I’ve been dealing with a surfeit of vegetables for the last month. The summer squash decided to go mental, the greens are abundant right now, there’s a lot.
Veg overload
I came across a recipe for roasted vegetable quiche which had a basic template of two cups of cooked vegetables a cup of milk, four eggs and a cup of cheese. Easy to remember and very adaptable.
I have a brilliant pasty recipe from the River Cottage Veg Everyday (125g of butter, 250g flour and about 75ml milk). That makes two crusts in a 9in flan pan.
Crust
I blind bake it and add two cups of cooked veg, roasted courgettes and chard stir fried with garlic and salt. I mostly use parmesan and cheddar for the cheese but I have also used feta.
Eggs and milkReady for the oven
I put it in a medium hot oven for about 35 minutes and volia, quiche.
It’s an unwritten rule that the last week of work before a holiday is always busier than you want or expect it to be, last week was no exception.
Amble Sunset
I did a day in the Southampton Office, a day in the London office and three mad days at home. I knew it would be busy, I’ve recently stepped up the support I give to two more members of staff to make it more formal and less ad hoc and the work is fine (I’ve been saying that I need more to do!) but it’s the change in headspace that supporting more people requires that has been an adjustment. I also still want to do all the other stuff I do and so it’s been a journey. I’m getting there and I’ll have it nailed in a month or two. But September and October (so far) have been a stretch and I was ready for a break!
But first I needed to get there! By midnight on Friday, I was mostly packed and had a mostly empty fridge, so on Saturday morning I was as ready as I was going to be (and I remembered my walking boots – which is more than I can say for Mother!) and we were off.
Spurrelis Ice Cream is the best ice cream
We’ve had a walk or two around the harbour and a visit to Spurrelis and The Old Boat House. The plan for the week, is Alnwick today for Barter Books (and Warkworth on the way back), Newcastle and the Baltic on Tuesday, Hauxley Nature Reserve and Woodhorn Museum on Wednesday. Depending on the weather we’re thinking about Holy Island and on Friday, we’ll do the walk from Craster to Dunstanburgh Castle.
We’ve not spend a lot of time on the plot for the past couple of weeks. The weather has been weird, I’ve been busy, Ma’s knee has been playing up.
The allotment feels like it’s been more productive in the last four weeks, than it’s been all summer.
September haul
We are still getting a couple of strawberries, the raspberries are producing, the summer squash and courgettes had a resurgence. The autumn crops are also starting (and finishing) cauliflowers grew and are done (next year, I’ll probably end up freezing some, this year they went into soup!), the cabbages, kale, chard and broccoli are producing. And we are getting turnips, which are much nicer than we expected!
October haul
Last week I also called time for the winter squash, back in June I was thinking that I might not get any winter squash, there were nine, and two little ones I’ve left and will pick up this week. It’s not a patch on last year’s haul but I’ll take it!
Winter Squash
There is always work to do and we won’t get to any of it until the week after next but the main things to get done in October are:
Build a polytunnel
Repot the blueberries
Sow garlic
Sow onions
Sow broad beans
Weeding and tidying up
October is the time when lots of allotmenteers stop for the winter. That has never been how we do it and why we have always tried to have food plants to overwinter. Winter is time to get the structure of the plot sorted, we do less work but we still work. I’m hoping that this is the last year we’ll need to work too much on the structure, there’s the poly, replacing some of the beds and hopefully the last year of moving fruit bushes and roses. Then I would like at least a couple of years of calm and just gardening (famous last words!)
People, last week was wildly busy. In fact the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy and I have a case of Autumn coming on. Which is why posting has been scanty this for the last couple of weeks!
I worked from home on Monday and that was pretty intense but gave me a chance to do some stuff at home, which was great because then it felt that all I did at home from then was eat, wash and sleep. I did a couple of 12 hour work days and I don’t enjoy leaving the house in the dark and coming home in the dark!
Tube at 7am
However, I think the planning day went well, the highlight of my day was buying 20 sandwiches from Pret! Then on Friday, the whole team spent a day on Black Down helping preserve the heath. Which was lovely and we got really lucky with the weather.
View
From there I went to see Christelle and Mike (and the dogs!), it was a most unusual night for us because I couldn’t drink (too much drinking at the team dinner the night before, not enough sleep all week and menopause = a Nic that could not drink!) but it was another late night.
Cute puppy
On Saturday, I went home and stayed there because the weather was filthy. I was also in bed by 9pm because I was done.
On Sunday, I went to the plot, to do not much work but to collect vegetables.
Winter squash
Followed by a long bus journey to see Ma and offload some veg!
This week (ok it’s late Tuesday, two days are gone already!), I have loads of work and a trip to Southampton tomorrow. I also need to pack for holiday. That (and as much sleep as I can manage) is the plan for this week.
There was no miscellany last week because the week before wasn’t a great week, I had a migraine on Monday night, Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday late evening. They’ve been getting worse and are the reason that I finally decided to get HRT. But you can’t start the HRT until you have a period. Look I’m aware that all of this stuff might be difficult to read, but talking about menopause needs to be normal. I knew about it, but no one really talked about it, even Ma just carried on through it and we need to talk about it because it’s horrible and it shouldn’t be secret. Women can’t be prepared if no one ever talks about it!
All that to say that said period arrived last weekend and I’ve now started HRT, which can take up to three months to kick in and thank goodness, I’m going to save you the gory details but I had to change the bed four times last week (I’ve only just caught up with the laundry). I cancelled going to Christelle’s because it’s hard enough to deal with this in my own house without the fear of destroying someone else’s bedding.
So this week was quite and I was a space cadet. One of the godchildren came to see me on Tuesday and had a positive COVID test on Wednesday. So I’ve mostly been at home. I’ve been testing negative and it had better stay that way because I a really busy week next week and have to be in the office for a lot of it.
In happier news, I have three weeks until my holiday. Yes, we’re going to Amble again, no I don’t get bored of it, it’s sea and sky and castles and space and it’s beautiful, even when the weather is terrible and it’s raining.
There had better be enough petrol!
This week is going to go fast, so I’m just going to try and keep up..
The classic recipe I can never get right. This used to be me, the secret is to show it no fear and I get it right 90% of the time nowadays. I did find that changing to whole milk helped a lot in my hit rate. For the thing I really have never mastered, step up Key Lime Pie, Jo has mercifully stopped sending me recipes for it but maybe it’s time to try again.
This time of year is tricky. Summer isn’t precisely over yet, if you have tomatoes unblighted, they are probably producing, the summer squash isn’t over quite yet and there is kale, chard and raspberries starting to ramp up production.
Last week we had amazing summer like weather and the cucumbers and squash rewarded us with production (seven cukes, six straightnecks and two round courgettes). There were a handful of beans and the last of one carrot bed. I had a tidy up of the kale bed, so we had about 800 grams of that.
The jasmine is settling nicely
After some produce collection, Ma and I got the nets on the cauliflower and kale raised as they were in danger of being cramped!
more breathing room
Then we spent some time on tidy up. Weeding and clearing some of the self seeded area. As I said September is tricky, things are slowing down, having done an entire summer of gardening, there are new ideas about how to change the garden for next year. We always do the major changes in winter but we can’t start quite yet.
Our working plan is that sometime after our holiday, my lovely friends will come and help me sort out building a polytunnel. After that, we’ll start moving some plants and building six new beds plus another in the poly.
We’ll also need to harvest sweet potatoes and winter squash, and plant onions and garlic and sow broad beans and maybe winter peas. There is always something to do. But we can’t do any of it yet.
So I guess it’s just time to enjoy the garden and weed!
