Many of the plants in the allotment are winter hardy - the fruit trees and bushes shut down for winter and vegetables like parsnips and leeks will be fine in cold weather. However, a few of our plants do need a little bit of extra protection at this time of year.
This is our Mayer Lemon tree. It used to live in our house but was always getting plagued by scale insect but we found that after a few weeks one summer at the allotment it started being healthy and there were no scale insects. There is always something to eat the bugs!Cash and Carrots
Read on for my thoughts about growing your own and saving money! Bit of nature and environmental stuff too! Now with a list of local markets in the Links section!
Sunday, 1 January 2023
Winter Protection in the Allotment
Thursday, 10 November 2022
Little Asby Common - Part 2 - insects, birds and frogs
In Part 1 of this blog series I looked at some of the plant life on Little Asby Common, Cumbria which we saw when we were staying in the village.
In this blog I share some of the wildlife we saw up there. Like many uplands in the UK, you can hear curlew with their bubbling call, though we were too late in the season to see some of the other waders that nest in the area and too early for the influx of ducks and geese from Iceland and Greenland that pass through the region on migration.
Quite some distance from other flowers I found this Musk Thistle (Carduus nutans) with what I believe to be a Bilberry Bumblebee (Bombus monticola) but I am not 100% sure of the identification!This is a Meadow Pipit (Anthus pratensis), a common bird both in the lowlands and uplands. They are usually quite skittish around humans but this one was perched for a little while on a wall near Sunbiggin Tarn while we watched.
While we were at Sunbiggin Tarn we had to be very careful walking around as there were quite a few tiny frogs making their way towards the lake through the undergrowth!
I only had moments to get a blurry
photo of what I think is a Common Darter dragonfly (Sympetrum striolatum) enjoying the sunshine on a rock on the hillside above the tarn. I wasn't expecting a dragonfly out in the middle of the moorland but looking at the British Dragonfly Society sightings map, some have been seen here before.
And of course, although they aren't wild, meet one of the sheep living on the moor, in conversation!
Little Asby Common - sheep wrecked?? Part 1
But having been gifted books on lichens, mosses and ferns for my birthday, and with an increasing interest in wildflowers, I wanted to see what species there were on a moorland habitat some deride as sheep-wrecked.
This is an Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnalis), looks a bit like a dandelion. Common in rocky places and is perennial.This is a Harebell or Scottish Bluebell (Campanula rotundifolia) more common in the north of England into Scotland than further south. Very delicate flowers, of which there were quite a few on the moor.
Sunday, 6 November 2022
Autumn in the Allotment
I also have been doing some website and social media volunteering for https://futureoftheamazon.org/ , a non-profit foundation helping indigenous people in northern Brazil restore and protect rainforest.
We've also made several bags up of mini sweetcorn, the variety is called Minipop and it does seem to do very well in our allotment. We start them off in sterilised compost in toilet roll tubes and then plant it in a block as it is wind pollinated.
This Autumn we have had a lot of apples and pears, and I mean.... a lot! We have three minarette apple trees, a Gala, a Chiver's Delight and a Falstaff. There's also two minarette pear trees, a Conference and a Comice, the latter of which does ripen very quickly in storage and so I have had to preserve a lot of them in sugar solution, great in porridge!
We've had some lovely Cosmos in the allotment, and indeed sunflowers, nasturtiums and marigolds. We also leave some weeds to grow into flowers, mainly to see what they are, but also as you never know what wildlife will turn up on them and indeed depend on them for nectar etc.
Sunday, 24 April 2022
Cassoulet - ish
I enjoy cooking but have, I suppose like many people, a fairly limited selection of dishes that I can actually cook! I find recipes in books and online often way too complicated for me, not that I can't understand them given time but that I just want to get on with throwing things into a pan, wok or dish, frying or bubbling or oven-cooking it up.
However, having gone round my usual list of Sunday dinner options, which doesn't just include the traditional English Sunday roast, I decided that I would actually try something new this week.
My eldest mentioned recently that cassoulet, which is basically like a French bean casserole with meat, is something that she bought in tins when working in France but never really tried cooking it herself. Now, I am sure that my version of it would seriously annoy any respectable French cook but I decided to give it a go.
Hence, "Cassoulet-ish" is the title for this blog!
So, one of the things that we grow a lot of in the allotment are borlotti beans for drying.
Sunday, 13 February 2022
More local dinner!
It has been some time since I blogged although I have been active on Twitter on many topics (@cashandcarrots). One of these is local food. I live in an area with many local livestock farmers and the beef, pork and lamb in my local butchers is raised on a farm three miles away. The chicken is from a couple of farms, around thirty miles away in different directions, and more on one of these later. We cycle to one of three smallholdings in nearby villages for eggs, two of these have the chickens in a small field right next to the road so you can literally see where your food comes from! Our milk is delivered from TD Goodall's dairy about ten miles away as the crow flies, with the yoghurts and cottage cheese (and butter if we need it) that come in the same delivery originally from Longley Farm near Huddersfield, a company that I have supported for over thirty years now.
Our local butchers shop is often trying out new products and this weekend I noticed that they had got in some free range chickens via a merchant called Soanes Poultry. These were, looking at the colour of the skin, obviously corn fed and the farmer is not far from Doncaster Airport. These were on a trial price so they will be a little bit more expensive in the future but it is worth paying a bit more for free range if they are available.Tuesday, 9 November 2021
Local dinner!
First of all, for all those reading in the North of England, no I haven't gone posh and decided to call my evening meal 'dinner'! But a headline of 'local tea' would be confusing in other ways, so 'dinner' it is, even though it wasn't at lunchtime!
When I got home from work, light was fading fast so it was a quick trip up to the allotment to pick some carrots and a turnip.