Focaccia

Posted on July 1, 2021 by nicdempsey

This is a great recipe, it’s looks and taste are much greater than the effort. As you can see I added tomatoes but it’s great plain too, I want to try onions next.

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Allotment Adventures: Onions

Posted on June 30, 2021 by nicdempsey

It’s my fifth year of having an allotment and for the first time, I have successfully grown onions!

I’m not going to dry them for storage, we eat a lot of onions and if they last the month, I’ll be amazed but I am pleased that over wintering worked and we got to use a bed when which would otherwise would have been covered this winter.

The plan for the that bed now is autumn/winter brassicas, we have cabbages, broccoli, kale and cauliflower to plant next month, also leeks and I’ll sow chard. I think the winter plot might be more productive than the summer one! I definitely didn’t plan the summer growing as well as the winter one, we’ll chalk it up to another lesson learned.

The blueberries are beginning to ripen and so we took measures to protect them, I do need to go round and check the netting is still intact! I did the same to the blackcurrant that still has some currants on, I’ll need to do it earlier next year and do the same to the gooseberries, the soft fruit needs to be protected from the birds if I want to eat any of it.

We pulled up the broad beans and sowed some carrots, spinach and parsley in that bed. It’s looking lovely!

Parsnips and salsify

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Monday Miscellany: Double Jab

Posted on June 28, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Julian Opie at Pitzhanger

Last week was a good week. Because Ma was here on Tuesday and Thursday, she spent a lot of time on the bus this week, and it’s difficult to be in someone else’s space when they are working. I don’t know how a couple living in a one bedroom flat coped through lockdown or worse families living in flats and not having separate space to work. However, Ma is an excellent houseguest and did my ironing and the washing up (I didn’t ask her, she offered on Tuesday and then just did it on Thursday!) It was excellent for me.

Last Friday, I got my second jab and in two-ish weeks times, I’ll be fully vaccinated, which means that it’s time to think about spending some time in the office, which is weird.

Back in March 2020 it was weird to be working from home and now it fills really odd to be thinking about going back to the commute and office. I have said all through the last 16 months that I felt very lucky to be in place I was in terms of work and home. I feel the same about the way my company is treating going back to the office. There is no pressure to get back to the office and no pressure to go back five days a week. I’m aiming for three but it’ll probably be two days a week in July and August. Depending on workload and where the country is, my aim is to alternate my days in the office, so one week to do Monday/Wednesday/Thursday and then Monday/Wednesday/Friday the next week. Obviously, it’ll depend on what’s happening at work, if I need to be in the office for the entire five days or swap days for meetings etc, I will. We’ll see how we go!

More generally, I’ve noticed that now we’re quite close to being fully open and having to negotiate how to get back into the office, the commute etc, people are more anxious. Again I know that a lot of people didn’t have an option to work from home and worked all the way through lockdown, and those of my friends that did that, are actually more nervous than the ones that didn’t. It’s something about the increase of people out and about and the lack of social distancing. I think that’s also why so many people where enraged by Matt Hancock’s breaking of the rules. We’re all nervous and tired and finding it difficult and there is Hancock, carrying on with his mistress, in the office, not a care in the world.

Post Allotment Breakfast of Champions

Post jab, I was fine on Friday but didn’t feel great on Saturday, we got to the allotment, but I was not at my shiny best. In fact, so much so that Ma didn’t stay the night and left me to go to bed early and sleep in on Sunday.

Plans for this week are to get on with making this years batch of cocktail cherries, defrost the freezer and get all the floors in the flat cleaned (my aims are simple!).

Have a good week everyone!

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Sunday Music: You Should Probably Leave – Chris Stapleton

Posted on June 27, 2021 by nicdempsey

I love Chris Stapleton, so does my mother (she loves a man with a beard).

This is just, look I’ve been on both sides of this song, I think a lot of people have..

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Allotment Adventures: Control of magpies

Posted on June 23, 2021 by nicdempsey

Yes, we’re still working on how best to stop the magpies from destroying plants. This week we’re using the potato pots! Let’s see if we can just give the plants enough time that the birds stop seeing them as a chance to get their five a day! I think we’ve made the decision to leave it at one bed this year. We’ll fill up the other long bed and use it for leeks, next year, we’ll go for two squash beds and beans climbing up the arches, for this year, if I can just get these seeds to grow and produce anything, I’m going to be happy (and slightly amazed!)

Most of the other work on the plot was weeding because the rain last week has given them a boost, the area by the apple tree is overrun. Ma did the top of the plot and I did the bottom but there is aways work to do and I’ve found that we’re never truly on top of the weeding. You just have to do your best.

Apart from giving the tomatoes their first tidy up (it’s that time of year, my tomato babies need my attention), I think all the work was magpie protection and weeding. We will need to think about how we protect the blueberries from the birds as this year we are looking at a bumper crop. Which is good because I need to trim the plum tree which is really going to suck as we’ll lose lots of this year’s baby plums in the process.

We did do a bit of harvesting too. I thinned some beetroot so Ma took some babies home and we got beetroot greens. There was rhubarb (another 1.5kgs) but the star was the garlic. This is the third time I’ve tried to grow garlic and honestly we’ve not had much luck. These bulbs came as part of an allium offer last autumn and they’ve done really well. I’m chuffed. I figure this will last us about a month (Ma is a garlic fiend!). I could have left it in the ground a bit longer but I want to get the garlic, onions and shallots up before I put in the leeks and get the garlic up before the rust got any worse.

Garlic

Gardening is forever teaching us lessons, one of this year’s lessons is, if we don’t autumn sow the broad beans, we don’t have them. We’ve gone back and forth about whether to pull them up, they are covered in blackfly, though the recent rain and huge amount of ladybird larvae have helped a bit. Usually they would be really bad at this time of year and it wouldn’t matter because I’d would be at the end of the harvest and pulling up the plants. I don’t think we’re that far away from a harvest but I’m not sure how good it’s going to be. Lesson learned, we overwinter to save our broad beans from pests and so they give us the space for other things in June.

The raspberries are about to burst into flower too

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Monday Miscellany: Rain and Shenanigans

Posted on June 21, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Last week started sunny but finished wet. On Friday we had a month’s worth of rain in one day (and yes I did get caught in it!). This week shouldn’t be quite as wet but I don’t think I’ll need to water the plot this week!

Summer weather

Other good things this week, on Saturday I went to see Christelle and Mike, for the first time in about 18 months, it was lovely to see them and to catch up. I’m naturally an introvert hermit but the friends I do have I would like to see more than every 18 months!

Lost teddy

The rest of the week was pretty usual and I don’t expect this week to be much different. The days do have a sameness to them at the moment, I expect in a couple of years time we’re all going to look back at 2020 and 2021 and see it as totally surreal although I mainly know introverts and we’ve all been, more or less, fine. I need to clean the house and pick up a prescription and work on getting my brain to switch off so I can get more sleep. Ma is also going to be here on Tuesday and Thursday because she’s not allowed in her flat while they do some asbestos related work. It’ll be fine but I know that she’s not happy, no-one’s else’s flat is as comfortable as yours!

Red roses are not my favourite but I’m really enjoying this one

Other things to get to this week are processing the 3kgs of rhubarb in the freezer, making a years worth of cocktail cherries and getting a service wash for the winter duvet.

While I’m over here, living the dream life of middle age, I hope you all have a good week!

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Allotment Adventures: Magpie Mischief

Posted on June 16, 2021 by nicdempsey

Last week, I counted 10 magpies on my plot and they are wreaking havoc.. only 4 of the 10 sweet potato plants survived, several tomato plants were decapitated and they have been all over the cucumber, summer and winter squash beds and have pulled up the new shoots.

On Saturday, I was wild about it. However, there’s not a lot I can do about the wildlife, so we need to protect the beds more. We are transitioning from using net to using mesh and bought ten metres of it (we have another 20 metres on order) and we started to cover things. Some things just need covering until they come up (squash and cucumbers), some will need covering when the fruit is ripe (if they eat all my blueberries and blackcurrants, I will be devastated!), and some (brassicas and leeks) will be covered for their whole life in the garden to protect them from birds, aphids and allium miner. I plant for the bees and there are bird feeders but I’m not opening a salad bar for the pigeons and magpies!

Some of the potatoes got a bit crispy but we’ve topped them up with compost so they’ll recover but the salad bed is a disaster and if the pigeons haven’t eaten it, then it’s bolted. This year has made some things really clear, we didn’t overwinter the broad beans this year and it was a mistake, we don’t have broad beans yet and they are covered in blackfly. Usually, we’d have finished the crop about now and would be thinking using that bed for something else. Things that we did over winter (onions, shallots and garlic) are looking pretty good, I have some concerns about the shallots but they are nearly ready, and the onions have fallen over already. So in October and November when I’m just about done with the plot, I need to push through and get things in the ground.

It’s not hugely productive right now but it’s so pretty, I’m enamoured of the knautia by the pond and just the pond area generally.

There are flowers and bees, and ladybird larva and I think a damselfly. I’m really proud of this area because I made it and it’s maturing well.

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Monday Miscellany: Entertaining, Football and Gin

Posted on June 14, 2021 by nicdempsey

We finally have proper summer weather, it’s warm and all the windows are open and fans are being deployed. It also means that I need to water the plot more often, I’m loving the gardening videos where they talk about hand watering and have a hose…..hand watering is me with two 10 litre watering cans and a through watering of the plot takes about an hour.

I’m not great in excessive heat but in this weather, I tend to get up about 6am and go to bed earlier because by about 9pm I’m too hot to be awake.

Last week, I had people that weren’t my mother in the house! Sue and Richard came for dinner. I cook for Mum all the time but I haven’t had anyone else in the house since last year, it was lovely but I’d forgotten the worry I have that people won’t have enough to eat. So I made enough food that I fed everyone on Friday night and Ma and I on Saturday and me on Sunday!

Saturday was World Gin Day and after a morning at the plot, Ma and I celebrated with a martini (in the big glasses). We had an early night, I was running on 6 hours of sleep and that along with the sunshine and gin seemed to tip me into the beginning of a migraine (all good things seem to cause a migraine right now – thanks perimenopause!).

This week I’m going to be mostly listening to the football, look everyone gets excited for cricket or Olympics or rugby, I like the football and I’m tired of people on social media being snobbish about it, it’s the best game and I even understand the offside rule. Although I don’t think they should have resumed the Denmark/Finland game on Saturday night but I’m pleased that Christian Eriksen is stable and hope he continues to recover. I’m was going to renew my first aid qualification in August anyway but this has been a great reminder of what knowing CPR and how to use a defibrillator can do…

Have a good week…

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Allotment Adventures: Looking like a garden

Posted on June 9, 2021 by nicdempsey

This time last year, I had almost everything planted, sow and growing. This year has been very different, I went into last weekend with garlic, onions, shallots, carrots, beetroot, pea, broad beans, salad, parsnips, salsify, and potatoes in the ground and growing. The fruit is all in various stages of growth as well, I think we’ll be fine for rhubarb, blueberries and raspberries, we’ll see how the plums do and hopefully get one or two gooseberries, strawberries and boysenberries.

We are fighting a battle with the weeds but after this weekend feel like we are almost there in terms of planting. We got tomatoes and sweet potatoes in and sowed summer squash, french beans, cucumbers, basil, dill and the first bed of winter squash.

It feels like the hard work is paying off.

s

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Monday Miscellany: Busy

Posted on June 7, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Last week, I was too busy to post. Please don’t think I was being all that productive, except at work where I managed to get a whole lot of work off the to do list and on to the done list (probably because my boss was on holiday and not checking his emails!) but there is a thing I’m much more open to as a get older which is that sometimes you need some time for things to stew a bit and then you get it all knocked out very quickly! It’s not the same as ignoring things, or worrying about them, it’s just that some tasks need to be ticking over in the back of my subconscious to find the solution, so that when I actually do them, they are simple. It’s a theory…

The Bank Holiday weekend we were up at my brother’s having Christmas and Christmas in May is great, I highly recommend it. It was great to just be with each other (and watch Chelsea win the Champions League. I won the family sweepstake for the first time ever in the 10 or so years we’ve been doing it, with my team! It was pretty great). We also got to know Barney, the very mischievous dog. He is interested in eating everything and drinking my water (they used to have a cat that did the same thing!)

The rest of the weekend was all about the plot we bought some more wood and built the final raised bed, and extended the weekend by having Tuesday off work for a haircut, it had been 10 months since my hair had been cut, my split ends had split ends!

I love this time of year, the days are long and even when I’m grumpy, (peri-menopause is harder on the nerves than I anticipated) I feel more awake and just feel like I get more done. I’m a summer person rather than a winter one.

Assuming that everything opens up on 21 June, this is probably going to be my last month WFH full time, I’ll have my second jab on 5 July and am planning to be back in the office at least some of the time from 19 July. There’s no pressure but I’m thinking that at least Monday and Wednesday would be good days to be at the office although it’ll depend on what else is happening. It’s going to be weird to be back to commuting and office life, I’ve been at home for over a year now. I’ve started to get up earlier and am generally changing my routines at home to accommodate office working, basically, I need to be a little bit more organised and rigid as I won’t be able to wing it as much as I do now, with laundry, housework and food, I’ll have to get out my lunch boxes again.

My plans for the week are few, I have friends over for dinner on Friday, but other than wheelbarrowing compost to the plot and watering nothing else major going on. It’s quite lovely.

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