babysitting, I was the sensible girl.I didn’t think that boys would make me feel better, I was well educated about sex and I was lucky that I had a bunch of wise older women to advise me when I wouldn’t listen to my mother. As an adult, I understand that deep down I understood that life was sometimes terrible (and at 17, I truly believed it was grim) but that you just got on with it.

I am naturally a bit depressive which comes from my father AND my grandad, so both sides of my family. However, from the viewpoint of being the most balanced and content that I have ever been, I can see there were times when I was depressed. I went to see the GP because I couldn’t sleep and had a prescription for sleeping pills but I never thought that I needed anti-depressants and I was never offered them (and I’m not in any way suggesting that people shouldn’t take them, if they help). I did eventually get some counselling (there is a famous episode when a friend suggested therapy and I replied that I would, if I could find a sensible therapist!) which gave me some coping skills and helped me recognise where I was getting in my own way. One of those ways was having ridiculous expections of myself and of other people.What I’m trying to express, probably very poorly, is that although I don’t wish to tell anyone that they don’t have mental health issues, I think that as a society we have a problem with perfect that is causing a mental health problem for young people.

That there are a bunch of people, who honestly are not making it up, but just don’t have any coping skills or resilience to not feeling great or bad things. Because we as a society haven’t taught them how to cope. My impression is that we hover over our children, giving them things they don’t need but not the time and attention they do.

I see children not being taught how to behave appropriately in public spaces and their behaviour not being dealt with. I’m not talking about tantrums here, that happens, it’s the running around cafes and restaurants, being rude to adults, not being able to be quiet in a library, the children who thought it was ok to try and take produce at the allotment open day and the parents that encouraged it.

As a society, it seems that we are overly permissive about behaviour of children but once they get a bit older, we give them phones and social media access and don’t teach them how to use it or monitor their use. We are giving children mixed messages. They are the most precious thing in the world and can be anything they want to be but we’re not paying attention to them or teaching them how they can be anything they want to be (which basically starts with ‘apply yourself’).

We expect them to be perfect, to know how to navigate the world they find themselves in and they expect their lives to be perfect. Only we haven’t taught them how much hard work perfect is and we haven’t taught them that good enough is good enough.  So we have lots of young people who don’t know how to move through feeling low because they never learnt to regulate their behaviour or emotions. They don’t know how to deal with the pressure from social media and how to cope with their lives not being instagram perfect.

As a society we struggle to be content, we struggle to deal with grey areas and imperfection. So is it actually any wonder that young people dealing with the crap hand they’ve been handed with work and housing and social pressure are struggling? And if you think about it isn’t depression and anxiety a logical outcome of all those factors? I don’t know if I’m right about this and I sure as hell don’t have any real answers, although I’d start with housing and schools and more expectation from parents about appropriate behaviour. I do think it’s something we have to pay more attention to though.

 

 

 

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Best/Worst 10 to 16 July 2017

Posted on July 17, 2017 by nicdempsey

Welcome to the new week.

Best

Rain. Finally on Tuesday, it poured down for most of the day. A day with rain is a day that I don’t have to water the plot! The rain also calmed down the pollen and that’s a really good thing…

Dinner with the Kennys. Actually dinner at Tom and Yoey’s, but Christina was there too. They are lovely and interesting and clever and if they are typical millenials, the world is going to be ok.

Worst

Work. Again. Yes it is my busy week and yes I am in migraine week so I maybe this is affecting how I feel about it. But I’m was so glad to get to the end of this week in the knowledge that there are 3 more weeks before I have a birthday and am off for a week and don’t have to run around for this meeting.

Aphids. Blackfly everywhere, greenfly on the sweetpeas. I’m seriously considering chemicals. Everyone is saying ladybirds but they are expensive and I’m broke. They are everywhere and I had to chop the borage and the rhubarb down because they were infested. Bloody ants…

Honourable mentions to the story of Oli’s Saturday run, conversations with friends, tea in the shed, gin with Ma, working from home on Friday, Sunday afternoon naps and crops..

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Friday Links

Posted on July 14, 2017 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday. Today I am working from home and have a very chilled weekend planned. Because it’s Bastille Day, I also have the French National Anthem running through my head. I love the tune but find the lyrics a bit bloodthirsty.

Here are this week’s links..

The Charlie Gard case is heartbreaking but we need to trust medical experts. When this case first went to court, I felt so sorry for Connie Yates and Chris Gard and now I still feel terrible for them but I also feel angry. Because of their behaviour this week. I get that they disagree with the doctors caring for Charlie but the way they have acted as if the hospital is out to kill Charlie. Their child isn’t going to get better, he’s never going to have the life that they wanted and he’s suffering and in pain. It is awful but it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s certainly not the fault of the NHS or Great Ormond Street or the professionals caring for him. I feel for parents in this situation because no-one wants to be in this situation but they need to listen to the doctors and do the hardest thing. Let that poor baby rest.

Fit in my 40’s. I like Zoe Williams and I know of what she speaks…

A reply to Mr Marvell from His Coy Mistress. This is silly and funny

The next election isn’t won, whatever Labour and Corbyn think. I wasn’t aware that Labour thought it was in the bag. But in less than two terms the wheels have come off for the Tories. You know Tories don’t care about the NHS and the lives they ruin, but they are at least efficient. The problem with this set is that they don’t care and can’t run a piss up in brewery. However, I love d’Anacona’s opinion pieces because he still acts like the Tories are competent, the entire mess this country is now in is down to the incompetence and hubris of the Tories. Labour in comparision, isn’t running about telling everyone how good it is while making a mess. Corbyn needs to get to grips with the right wing of the party and that means getting them onboard by explaining they need to fall in line and explaining to the left wing of the party that no-one likes an ungracious winner. They need discipline and momentum to win, but if the Tories carry on like they are doing, they might not even need that…

Steve Bannon has a painting of himself as Napoleon and Nigel Farage gave it too him. This confirms everything I every thought about the two cockwombles…..Napoleon FFS. Also and I honestly never thought I would utter the words, Napoleon had more intelligence and class than those two will ever manage….

Church’s plan to sell allotment plots. This worries me, the CofE needs to be using it’s money to build affortable housing AND promote the building of community. It really bothers me that it can’t see that both things are important. It’s the same at our site, with the local vicar writing to say how important building on our site is. I know him and I wonder if he’d feel the same if his allotment site was under threat!

Chinese umbrella-sharing start-up loses 300,000 brollies. Whoops..

Anne-Marie Morris has had the whip removed. As she should, but that phrase is not a slip of the tongue, I’d be willing to bet she uses it a lot out of the public eye and the slip is that she forgot she wasn’t in public. Elephant in the room would have expressed the same sentiment without being offensive. I don’t understand, I’m pretty old and I’ve always been taught not to say it and to understand that if black people do it then they can, but I cannot.

Why is there still so much prejudice against working-class accents? Oh, Dreda Say Mitchell, now you’re asking. It’s about how it sounds. Which is usually my problem with accents, I don’t think Angela Eagle is thick, I’m just not keen on the North-West accents whether from Liverpool or Manchester or points inbetween. I’m fine with the North-East accents, which I accept is completely arbitary. When it comes to Dreda Say Mitchell’s accent, I don’t think she’s not intelligent, but I hate the ‘oh look a working class person’ reputation she has developed for herself because she sounds like that. As if the only way to be authentic it to drop your t’s. I don’t get it, I’m a Londoner, I have a fairly standard southern London accent and I’m working class. My dad was a plumber, my mum worked in a bank, my grandad left school at 14, he and all my great aunts, who grew up in Wilesden, had pretty similar accents to me. My brother and my uncle and my cousins on my mum’s side sound like Mitchell. I don’t know why that’s the case, why my brother and I sound so different. What I do know is that people assume things about Ben that they don’t assume about me and my mum and that can limit them. Maybe she’s right and people shouldn’t make assumptions but it sounds off. In the case, of Mitchell, her accent drives me wild, it sounds like affectation, but that also could be because when I hear her on the radio, she’s usually making like her experience is all working class experience and that is just not the case. Also while I’m on the subject, I couldn’t care less if people say less instead of fewer (both are fine and less is the traditional usage!), the hill I will die on is ‘should have, could have, would have’ not ‘should of’, say it out loud, it sounds wrong.

Why Americans can’t get a raise. This is interesting. Mmm I would say that something like this is why productivity in the UK is so low.

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Summer Dinner

Posted on July 13, 2017 by nicdempsey

Last week I celebrated living in my flat for eight years. I think this is the longest space of time I’ve lived somewhere since I moved out of home. It was a Tuesday and Ma just finished her holiday and came over to see the allotment which she had missed (I think I had delighted her enough) and collect some produce.

She stayed for dinner which started with fizz and allotment raspberries.Dinner was low on cooking and making use of the allotment produce.Grilled courgettes with feta and herbs. This is one of my standard summer meals. It’s easy, there is no shortage of courgettes, the herb varies, today it was parsley from the plot but I’ve also used basil, coriander, mint and dill. Salad leaves, because we have them and they are just lovely as they are.Potato salad. The only allotment thing in this was the dill but soon, I should be able to do this with homegrown produce. This is amazing, the recipe is from Smitten Kitchen , I omitted the onion because Ma is not keen on raw onion (although next time I will probably put the sliced onion in with the cucumber to pickle a bit which would take away some of it’s bite) and I added some wholegrain mustard to the mayo. It does require some prep but it is amazingly good.

 

 

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Allotment Adventures: Harvest

Posted on July 12, 2017 by nicdempsey

After the excitement of the Open Day, this week it was time to get back to work, those of you following along will remember that last week, I had a big long list of stuff to do. Here is is in all its glory

  • Weeding, especially the strawberry, salad and courgette beds (bloody bindweed)
  • pull up the peas and relocate the bucket tomatoes
  • Sow some lettuce in the leek beds
  • Toilet rolls on the leeks on the second bed – this will blanch the stems but I’m not so worried about that but I want to see if I can stop the fox sunbathing there and destroying my crops
  • Sow the pak choi, chard etc, that I’ve been saying I’ll sow for the last couple of weeks
  • plant my cabbage plant out in the brassica bed
  • plant out the tarragon
  • sort out the strawberry runner situation
  • cover the spinach to protect it from the pigeons

as you can see we didn’t do much of it. We were out for about 5 hours, we did work, we watered and fed everything. We cleared the peas and took the bucket tomatoes outside.

We weeded the top of the plot and admired the mystery plant which is developing fluffy red flowers.I loo rolled the second leek bed in an attempt to prevent the fox using it as a sunbed!Over the week and again on Sunday I checked the tomatoes and removed lots of leaves. It looks like we’ll have quite the harvest of tomatoes, I’m both excited and apprehensive.

I also had to cut back the borage. It’s infested with blackfly and I was worried about the squash. The baby blue hubbard squash is doing really well but there were some signs of blackfly so I removed those leaves and cut back the borage. This year has been crazy for ants and thus blackfly, I think it’s the lack of rain and mild winter.Also doing really well is the butternut squash I planted on the remains of the rubbish heap, it’s a bit of a monster and look squash…We spent a lot of the time we were on the plot, harvesting. The potatoes all came out of their sack (just over 2 kilos), the french beans were ready, there were cucumbers (taking it to five for the week) it felt amazing.And on Monday morning, a photo of last year’s harvest for this week popped up. I knew that the raspberries were earlier this year and gooseberries and rhubarb have been bad but overall, I feel that there is a lot more going on this year!

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How I Grow: Beds

Posted on July 11, 2017 by nicdempsey

This year, the allotment site was entered into the Ealing in Bloom competition, we had a first visit in June and I’m told that the judges were disappointed that more of our individual allotments weren’t entered into the competition.

There is no way that I’m going to enter my plot into a contest, I was happy to win runner up for the prettiest plot but it was totally unexpected. However, it did get me thinking about how the 120 odd plot holders on the site decide to plan our plots out.

My plot was designed by accident there was no big plan just a series of small decisions. I inherited a big open space, it had been dug over the previous autumn but left to it’s own devices after that. In order to get the waiting list down and to prevent newbie allotment holders getting overwhelmed, the committee only lets out plots in half plots. Joe had decided to give up the top half of his plot so he could keep his shed and loganberries. So my new plot had no shed or storage, it did have good sun, 43 year old raspberries, three gooseberry bushes, a blackcurrent bush and two very healthy rhubarb plants.

It had been worked as an open plot, in rows the raspberries went across the plot but all the other fruit was at the side of the plot. It looked like a lot of work. So we started digging over a strip and weeding. By the time we were finished, I knew I was not going to be digging in all over once a year, I was completely shattered.

I had read a couple of how to allotment books, which stressed the importance of working 0ut a system of allotmenting that fitted in with the time you had. I knew that my allotmenting would be evening and weekends only and that I was unlikely to do anything more than watering and picking in the evenings. So a system of beds was likely to be the best option for how I wanted to garden. Also, the allotment is heavy clay, so it seemed that a system of beds would help me improve the soil, I was growing in.As I realised what I was up against, we laid down weed fabric so we could keep the weeds from spreading and I cut out beds as and went I needed them. When there was a delivery of woodchip, I covered the weed fabric with it.

The beds we had made worked well. They allowed us to weed a bed at a time and we didn’t have to be digging all the time, which I loved! Even without edging them the allotment looked well cared for. So in the autumn we (I) decided that we’d fill in some of the space that was under cover with square beds. Then when we got the metal frame down and looked at the bottom of the plot from the herb patch, I thought we could use the space for more than 2 beds and we dug it over again, covered it up and eventually bought more beds for that section and that was all our beds in.At the moment though it looks like this and I’m pretty happy with it. If I had to take it on again knowing what I know now, I would probably think about a couple of larger beds and I would get it all under cover sooner but this way of working the plot works for us, there is enough space for growing things and it makes it easy to keep on top of the work (well easy for an allotmenter, it’s straightforward but still quite a bit of work).

The thing about a plot, is that the work is never done. You can always improve on the layout because what you need it for changes depending on the season, what you’re growing and how often you can get there in a given season.

I do have plans for next season, one more long and square bed, a mini size bed by the greenhouse, We are going to take the raspberries in so I have a clear path from the shed and the greenhouse down to the rest of the plot, I want to frame some of the beds we already have in, and having talked about it for about 6 months this winter I will move the gooseberry bushes.

 

 

 

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Best/Worst 3 to 9 July 2017

Posted on July 10, 2017 by nicdempsey

Welcome to Monday, hopefully this week, will be a better week than last week was but I will be as awesome as I was last week. I did really well even though the week itself was a ‘mare.

Best

Eight years in the flat. I love where I live, the flat is so very me. Sure there are downsides to living where I do, the rent, the housework, the bills and so on, but overall, I’m lucky to have somewhere to live that’s safe and to have a decent landlord.

Family. Ma and I treked up to Ben and Laura’s for Oli’s school fete. They are lovely boys and it was fun.Crops. We’ve had courgettes and salad and raspberries. But this was the first big harvest.

Worst

Work. I had a really positive can do attittude about work this week, which work had basically kicked out of me by Friday. Never ask if the week can get any worse after a particularily bad Wednesday because Thursday will be worse!

Trains. Thursday and Friday were the days of train nightmares. No trains out of Paddington on Thursday night, severe delays on the Piccadilly on Friday morning. The really hot weather didn’t help with comfort or tempers either.

Honourable mentions to an empty train at Northfields on Wednesday. It doesn’t happen often so it should be celebrated when it does, it was the last time this week that the trains weren’t mucked up; sunshine; watering; and making cocktail cherries.

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Friday Links

Posted on July 7, 2017 by nicdempsey

God it’s been a difficult week. I started it full of optimism and cheer and it has been beaten out of me. However, all things good or bad eventually come to an end and this week has. Here are the links from this horrible, no-good, very bad week….

The pressure to leave London. Never experienced it. So couldn’t say but I am from here and maybe that makes the difference.

Spending your money on experiences not things might not make you happier. Whenever I read that I should spend my money on experiences not things, I roll my eyes because really before spouting off that line think about it. It reveals such privilege, if you have nowhere to live and no money for food then spending money on those things is going to make your live much better than going on holiday or a hot air balloon ride. If you have secure housing and money to meet your basic day to day needs (and think about all of the things that you can’t do without, that make your life easy – food, housing, clothing, a phone, a computer, a bed, a sofa, a fridge – the list is pretty big even if you are a minimalist.) Then, yeah, things might not make you more happy and experiences might. But that list of essentials is a pretty big ask in monetary terms and people who all of that spouting about experiences over stuff is really annoying.

The Declaration of Independence in a tweet. This is fun but I still like the person who wished the US ‘Happy Treason Day’ best

Sali Hughes on not changing her name when she gets married. Absolutely. I’m not attacted to my name because it was my father’s or is the rest of my family’s surname. It’s mine, I’ve always had it. And because of this:

It seems to me that the trend for maintaining one’s own legal identity is less about stating my feminism, more enjoying the self-worth and maintaining the individual status that hard-fought progressive feminism has given me. I’m not keeping my name to make a point. I’m keeping it because it’s who I am. Not someone’s wife, nor someone’s mother. But myself. And I’m enough, whether I catch a man or not.

Hilary Mantel says final Wolf Hall book likely to be delayed. Damnit! I’ll have to re-read A Place of Greater Safety again. But if you haven’t look up her Reith Lectures on the iPlayer Radio app, they are really worth the listen.

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Allotment Cooking: Carrot Top Pesto

Posted on July 6, 2017 by nicdempsey

One of the most important lessons I’ve learnt about growing carrots is not to leave carrot thinnings lying around because the scent attracts carrot fly. The second thing I’ve learnt about growing carrots is to sow thinly (I’m working on that) because thinning carrots is no fun.

Last week, I thinned the carrots and ended up with a massive bag of carrot greens and I had to find something to do with them. I had vague idea that I would make pesto with them. So after washing them, which took forever, I did.Proper pesto is a regional thing, made with basil and pine nuts and is probably pounded with a pestle and mortar by Italian mammas but only in a specific part of Italy. I am English, we’re known for taking food from other countries and changing it beyond recognition and liking it like that. From spagetti bolognaise to chicken tikka masala, there isn’t a food culture we haven’t played fast and lose with.

The same applies to pesto. For reasons of economy, I usually make mine with rocket although I have dabbled with nasturtium pesto too. I don’t often have pine nuts in the house, they are phenominally expensive and more generally I just use mixed seeds, which works for me although seems to be undocumented on the blog. This version wasn’t all carrot tops either, there were some spring onion thinnings in it but I don’t think enough to make too much of a flavour difference.All the recipes I found had some basil in them, I made a version with and one without and felt the version with had the edge, however the most important thing not to forget was the salt which seemed to have more of an impact on how bland I found it.

Finally a word about my measurements, I’m very lax about this and most of the recipes used cups, which I do here but a cup of carrot tops for me, looked something like this. So remember it’s a rough not a precise guide!

3 cups of carrot greens

1/2 a cup of basil leaves

1/2 cup of grated parmesan or italian hard cheese

1/4 mixed seeds

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon seasalt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Olive oil (Extra virgin is best but it workes with the normal kind!)

Add everything but the oil to a blender bowl. Start to blend and add olive oil until you get the consistency you like. Taste and adjust seasonings accordingly.

 

 

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