Over the years, I’ve got my skincare to a place that works for me and since I’ve been on HRT, banished my spotty chin. But I’ve struggled to find a moisturiser that’s budget friendly, works for my skin and that has a scent I can stand. It’s harder than you’d think.
At the beginning of this year, when I’d finally got around to using up a lavender scented M&S night cream, which was ok but £12 a go and I really didn’t like the scent. (It’s a strange thing, I love the smell of lavender but apparently just not on my face) I decided to try the Nivea Anti-Wrinkle and Firming Night Cream 45+, it was £3.99 in Savers, so it felt like a low risk purchase if I hated it.
I did not hate it. It smelt good, didn’t irritate my skin or clog any pores and it seemed to properly moisturise even the really dry patch of skin by my nose that is always peeling. So I bought the day cream and it’s similar but with SPF 15, which is on the low side but I use the Altruist Face Fluid which is SPF 50 over the top of this, I’d be fine if there was no SPF.
It’s a basic cream that does the job and works really well with all the other products in my skincare routine.
I know it’s the last week of the summer holidays (well in England and Wales, Scotland went back in August and I think N. Ireland went back this week) and so the news cycle is slower that it would be but I just can’t escape the feeling that the lunatics can’t even be arsed to run the asylum. We do still technically have a Prime Minister but he’s spent most of the summer on holiday and this week seems to be doing a ‘dress up’ tour of the country. The sheer arrogance of the useless waste of space, he’s been a terrible Prime Minister, and we are in the middle of a cost of living crisis and he’s doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.
However, the smart money says that Liz Truss is going to be the next PM. Being asked to choose between Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss is like being asked if you’d like to drink the sewage water or cook with it, neither option is good but Sunak is probably the lesser of two evils. However, I’ve been pretty vocal about my opinion that the Tory Party won’t ever vote for a brown man (doesn’t matter how rich he is) over a white woman who seems to worship at the altar of Margaret Thatcher.
Anyway, she won’t agree to an interview with Nick Robinson, doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what she could do about the cost of living crisis except, have a fight with the EU over N. Ireland and cut taxes. Look, no one likes paying taxes but tax cuts always work better at scale, the more money you have, the more tax cuts benefit you. The tax burden in this country already falls the heaviest on the people who earn less. If you wanted to cut taxes, for the bottom, you could but you’d need to raise taxes on corporations, the highest earners i.e. raise the top rate of tax (you could have a supertax year like MacMillan did in 1961 – I mention this because he was a Tory), or tax capital gains tax, so that people who have passive wealth pay more. The problem with all of those options are that Tory Party donors don’t like that.
So this winter is going to be horrible, this is probably the first time in my life that being single and childless is to my advantage. I’m just so aware how bad things are for people that were doing ok 18 months ago (yes even as COVID and lockdowns were happening!) and it’s going to get worse.
It’s that time of year, the pressure canner has taken up residence in my kitchen, the freezer is full, there are jars everywhere. Welcome to August, the month the garden is out of control and I’m struggling to find things to do with it!
Last year, I did a lot of fruit compote, pesto, and froze other fruit but the vegetables we got through just eating. This year, we froze some rhubarb but didn’t can any, I made loads of cordial from the rhubarb and drank it. I’ve made blackcurrant jam, and apple butter and this weekend will get to Ma’s current favourite of plum and raspberry compote, there are blackberries and blueberries in the freezer with an unseemly amount of plums. This weekend, I’m also going to make more plum gin because I need some freezer space back.
I’ve also canned 17 jars of chopped tomatoes, made a batch of tomato jam, pico de gallo and tomato sauce. Cherry tomatoes are prolific for us at the moment but the big tomatoes are slower, so I’m expecting that in the next couple of weeks, I’ll have enough to do some more pico de gallo and some more tomato sauce.
I made kale pesto last year and we preferred that, so I’ve only just started to make pesto but the kale grows all through winter so that’s something we can do as we go. I slow cooked a bunch of the summer squash with oil and butter, added seasoning and blended them into a ‘butter’ they are in pots in the freezer for use in soups, pasta and whatever I can think of in the winter. I really need to find another way of using up the squash, it’s tricky because you can’t safely can it and I’m limited on freezer and fridge space. Next year, I’ll have that extra fridge freezer and I’ll pickle and maybe ferment more, but that’s not gonna work for this year, so I need to use as many as I can and I may have to take the space hit and grate the rest up to freeze for use in soups and baking.
In the fridge there are currently four jars of cucumber pickles and a jar of roasted tomatoes in olive oil, I’m going to more of those with basil and freeze them, because I have a feeling they’d be great on pizza or as an extra on garlic bread!
When you write it down, it doesn’t sound like much but when you’re doing it, it’s a mission but Ma and I spend a lot of time and money on the allotment growing this food and it would be stupid to waste that time and money on not eating the food. So I do this…
Last week, before I went to nephew sit, I dealt with all the produce, things were preserved, pickled, pesto-ed and jammed and I was feeling in control of the produce.
However, last Thursday it rained for an entire morning (we could do with a couple more days of that kind of rain) it was combined with slightly cooler temps over the weekend and although I had a friend water the poly, nothing else got watered or cared for. The plot was not deterred and yesterday, Ma and I collected 15 cucumbers, 15 summer squash, 1.2kg of cherry tomatoes, three boxes of raspberries, some blueberries, just over a kilo of potatoes.
Produce Haul
August is a tiring month on the plot for us and for the plot, all the plants are trying to get done before the autumn and Ma and I are just trying to keep up.
The polytunnel is bursting, if you cast your mind back to May when I panicked about the tomatoes and ordered 12 Sungold tomatoes via a Grown Your Own magazine offer and when they turned up, they weren’t Sungold and they were in a state and I took the last three and planted them up and put the container in the poly and hoped for the best? Only one of the three survived. Clearly ‘plant Sparta – they live or they die’ really worked for the one that lived because it’s trying to take over the poly. It’s not the only plant trying to do that, the sweet potatoes are wild. Last year we grew them outside and it was a really bad summer so we got some but not many reasonably sized potatoes, this year I did them in the poly and we had the kind of summer that they would have been fine in. The irony. If they’ve done well in the poly, I’ll probably do some inside and some outside and see what we get…
Tumbling Tom plant
I did manage last week, to pot up some of the herbs I got for my birthday, either out or into bigger pots, and some of the mints I’ll leave in the poly over winter to try and stretch out our mint tea supply. Because I had a couple of duplicates, I potted the berries and cream and ginger mints into bigger pots and used the pots the older plants were in to pot up the blackcurrant sage, olive plant and parsley, the basils I bought at Wisley went out into one of the tomato beds.
I have a load of other plants in trays in the polytunnel that need planting out/giving away but right now, the ground is too hard. I may just have to wait until next spring.
Outside, we’re not having the best squash year ever, the butternut squash have managed one fruit and overall it’s not going to be like 2020 when I think we managed 40, I’m going to need to amend the soil in the beds because everything seems to be struggling a bit. With the slightly cooler weather the beans we are growing for drying up the arches (lazy housewife and giantes) have recovered and there are beans. Which is good because the dwarf drying beans (Jacobs Cattle) have not done well at all. Ma and I have been discussing beans and next year, I’m only going to grow beans and peas (I want to try carlin peas and I think borlottis would also be a good shout!) for drying up the arches and dwarf beans will be for fresh eating only.
Giantes (yes they are a type of runner bean)
The summer squash are also running riot and along with the cucumbers have mildew, I could do more about it but its’s September, the cukes have only got two or three more weeks in them and while I hope to grab some time at the weekend to cut the worst of the leaves off the patty pan and the straight and crookneck squash, their time is coming too. I’m not touching the hybrid courgettes. I can’t remember if I mentioned that I planted four courgette plants, and they are not producing courgettes, I think they must have crossed with a winter squash because they are running rampant and two are producing courgette shaped fruit and one is producing a round courgette and the other is producing something pear shaped and pale green (you can see them in the top photo). They are also running all over the plot with what I can only assume is hybrid vigour.
Everything is a bit crispy
They aren’t bitter and they eat fine so we’re using them. I want to put a disclaimer in here, in 2021, there seemed to be a lot of squash seeds that had crossed, on some of the groups I’m on there was lots of talk about how the fruit they produced was poisonous and should never be eaten. Toxic squash syndrome is a thing, it’s caused when a squash has cucurbitacins in it. The squash would taste bitter and should be binned, ours don’t taste bitter but if they did, I would throw them away. I’m telling you what I’ve done, not what you should do!
We’ve bought garlic for autumn planting and have the first of the two sets of planters, we want to use for strawberries, I’ve bought another nine bags of compost for this and for the cherry, lime and lemon trees, that really need to go into bigger pots. It’s past time to repot the blueberry bushes so we either need to buy and have some ericaceous compost delivered or we need to wait until Christmas when we have a car, we’ll see what the budget is doing after we’ve paid the rent for the year and sorted out the strawberries.
This weekend we will try to do more than water and harvest, I would really like to find the time to plant out the leeks and sow chard, turnips, pak choi and radishes. There was a massive pile of woodchip at the plot and if it’s still there, I’d like to collect some to re-up the paths, but the paths also need to be weeded, I have lots of cardboard but I’m not sure that this is the best course of action because it’s so dry. I also need to cut the grass on the paths down, generally tidy up and it’s probably time for another turn of the compost and to riddle the stuff that’s mostly broken down and has been sitting for a year.
While I was on leave celebrating my birthday, Ma and I took a day to visit Eltham Palace.
From the moat
Eltham Palace is a really strange mix of historical periods. It was given to Edward II in 1305 and the Great Hall was built in the 1470’s, it was a favourite royal palace for a while and was where Henry VIII lived as a child.
By the 1930’s, it had fallen into disrepair and was ‘bought’ by Stephen Courtauld and his wife, Virginia. They restored the great hall and built a house attached to it. The new part of the house was very modern for the time and it’s used a lot in films set in the 30’s and for fashion shoots. English Heritage took over the site sometime in the 1990’s and it’s worth a visit, if you like history or gardens (which obviously, I do!)
Great Hall Roof
I found the house interesting but I feel as I often do when I tour these places that I probably would have been driven bananas by the Courtaulds and their pet lemur!
Map roombathroomLibraryDining RoomDining room doorsServants area – much less luxurious Phone booth for the guests
August has been busy. I had a birthday, a week off, lots of work, lots of allotment things to do and some house work, it was busy.
Barney
Despite that, it feels like there’s not a lot to talk about, Ma and I are (until this afternoon) at my brother’s with the nephews, while my brother and sister in law have been in Amsterdam celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary and enjoying a child and dog free weekend. We’ve made pizza, and blackberry jam and I’ve walked the dog a lot…
Sonic Boom Monopoly
I love my nephews and the dog but I’m looking forward to being in my flat tonight, where I know where everything is and there is no background of boys bickering! Tomorrow, I’m off work for a haircut and some quality time on the plot. Then I’m back to work for the last three days of the week.
I can’t quite believe we’re going into September this week. Autumn comes around every year and every year I’m unhappy about it, if you didn’t already know this, I can refer you to my previous post, here. (For coping strategies go here and here.). One of the things that does help is preparing the flat and therefore myself for it, this year with the energy price cap rises and inflation at 10% things will look very different for a lot of people and for me prep for autumn has been more about the physical as well at mental preparation. I’ve done quite a bit of food preservation and some decluttering and tidying and I used the ‘cost of living bonus’ I got from work to buy a dehumidifier and heated airer to make drying washing easier and quicker in a colder house. (I’m very lucky!)
Nephew on a swing
The real prep in September is going to be sorting out the kitchen in preparation for the new one being installed in October, assuming that with the cost of living that’s still happening. I need to talk to the landlord and work out if he can still afford it and if he can’t (which is fair enough) make a plan about what he can do, because the sink and the oven are not going to make it through another winter!
Ma and I will start to tidy up the plot and start thinking about the winter work list. Then it’s the family birthday season (both nephews, Ben and Ma) and Christmas! It feels like five minutes ago that I was sowing tomato seeds, where did the year go?
It’s been a while, August has been fun, but I’ve been scattered and this space is always the first thing that stops when I’m full of overwhelm (good overwhelm, but man I need to pull myself together – more on that on Monday!)
I worked on the privatisation of England’s water in 1989. It was an organised rip-off. I’ve been saying it forever, but utilities are national resources and should not be privatised, for me that’s water, energy, trains and the BBC. They should be run for the benefit of the citizens of the country. Most of them (trains excepted) were built as monopolies and the privatisations were a botch and not truly competitive. Capitalism has to have limits, this should be the line.
I feel sure that I’ve mentioned that London and the South East of England is having a drought. It’s a issue, I can’t remember the last time we had rain and for the first time since I have lived in this flat, it didn’t rain on my birthday. It’s dry.
I’ve always tried to do heavy watering once a week and a top up water once during the week if it doesn’t rain and that has not been cutting it. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed some of the tomatoes had blossom end rot and I was not ok with that.
Not good
So this past week, I have been going to water every day at twilight, and that has been working. Not everything gets watered every day, I’m not watering anything that’s done (blackcurrants, boysenberry) but everything that’s looking parched has responded accordingly. Overall the plot is looking a bit parched but the squashes, cukes and tomatoes are producing and setting fruit.
In the mini heatwave, watering has not been fun but that’s how it work.
The side effect of all this watering is that Ma and I have been able to get on with a little bit of work and some leisure time on the plot.
Friday dinner on the plot, in a heatwave
Ma has attended to the alpine strawberries, trimming the dead leaves, then watering really hard and mulching with fresh compost. They look much better and while this is all guess work from me, I suspect this is something I should have done in spring. Not much I can do about it now, I’ll just make sure that we do it again, in spring.
I’ve attended to the compost pile. I’m not great at composting but I needed to add a bokashi bin that was done fermenting and I had some shredded paper that needed adding too. I had noticed that the bin wasn’t breaking down as much as it usually does because it’s dry (did I mention the drought!). So I took half of the bin out, turned what was left and watered it. Then I added the bokashi, got it wet, added the shredded paper, got that really wet too. I added the rest of the bin back in, soaking it all as I went and finally, we added the waste from today, wetting that as well. I’ve been watering it every time I water the plot to encourage it to break down, I suspect that I’ll need to turn it again this weekend and do it more regularly and get better at making compost.
I was on leave the week after my birthday and my friend Richard (the builder of the polytunnel) recovered the roof for me, it looks great and I’m so grateful, I also need to paint the shed again this weekend.
I got a bunch of birthday plants this week. From Urban Herbs, the boozy collection, a herbal tea collection and some samphire. This has given me 14 new plants to deal with, some of the mints are duplicates so we’ll put them in bigger pots. I have a plant for some of the thymes and rosemary. So that needs to be sorted.
The polytunnel was getting a little bit crowded, so we’ve finally bought two mini greenhouses (half price too!) we’ve put one up and will put the other up this week. They will do as shelves for the time being and next spring I can put the covers on to help with the seedlings. I’m hoping that this will finally help me with growing more from seed, we’ll see. Also in the poly, I finally have a melon! Whether it will grow in time remains to be seen but I’m still happy about it!
A baby melon
We are also rich in summer squash, tomatoes and cucumbers, which is a nice place to be!
Produce haul
This weekend, I’m solo allotmenting (due to bus and tube and train strikes!) but this week we’ve also had rain (finally!) and next weekend, I’m away, babysitting my nephews. So I have a lot to do, but the things I really want to get done are here.
Paint the shed
Turn the compost
Put together the second mini greenhouse
Sow chard, beetroot, winter lettuce in modules
Sow more carrots, in the carrot bed
Weed the paths and if there is any, woodchip them
Plant some of the herbs and mint up into bigger pots
I have a confession, I have an ice lolly problem. I really, really like them. I didn’t realise it was a problem until the most recent heatwave, when ice lollies were better than dinner. I have a general rule that the majority of food I eat should not be ultra-processed (see here for what I mean by that) and that treats should be homemade, so if I want cake or biscuits, I have to make cake or biscuits. It was not happening with the lollies and I wasn’t about to give them up.
While I love mini milks, especially the vanilla ones, they are little, and I jumped at the chance to make grown up sized ones. (I have this ice lolly mould). These lollies are simple, to make, two ingredients and 110 calories per lolly. They do have condensed milk which is an ultra-processed ingredient, but this is my compromise and with 400ml of milk, I figure that it’s probably better than a FAB.
August is the best month of the year, everyone is on holiday so London is a bit emptier than usual, there is a Bank Holiday AND it’s my birthday! Which happened on Saturday. 49 isn’t much different from 48, although last week, my back ached a bit more, but due to the ‘water every day’ schedule on the plot rather than being closer to 50.
The week was pretty standard, my sleep lack of sleep issue is slowly improving, I just need to keep doing what I’m doing (going to bed a set times, getting up at the same time every day, eating well and exercising a bit more) and it will come right, I’m going to add wake up and bedtime yoga to the my routine while I’m on leave this week, to see if that helps. At best it will, at worse, I’ll get some stretches done that’ll help my back! I don’t enjoy who I am when I’m this tired (grumpy, emotional etc) and I can’t work out what’s sparked it this time. It could just be a come down from midsummer and a slide into slightly darker evenings, it’s been pretty dark 9.30pm when I’ve finished watering and I could just be reacting to that. Whatever it is, it’s annoying and I want it to stop! Tired and grumpy as I was last week, I was really happy that I’d spent some time on Sunday, getting myself prepped for the week, just knowing that I had food and clothes all ready to go with minimal effort was a gift I gave myself.
I did three days in the office on the trot, got a walk with Sue and really worked on the flat. There’s nothing actually wrong with the flat, I’m just feeling that it’s a bit cluttered and I’m currently looking at October for the new kitchen, which is going to mean packing everything up, so it feels like the more I can declutter now, the better it’ll be for then. I got all of the cardboard out of the flat, all the paper that needed shredding got shredded and is now turning to compost on the plot, tidied up the stuff lurking under my desk and really cleaned (on my hands and knees getting rid of all the dust in the corners) the bathroom and living room floors.
I’m off work this week until Friday. Ma and I were going to Eltham Palace on Wednesday but we are moving that up to today, because the later half of the week is going to be too hot! The rest of the week, I’m just leaning into middle age, tomorrow Richard is going to replace my shed roof, on Wednesday I need to sort out an outfit for a wedding on Saturday, and on Thursday Sue is taking me to Wisley with her RHS membership. I really feel that I’m in a place where my age has caught up with my interests!
I between all that I need to get the flat a bit more under control and keep the plants at the plot alive! Should be fun!
Nic Dempsey 