2021 will mark the year that I ate more potatoes than I have never eaten. Potatoes have featured in every Oddbox I’ve had and we grew quite a few of them this year. It’s not a problem, I quite like potatoes, but there is a limit to how many times even I can eat potato salad.
So I have this thing that I do with them. It’s not really a recipe, although the idea is from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe for roasted new potatoes and asparagus.
Take potatoes and chop them to a new potato-ish size. Chop up an onion or a couple of shallots and toss both of them in olive oil and stick in an overproof pan (I use my cast iron one) bake for about 20/25 minutes. Then add some chopped veg, asparagus works, so does broccoli, cauliflower and Romanesco. Add to the pan, toss and put it back in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Finally take it out of the oven again and make a well, crack an egg into the pan and back into the oven for about 3 to 5 minutes. If you don’t like or eat eggs, some mozzarella works well instead of the egg.
Our scheduled Saturday at the allotment was cut short on account of the rain and various other small calamities..
The good news it that we got to harvest one straightneck summer squash and two of the round courgettes. The cucumbers also sprung into action and we had 10!
They were turning ripe
But the tomato plants were too far gone for hope. Some of the tomatoes had started to ripen so we took them all off and cleared the beds. I washed the tomatoes and we’ll see what ripens! That does mean that I have three clear beds for overwintering onions and garlic. We’re going to sow more garlic this year and just onions as Ma was not keen on the shallots, I reckon by the time we’ve got the garlic, onions and broad beans in, we’ll probably only have the current winter squash bed empty for winter. We are replacing most of the lawn edging beds this winter so they won’t be used at all but even so, I’m pleased that we are growing things throughout the winter, sometimes I think I’m better at growing in winter than in summer I suspect because the plants aren’t as needy.
Jasmine ‘clotted cream’
We also built the a small bed in front of the shed and planted my birthday present from Jo. I will probably end up planting something else in this bed as there is just too much bare soil at the moment. I’m thinking more lavender, maybe a munstead as it’s much more compact, but I think that can probably wait for a bit.
We got about two hours on the plot and that was that.
The plot does need some work and we’ll get to it, we have a pretty large list of winter work (again, I kid myself that this year it will be a bit easier as it’s less than last year and there shouldn’t be too much more to do, there certainly won’t be anymore room on the plot and we are not up for another plot!) but it does look lovely right now.
Rampant winter squash
The optimistic list for next week is all about tidying up, this time year is all about preventing a descent into chaos, the more work you do now, the less you have to contend with next Spring. There are lots of arguments about leaving areas for wildlife, which we do but some of it (borage, I’m looking at you!) needs clearing. Here’s the list:
Strim the paths
Dead head the roses and knautia
Weed (everything needs weeding so it’s a moving target!)
Tidy the self seeded area, some of that borage needs to go
Put together the compost riddler
Empty the full compost bin
Turn the other compost bin
Tidy the shed
Good job it’s a back holiday and I have an extra day but more seriously, this year hasn’t been epic for summer growing and even when it is, the end of August, beginning of September is when a lot of allotment holders stop going for the year. They’ll come back in March and April and wonder why their plots are a mess. This is why I’ve always tried to overwinter some things, it gives you a reason to check in with the plot and do a bit of prep for spring. Ma and I are gluttons for punishment, but I’m really hoping that this winter will be the last ‘construction’ winter for a while. We have a polytunnel to put up, six new beds and I need to move some of the gooseberries and roses to better spots but then I really just want to have a year of growing, weeding and maintenance.
Much to the amusement of my Irish neighbour, the day before my birthday I went to Battle. Yes, it’s an actual place, in East Sussex, quite near Hastings, and the site of the Battle of Hastings and Battle Abbey
In 1070, Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for killing so many English people while conquering the country. So William I vowed to build an abbey on the site of the Battle of Hastings. The Benedictine Abbey was begun and the church was finally consecrated in 1094 and called the Church of St Martin of Battle (the Martin in question was also known as the ‘apostle of the Gauls’). It was a pretty significant Abbey in it’s time due to being outside of episcopal jurisdiction (so on a level with Canterbury!). It stopped being an abbey in 1538 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries and eventually fell into ruin.
The site is run by English Heritage nowadays and anyone who been reading this a while will know about my love of old and ruined things and my love of my English Heritage membership. Look I’m middle aged now and it’s in the job description, I’m embracing it! So Ma and I took a day trip during my week off work to look around and be frankly terrified by the stone spiral staircases.
I didn’t bring a proper camera with me but it was very ruined and picturesque, well worth a visit especially if you have small children that are doing 1066 at school. There’s a great and small exhibition about the lead up to the invasion and you can walk around the battlefield.
There has been a whole lot of not very much happening this week. Two days in the office, another sodding migraine (apparently a rash of them at work – a couple of us have been suffering this week), maybe it was the weather which was pretty grey and cold for this time of year. Apparently we’ve had 30% less sunshine in August than is usual for this time of year, as I write this, it’s raining.
For the rest of this week, I finally got to catch up with Jo and Sarah, which was great. I also got to experience parsnip burn in real life, I thought I might be coming down with measles until I realised it was just on my forearms and the spots started to blister, so I currently look like I’ve had mild chicken pox on my forearms. Which is quite the look.
I’m currently working on my annual get everything back under control because winter is coming plan, I know that I can’t be as relaxed about anything in autumn/winter as I am in summer because I’m usually so miserable. The extreme dull and cold-ish weather last week felt autumnal and kicked me into thinking about this earlier than usual.
The way I survive the winter is to be fairly rigid about things like chores and bedtimes, otherwise I would just live in chaos and hate myself while refusing to leave my bed. Last year was pretty easy because I was working from home, being able to spend the week days not getting up at 6am and having to commute was much better for my SAD. However, this winter I’ll have to be in the office a couple of days a week, so I need to crack on and make sure that by the time the clocks go back I have a routine embedded.
Plans for this week are pretty much all about that, setting a routine for chores, exercise and bedtimes around being in the office for two days and I have a bunch of work I want to crack on with for work too. So it’s pretty dull.
Next Monday is the last Bank Holiday until Christmas, I have very excitingly arranged to be on the plot for Saturday and Sunday (I’m middle aged, I like to garden) but other than that, I have no plans and that feels rather marvellous.
This is on the soundtrack from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It’s one of those songs you feel like you’ve heard before, it feels old even though it’s not.
I’ve been going into the office at least twice a week since July. It’s been a bit of a shock to the system but I did take the opportunity to get some new commuting equipment. The first thing being a new water bottle. I’ve had a variety of water bottles in the last 10 years, all plastic and they’ve worked ok. One was 750ml and lived at my office because it the lid leaked and one was 500ml and didn’t leak but was a bit small (I do drink a lot of water in a day!). Aside from those flaws, the cold water didn’t stay cold and the bottles sweated so everything in my bag ended up a bit damp.
Water Bottle in the wild (my office)
So it was time to upgrade to one that wouldn’t need replacing for a long time and had none of these flaws. I went with a ProWorks 750ml bottle. It’s a basic double walled bottle, keeps things cold for up to 24 hours (I haven’t tried it for hot drinks) and so far has survived being bounced around my bag or the allotment without any major scratchest
It’s not a great Friday for the people of Afghanistan or the south of Haiti or lots of other places. I wrote a little about Afghanistan on Monday and since then the picture has just gotten worse. There is plenty of blame to go around but I can’t do anything about the actions of the US or now ex Afghan President’s. What I can do (and what I expect the MP’s, journalists and electorate of the United Kingdom) to do is hold Boris Johnson and his Cabinet of lazy, workshy shysters to account for their complete and utter failure to plan or just listen to their officials while they decided to swan off on holiday as our citizens and the Afghans that helped us at considerable risk to their lives and the lives of their families were stranded in Kabul. It’s not good enough, to just announce things you actually have to make things happen. I saw something this week that said that what brought David Cameron down was his sense of entitlement, for May it was her rigidity and for Johnson it’ll be that he just can’t be bothered. I don’t think it’s wrong.
The pandemic property boom is pricing locals out of the British countryside. This makes me die, in the 90’s when people like me, urban working class, were being pushed out of where we grew up due to the sky high rents and lack of social housing, there were crickets. No-one was lamenting the way that inner city children were being pushed out of their communities or couldn’t get on the property ladder. Ok yeah I moved all the way out to Ealing and I can (just) pay my rent but I couldn’t in a million years afford to buy there. And the only people I know from school who still live there are in social housing. This has been a problem in London for over 20 years and honestly I’m sick of articles blaming Londoners for having to move out and upsetting property markets elsewhere because most of those Londoners weren’t from London in the first place. This is was capitalism does, they’re doing to the regions what they did to us.
‘My bosses were happy to destroy me’ – the women forced out of work by menopause. I’m not quiet about it but it can be really difficult to approach my male boss about this. I’m very lucky that work/life balance is important to my company and that the company are so flexible about working from home especially post pandemic. My issue has been getting my GP to take me seriously, I still can’t get HRT and given the difficulties of getting an appointment, it’ll probably be 2022 before I can get that sorted.
We’re at that weird point in the year when we should be overloaded with summer product and the autumn leaves are starting to come in. We still haven’t had a summer squash and I fear that I’m hoping in vain for the tomatoes but the greens have started and the plums decided to have a great year.
yes that’s a full 15 litre bucket of chard thinnings
We were at the plot at about 8:30 and home at just gone 1pm, by 5pm, we had sorted cleaned and bagged most stuff. On Sunday, I made a batch of pesto and green tomato chutney.
All that’s left to do now is eat it!
We also did quite a bit of weeding. I try as much as I can to be no dig, and it’s pretty successful, it does cut down on the weeding but it doesn’t eliminate all weeds. The new beds we built this year were cardboarded, woodchipped, carboarded again and then filled with compost, some beds like the current squash bed, were cardboarded and mulched last year and then cardboarded, woodchipped, carboarded and mulched this year. We are still seeing bindweed pop up in them. Also despite the mesh nets, there is still whitefly. I don’t mind a bit of whitefly but last year it was a nightmare on the brassicas and I’m not anxious for a repeat performance.
So Ma and I tackled the beds, I dusted the plants with diatomaceous earth and Ma weeded the beds. We did all of the brassica beds, I figure that it’s best to tackle it early as I found some aphids on one of my carrots and as I said a little bit is fine but I don’t want the plague we had last year.
Dusted with DT
Then Ma got on with weeding the back, and I attended to my tomatoes. The blight has been really bad this year and all of the plants are sick to some degree. I grow outdoors and it’s always a risk (next year, I will grow one of each type in the polytunnel and think about spraying with asprin) but I’ve only ever had blight my first year. That year Joe and Dennis my lovely old school plot neighbours advised me to cut back everything I could and hope for the best. That’s what I did this year. I pulled up all the plants with fruit that didn’t look like they would ripen or only had a couple of tomatoes on. I removed all of the leaves and chopped the top of the plant off, in the hope that the plant will put some effort into ripening the fruit before the blight gets them. My tomatoes look massacred but if it can stay warm and not rain (I won’t be watering them this week either), we might get a ripe tomato.
I’m sitting down on Sunday morning to write this post about my week. Usually, I try to keep this one about my life and Friday Links is where I talk more about the world. However, the news at 7am this morning, reported that the Taliban had taken Jalalabad and the 11am news reported that they have entered Kabul. Last night mum was predicting the end of the month, I said the end of the week and we were both wrong. I have no words for what a complete failure the West’s intervention in Afghanistan has been, I was against it 20 years ago, this is a disaster and we did this. It was wrong then, but having done it, we shouldn’t be able to walk like this. We should be ashamed.
So back to the mundane everyday. I’m delighted to tell you that I’m still a qualified first aider but the first couple of days back at work were rocky. 600 emails in 7 and a half working days, obviously I manage diaries for a couple of people so a lot of it was appointments, but they need to be read so I can ascertain if they can be deleted and you have to manage the requests coming in because you’re back at work. It’s a first world problem, I still enjoy my job and it’s not a life and death thing!
Other news this week, I’ll talk on Wednesday about the sheer amount of produce we got from the plot at the weekend. I spent a lot of time sorting it out on Sunday.
I also got a birthday presents from Jo. Who says that she has to keep me off the gin so she bought me a plant and a trowel to help me plant it. Jo’s mother is a fantastic gardener, I wish I could garden like she does, so Jo has practice at buying for gardeners!
Jasmine ‘clotted cream’
Plans for this week are simple, I’m in the office Monday and Thursday, there will possibly be watering as currently there is no rain predicted until Saturday. I have no other plans. So no real change there.
The weekend at the plot was so weird because of the rain. It was warm and wet, like someone turning on the tap when it rained.
View from the back
Which is another way of saying we didn’t get as much as we hoped done, we waited until the rain stopped, went out, worked through the first time we got rained on but went home on the second, which is fair enough, I think.
So what did we do?
Sorted out all the netting, so the autumn crops are as protected as they are going to be. Every bed on the plot is growing something, some things are growing better than others (alas my poor tomatoes!).
Harvested some things – french beans and plums, we decided to leave the carrots, potatoes and blueberries for next weekend.
Weeded, strimmed and deadheaded, obviously this is a moving target, it’ll need more work but we got some areas clear.
Hang on little tomato, you’re so close
This weekend, we have a bunch to do
Harvest – plums, potatoes, carrots, blueberries, raspberries and french beans. Hopefully we’ll have some cukes or summer squash but who knows!
Weed and Strim – I need to finish strimming the edges and back. The front and back of the plot needs weeding and so do the beds and flower beds – we’ll get to what we can.
Plant or sow – Did I just say that we have no more empty beds, yes I did but I want to take some of the potatoes and replant them in a pot for later new potatoes. I also have some beds with gaps that I want to plant up with salad and maybe fennel.
It’s bizarre that in August thoughts turn to planning for next season, especially this year when I’ve not seen a courgette, crookneck or cucumber. We never totally close down for winter though, right from my first year, I’ve tried to over winter veg and that won’t change this year.
Rudbeckia and borage
The brassicas and leeks are planted out for autumn/winter harvesting (I expect we’ll go through broccoli, cauliflowers and cabbages this year and hope to have leeks and kale to harvest into February/March.) We’ll also attempt to overwinter garlic, onions, shallots and broad beans for the spring too, in the hope that the broad beans do better next year and the alliums do as well as they did this year!
And although we really hoped that we were done with construction, we have to build a polytunnel and after a year of sorting out the back half of the plot, some of the more rough and ready beds (the ones I build with lawn edging need sorting. Ma thinks we should use the same beds that we bought for the ‘uncultivated’ area on the plot. I reckon we need about 6 so from December, I think we’ll be ordering one or two a month until spring! Then we’ll be starting again on the whirlygig of fun that is compost, woodchip spreading and planting….
My hope is that this is the last year, of moving and building stuff, we’ll have had the plot seven years in May, and that the only decisions we have to make for year seven is where to grow things.
Nic Dempsey 