We actually did more than weeding and collecting this week!
The plot is still at the weird, messy and winding down stage we are still getting harvests but less squash and cucumbers and more leafy greens!
Winter Squash
We are still waiting on the rest of the winter squash and the last of the tomatoes, but have taken down the cherry tomatoes and the really poorly plants and I’ve stopped feeding them.
I have to confess, while I’m not at all ready for the dark days of autumn and winter, I am ready for the different type of work that winter brings, it’s less tending and more building. Once the squash and tomatoes are done, we can make a start on re-arranging the beds on the new half, and moving the compost bins and raspberries and setting up some support for the raspberries because they are all over the place in a way that the summer raspberries are not…
We might even manage to get a patio space built next to the pond and the rose garden but we’ll see how that goes.
I work we can do, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve planted another 10 cabbages and 40 winter lettuces, some of the lettuces perished in the mini heatwave last week. We’ve finished and closed up the cauliflower, carrot and courgette beds. We planted a bunch of spring bulbs but I need a good soaking rain before I can plant any by the pond, the soil is like rock!
Other growing work to do will be finding space for over wintering onions, garlic, shallots and broad beans.
Confession time, someone should stick a fork in me because I’m done. I’m over it all. We had the virtual offsite on Friday and I’m so glad that I wasn’t presenting because by the time we got the end of it, I felt like I’d done the office work equivalent of run a marathon. This week, I have a week ‘in the office’ and then holiday and I really need it and if the announce another lockdown and we can’t go, I’m going to lose my mind. There are more restrictions in Northumberland but luckily Ma and I like to do things like old castles and walks and they will still be ok. We have decided that we won’t go to Newcastle for the day like we usually do and we may not get to all the castles, we had planned but the ruined ones are still ok. The weather won’t be brilliant but I don’t care, I just want to be besides the sea….
I get that everything is difficult for everyone, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll find a way to cope but I’ve hit my wall this month and this has been keeping me going!
The only other thing I really want to do this week and can’t is meet my brother’s puppy, they got him today and he looks really cute, he’s called Barney and he’s a black lab and the boys are going to be so excited!
Today I am taking a trip to the Southampton office. I need to get there, do some and hightail it out of there by about 2pm. Fun.
Was wasn’t fun was getting up at 6am, in the dark and being unable to get a coffee at Clapham Junction, this part of the ‘new normal’ I am not here for!
In other news, last week was a busy week, I have two more working weeks until I go on holiday and I am so ready for it! I need to be by the sea and near some old castles…
Other than work, plans for this week are more work, the Kenny’s and partners are coming for dinner, I need to get to the plot for the picking of raspberries and watering, it’s going to be hot for the first couple of days of the week and that is all of my plans!
I’ve not been to the allotment since Friday, when I spent an hour harvesting and left Ma on the plot to weed. I’m doing the same thing today and at the weekend, I’ll go and do some work while Ma weeds…
I had such a good weekend that the working week is going to be a bit of a comedown!
In the week, we had a virtual birthday party for a friend. I hosted the work quiz, which Ma was here for, she didn’t win! I was supposed to spend Friday night at Ma’s but I was fried, work is pretty intense at the moment, so Ma stayed here and I went over on Saturday to attend to Mum’s washing machine! On Sunday, we went to my brother’s for the small nephew’s 5th birthday!
Everyone is well, it was loads of fun and all outdoors. I can’t believe that he’s five already!
Grandma also got a lesson in bouncy castles!
This week I have a ton of work to do, I want to spend a good long time on the plot and I really need to get the house into a cleaner place, it’s fine but the Kenny’s and their spouses are coming for dinner next week and therefore it’s time to really clean the floors!
Anyone else do ultra cleaning for other people, the house is always tidy but it’s always much tidier when I have company!
Happy Friday! Schools are going back, the govt has not got anymore efficient and I’m tired and grumpy! Happy Autumn folks…
The Tory party has been hollowed out and filled with Boris Johnson’s vanity. It’s like Thatcher never happened, the Tory Party has been hollowing itself out pretty effectively since then. This didn’t just happen, it is, as with the Republicans in the US, the work of decades not just down to their latest leader…
A Week in Tory. This was Tuesday, there’s been more since. If I didn’t laugh, I’d weep…
I have dabbled with canning. I preserved some of my home grown tomatoes, in 2017 but not since, I make jam and marmalade but full on canning has been something I’ve thought about but not actually done.
Most of my preservation before has been jam, which I mostly do the traditionally British (in sterilised jars, with waxed papers and done), this is still how I make marmalade and blackberry jam. I know that lots of people right now will be ready to tell me how wrong that is, but it’s how I was taught and I’ve never had an issue with mould before I’ve opened the jars, and marmalade has sugar and acidity going for it and it’s not been an issue. So while I understand the issues you may have with this process, I’m not going to have a fight about it. Do your research, make your own decisions or follow the recipes that you’re comfortable with.
However, this year we had lock down, I’ve begun to grow more food on the plot, developed a ‘making pesto for winter’ habit and so my ambition has exceeded my freezer space! There is no room or money for another freezer, so earlier in the year, I bought the Kilner Canning Pan and Rack so I could preserve rhubarb compote in jars instead of freezing it. I now have 7 litres of rhubarb compote, 500ml of plum compote and 750ml of cherry compote all canned and in a cupboard.
All the compote
The other things that take up a lot of space in my freezer are beans and stock, and I thought about a pressure canner but they are pretty expensive in the UK as they need to be imported from the US, which is currently in the middle of a COVID panic induced shortage of canning supplies. I decided that for the two things I would really use it for, it really wasn’t worth the hassle or expense. (For anyone who doesn’t know pressure canning is food preservation for low acid food, it basically pressure cooks jars and kills all nasties.)
Then came a friend who has been thinking buying one and we’ve spoken about it and he decided that it would be a good birthday present and so now I have a pressure canner! So in the last couple of weeks, I’ve learned about canning beans, stock and tomatoes (because 25 minutes in a pressure canner even coming up to pressure is so much easier than hot water bath canning for 85 minutes!). I have about 7- litres of chicken stock, 18 jars of tomatoes and 4 jars each of chickpeas and black beans. This weekend, I also canned some dill pickle relish because we had 18 cucumbers from the plot! The cupboard of doom has been re-arranged to accommodate, this bounty.
It probably isn’t this tidy right now
There are lots of reasons not to can. It’s a hassle, it’s expensive, the initial cost of buying the jars and lids is expensive and aren’t easy to come by in the UK (I use Kilner jars that currently run at roughly £25-£30 for 12 500ml jars) and that’s before we talk about the cost of the other equipment, canners and thermometers and funnels and the whole shebang. It’s a peculiar kind of madness.
I do it to preserve the food I grow and to free up space in my freezer. I spend a lot of time and effort and money growing some of my food and it would be ridiculous if I had to give the majority away or worse throw it away because I couldn’t eat it all in a week. It’s amazing to sit down in January to a meal containing food that you grew and preserved. Having the plot has made me more aware of the cost of food. This weekend Ma and I spent about an hour and a half, just harvesting produce, growing food costs money and in the UK we are not paying nearly what it costs to grow and harvest. So I’ve been making an effort this year to eat more UK produced fruit and veg and to pay more for food that is produced to higher food standards. I’m not even close to perfect on this, I need to quit eating bell peppers and cucumber in the winter, but I’m trying.
Harvest
I also can’t pretend that a lot of these issues have crystallised for me with the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. Which is looking pretty likely, that would mean that in January, there would probably be some food shortages in the immediately similar to the issues in supermarkets just before lockdown and higher prices in the longer term because of how much food we import (in the winter 75% of the UK’s fresh food is imported), remember a couple of years ago there was unexpected bad weather in Spain and there were no courgettes? (Although why anyone is buying courgettes in January is beyond me!).
Further down the line if there is a UK-US trade deal then there is a danger that food standards will be lower and I don’t want to eat chlorinated chicken, I did sign the NFU’s Food Standards petition but I have little confidence that it’ll make any difference.
Tomatoes for sauce
In an ideal world, Ma and I would be be able to grow all the fruit and veg we eat and keep chickens. But it’s not an ideal world and we live in the city, in flats that aren’t designed for that kind of storage, to say nothing of the difficulties Ma would have getting her share home on the bus! I know that my small scale preserving efforts aren’t going to feed me for the entire year, or radically change the way food is produced for most people. This is about me putting (or at least starting to) my money where my mouth is. As I start to make sure that the food I eat meets the food standards that I believe are important, preserving the food I grow and make will help me afford to do that.
This is also not a rant about people who aren’t able or don’t want to do the things I’m doing. This is about the things I have the capability to do, that work for me. It’s more of an explanation of how my cooking journey is changing because my standards are.
I’m not going to explain canning here because I’m no expert, my go-to sources are Sarah at Sustainable Cooks, Cassie at Wholefully and Marisa at Food In Jars. All of them have good, easy to follow recipes that are tested to a high standard and meet the US standards on canning. Cassie is doing a whole series on canning this summer and Sarah doesn’t just talk about canning, she has loads of posts on how best to freeze produce too! So if any of this is interesting to you, please go and check those guys out!
There hasn’t been an update for two weeks and the harvests have been crazy…
So much food!
This weekend we said goodbye to the french beans, the wind did for the frame and so we pulled them up.
Last weekend we caged the chard and planted 10 cabbages (Rigoleto F1).
Chard cage
We also harvested 6 cauliflowers! Purple and white, I had the best dinner this weekend of cauliflower cheese, roasted carrots and green beans. There were the first leeks of the season. The caulis, leeks and kale were bought as plugs and have been so worth it. Ma who is usually against my spending has suggested that plugs for brassicas might be the way to go until we have a greenhouse or polytunnel!
Kale
After the harvesting, which took over an hour! We tidied up and did a bit of weeding on the squash beds. Then called it quits, I need to go a bit more often in the week to keep on top of the raspberries and cucumber..
Sprawling raspberries
Over the next couple of weeks we have lots to do. For harvesting, there are raspberries, the last of the carrots, cucumbers, cauliflowers and summer squash, the winter squash – I think at least another 10 to 12.
For additional planting for autumn/winter, we have another 10 cabbage plugs (Duncan F1) ordered as well as 40 winter lettuces (valian, brighton, winter density and navara), which should all be here and in before we go on holiday at the end of the month. Before we go away, I need to sow a bunch of stuff (black radish, radishes, coriander, pak choi, japanese greens, mustard and mixed oriental leaves) to see what we’ll get.
Rudbeckia
After holiday, we’ll need to plant all the bulbs we’ve bought (mixed chrysanthus dwarf crocuses, nutans blue bells, white and blue dutch irises, mixed alliums and tulips – double late double romance and fringed gorilla), I’ll probably move the gooseberry bushes to the new bed, move the compost bins and move the tomato beds next to the rose garden. I want to get some more rhubarb crowns for the space vacated by the gooseberries. We’ll also have to start on the changes to the winter squash beds once they are harvested and find somewhere to sow the broad beans and plant the garlic, onions and shallots for over wintering. Then there is moving the blackcurrant bushes and setting up two new raspberry beds, sorting out the support for the boysenberry, painting the shed and sorting out the roof and a water butt and finally making a patio next to the rose garden and pond.
Winter is a slower time but there is a lot of work to do, next year as well as growing all the things, I want to get on top of making compost. Part of me, the optimist part, thinks that after next season work on the plot will calm down but the part of me that’s had a plot for four years, thinks that I’ll just find another challenge, like a greenhouse or an asparagus bed. That’s the thing about gardening, the work is never done.
The blueberry bush is confused about the time of year!
Happy Monday, Tuesday! Last week was a write off because I was ill, there was much throwing up and it was not at all pleasant. I worked and slept and that is all I managed until Friday when I had a day off work and a haircut!
Meteorological autumn starts today and while it doesn’t feel like the end of summer on the plot, it’s darker in the morning and I’m not happy about it. There are things to look forward to, next week is the littlest nephew’s birthday, the Kenny’s are coming for dinner, Ma and I are going to Amble at the end of the month, there is still loads to harvest on the plot.
However, things are winding down and we are going into autumn. I struggle with the approach of winter and I’m wondering if being home based for most of this coming winter will make my SAD better or worse. I have a bunch of things I really need to sort out before it gets really dark, a curtain in the bedroom, a desk in the living room and the re-arrangement of furniture to accomodate the desk, sorting out some kind of winter squash storage!
This week isn’t busy but it feels action packed, at work we need to finish off the offsite planning work and I’m hosting the Friday quiz. After that I’m going to Ma’s to sort out her washing machine and ferry lots of allotment stuff she can’t carry herself (pesto, basil cubes, rhubarb crumble, tomato sauce, dill pickle relish) in addition to the stuff we’ll harvest on Friday! Thursday is a virtual birthday party for a friend.
On Sunday, we’re going to visit the midlands to celebrate the small nephew’s birthday and see everyone. On Sunday night, I’m going to collapse in a heap of too much socialising…
It was quite a week for harvest! We had 17 winter squash, the first french beans, our first proper cauliflower, two patty pans, two crookneck, eight cukes (plus two that are yellow and not for eating, I don’t know how we missed them but we did), kale, carrots and tomatoes. There’s a point with tomatoes where you have enough to bring home and and they don’t just get eaten on the plot because Mum sees them and gets excited!
Believe it or not, this is tidier…
So this year we have two squash beds and the uchiki kuris in the first bed were more or less ready. I planted mostly uchiki kuri and butternut squash in the first bed (there are three other plants that were replacements for causualties – an experiment that may be a crown prince, a burgess buttercup and a pumpkin). The kuri romped and the buttercup and crown prince produced one each, but the butternut and pumpkin sort of sulked and I could see 15 or so squash so it wasn’t too terrible. In the last couple of weeks as the kuris were dying back they woke up and started to spread so at the weekend we took up 17 squash to give the others some room. We have 5 butternuts and a pumpkin so far and anywhere between 6 to 10 weeks depending on the weather. The corn does not look like it survived to thrive…
The second squash bed
I got a later start to second squash bed, this had pumpkins, candy roasters, burgess buttercups, and the patty pan. None of the plants were in good shape, but the patty pan has started to produce and I count three candy roasters and 4 buttercups. We should be ok for squash this winter!
Mum modelling the cauliflower….
After harvesting, we worked. We potted all the blueberries and while Ma weeded, I got on with clearing some of the self sown flowers, there is a limit on how much verbena one allotment needs and it’s not taking the hint and did some ad-hoc weeding.
It was a good day, the plot is in that weird summer state where it’s still producing but it’s starting to go over, I’m still really happy with it though.
Nic Dempsey 