Festive

Foraged, picked, bottled and stored in the summer...


...now decanted and ready for Christmas. The blackberry vodka is par-TICK-ularly tasty :)

I'm starting to feel festive.

Catching up

Well, we're back from two weeks in the Indian sun. Now surrounded at home by a few heaps of washing, half-empty suitcases and a selection of hastily-organised Christmas gifts. (Note to self - if returning from holiday on a Sunday evening, consider booking the Monday off work too. Otherwise a week of exhaustion follows.)

Popped down to the allotment this afternoon, the first chance we've had since getting back from Goa. And everything seemed fine! The chilly weather has meant that the weeds haven't taken over as feared, though some of the grass is sneakily encroaching on the edges of the beds.

Last week my Garlic Lovers' Pack arrived (yey!)


So today we planted out about 100 individual cloves - nine different garlic varieties. Actually, ten, if you also count the garden-centre-bought garlic which Adam planted before we went away.

So we have ...

• Elephant Garlic - two MASSIVE cloves!
• Solent Wight
• Aquila Wight
• Early Large Purple Wight
• Lautrec Wight
• Iberian Wight
• Provence Wight
• Chesnok Wight
• Albigensian Wight
• and a random white variety from the garden centre. Can't find the label...

Here's Adam preparing four beds down at the bottom of the plot. And all four now have garlic in... That's going to be a lot of garlic!







And in other non-garlic-related news, the brassicas are doing well - the red cabbage especially is looking great. The brussels sprouts, however, are tiny! I'm not sure what's gone wrong this year but I doubt we'll have any to eat for Christmas. The plants are about 6 inches high and - although they're healthy-looking, the sprouts are about the size of a pea!

Ooogosh again!*

*Or, Slightly overwhelmed by all the excitement!

Excitement? I hear you ask... What excitement?

Well, there's a much-looked-forward-to holiday fast approaching, with all the sorting, organising, planning and packing that involves when heading off to somewhere that's 32 degrees and has palm trees. And if that wasn't exciting enough, I took a look at Our Patch Of Earth to find...

...an award!Woo!

Thanks very much to Gary at Reads Allotment Retreat, it's very much appreciated! And also slightly strange to think there are People Out There reading and, I assume, returning time and time again to an insignificant blog that little ol' me wrote about chickens and vegetables! Funny old world...

And, here are the rules:
Post the award on your blog (including the above picture) along with the name of the person who passed it on to you and link to their blog. Choose 15 blogs which you have recently discovered and you think are great and pass it on to them. Don't forget to leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

Now, at the risk of being a party-pooper, I'm gonna have to do my own set of nominations when I'm back from sunnier climes in a couple of weeks. I think it deserves a little more thought and attention than I have to spare right now this minute.

And in other news.

I often visit a great site at Fennel and Fern and, on a whim, I recently entered a Garlic Giveaway - a competition to win a Garlic Lover's Growing Pack from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm, with nine (count them!) different types of garlic - that's enough cloves to make about 100 new plants.

And I WON!!! Yey!

So I think it's only fair to say a MASSIVE thankyou to Isabel at Fennel and Fern for running the competition, and to Darren at the Garlic Farm, who was kind enough to call me this morning to discuss the merits of garlic, top tips on growing conditions and when to deliver my prize (my Prize! Eeee!). I look forward to it!

And so to pack... Anon, chums...

Ooogosh!

I just wanted to share the wonder of raindrops on brassica leaves...



I won't take them for granted any more.

PS: I love my camera.

Disheartened

I have been remiss. Updates are not appearing on here as thick and fast as they should probably be. But there, look, I only posted once last October, so this is a vast improvement. And anyway, not much has been going on this month. Or at least, not much has been going on that I've been tempted to blog about.

We're onto chicken no. 5. A couple of weekends ago Lola had a cough on the Saturday, wheezed on the Sunday, and was dead on the Monday morning. Even as we were discussing the possibility of finding a chicken-certified local vet. And Lola! Good ol' faithful, had-since-the-beginning Lola! There were tears, as I wrapped her in newspaper...

I've put off blogging about it this long because our apparent lack of ability to keep chickens alive had me feeling somewhat ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, sad, angry... they were never supposed to be pets, exactly, but then they're not supposed to blimmin' well die so fast either. What are we doing wrong?!! Ah well. We discussed getting rid of Peggy Sue and becoming chickenless again (after all, where the run had been would make a fantastic veggie patch - all that poo!), but then a Saturday impulse led to us getting as-yet-unnamed-but-possibly-called-Alice.

I know. Don't say anything. I'm still not entirely convinced it was the right thing to do. At least they have a fairly pampered life with us while they plot their numerous escapes and pop out eggs every day before their untimely demise.

And I can keep working my way through the cupcake recipe book my sister got me for my birthday...

Harvest

We needed a wheelbarrow to take our tatties home today. Ok, not a massive wheelbarrow, but still, not bad for a couple of hours' work in the sunshine, and it feels like we've got all this food for free!

As Adam re-insulated the composte heaps with lots of dry grass, I picked the last of the tomatoes and the squash. Then we spent an hour or so digging up the last potato bed, and we ended up with half a barrowfull of Cara potatoes, as well as nearly a dozen winter and butternut squash, a bag of tomatoes and another big handful of dried borlotti beans.


I'm looking forward to eating these. They're not massive, but perfect for a meal for two, which is great as, well, we are two, and we eat meals. They should keep pretty well - especially if we can cure them a bit more in the sunshine - but that iddy biddy one on top isn't going to see the inside of a cupboard, as it's going to be roasted along with potatoes (ours), carrots, swedes and parsnips (all not ours, sadly) and a pheasant from the local market for our lunch. With lots of garlic and lemon. Yum.

And I wonder if I'll be able to resist making a Halloween lantern out of that orange one...


Update - ickle squash tasted goooood.

All autumnal

How time flies when you're having fun! Since my last post we've had more tomatoes, more beans, and more potatoes. Also my birthday, and, oh yes, a new camera. Woo! But the weather's definitely turning, the courgette and tomato plants are looking sorry for themselves and the sunflowers in the garden are getting a little bedraggled. But still beautiful, especially if you look close up.

One of the first real signs that autumn is well and truly here - the borlotti beans are drying nicely on the plant. We've got a couple of handfuls of the dried beans now which we can store and use in something hearty in midwinter. They're sitting in a kilner jar in the kitchen, look nice and rustic.


The winter squash are also ripening nicely. We'll just give them another week or so to get a bit more sun. We've also got three small butternut squash, which is very exciting stuff indeed as I love butternut squash.












No real success with the sweetcorn this year. We've had three, maybe four decent sized cobs and a couple of tiny ones. But boy, were they tasty! The cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, red cabbage and purple sprouting brocolli are all doing fine. The netting seems to have kept the pigeons off so far!

The allotment as a whole seems to be going from strength to strength. Apparently the council-owned allotments are full and they've started sending people our way. All the suitable plots are now let, so the ones near us which are mainly overgrown with brambles and grass are going to be professionally rotavated, so we should have some neighbours which will help keep the path clear and the weeds under control But they're going to leave the big giant blackberry bush untouched, so we'll keep a little privacy. And get the blackberries!

We helped to clear some of the long grass on one of the adjacent plots and found this little fellow hiding under a rotting piece of plywood...


Bless!