allotment in the snow

Now the 7th day with snow on the ground and -8 deg C when I went out. I heard on the radio the other day that fruit growers are very pleased at the cold snap. Due to the mild autumn and early winter, they were concerned that the fruit trees weren't getting the period of cold needed for the trees/bushes to help produce next year's fruit crop, thus affecting yields.

Be careful what you wish for! After a heavy snowfall on the 4th of February in the afternoon (complete with phantom accidents on the overhead road signs on the M1!), the snow has hung around, getting more icy, with another big dose of snow on Thursday 9th evening. Not much above freezing during the days so only a slight thaw, which has refrozen again into ice during the night.

Not as bad a the last two winters though, but there's time yet!

Allotment photos in the snow - the winter onions just poking out of the snow - they have had a good amount of growth in late autumn so should be fine, they are pretty hardy and most of them survived the last two winters.

Impossible to get the leeks out at the moment, they just snap off when you try and lift them!

And it won't be long until spring and broccoli! We've had a bit already, even a few springs of purple sprounting, but the main crop will be another month or so yet.

parsnip tea perhaps?

Do we eat this parsnip or do we make tea in it?

allotment news - 21/12/11

It's some time since I have had chance to update the blog, what with rushing around the children every weekend and sometimes during the week, things on at their schools etc.

I have just picked the two last ordinary tomatoes and last cherry tomato from the office plants, although I am going to do what we have successfully done with the tomato plant at home - prune it right back, let it grow shoots from the stem and enjoy tomatoes again by early spring! (I hope...)

In the allotment my wife has finished digging up all the stray potatoes and digging the patch over. We have got winter onions in and garlic at the top end where the beans were.

First time we have grown sprouts - two plants looking good, should be ok for Christmas dinner - although it is not me that eats them!

We also have occasional brocolli, both green and purple shooting, plenty of parsnips still, some beetroot, plenty of leeks.

We have potatoes and onions and garlic in store, we have just finished the apples.

4 or 5 allotment vegetables in December isn't bad for a meal!

pumpkin chutney (and the big stink!)

As it's getting a lot colder now (frost predicted tonight as I write this) and the 2 pumpkins in the allotment looked ready, I picked them on Saturday and proceeded to turn them into chutney.

The variety of pumpkin is "Turk's Turban" - you can see why from the picture above.

Now, these pumpkins were really tough to get through - I still have the blisters from peeling and chopping them! However, there was much more flesh per pumpkin than you get in the traditional ones for Halloween, and a lot fewer seeds.

So, once chopped up finely it is time for some cooking

I'm using just over half a bottle of Sarson's pickling vinegar (like most other British brands nowadays it is owned by another company, in this case Crosse and Blackwell, though I would imagine someone else owns them by now....). It's ready spiced so there is no messing around with a small muslin bag of pickling spices - you can of course do this if you have your own secret pickling recipe!
Also a 500g bag of dark brown sugar, some ginger, curry powder and garam masala, although of course you can add your own spices to taste.

The pumpkin was chopped up quite fine into rough cubes about 1cm cubed.

Now for the bubbling, and this is where the big stink comes in...

This is the chutney bubbling away in my mum's jam pan that I think dates from pre-war and didn't get melted down for Spitfires... It's steaming away just as much as the Icelandic hot springs we saw last year, and although not a sulphur smell, it is really quite a strong vinegar smell.
So much so that when my daughter came back up the street from a walk she could smell it from 3 houses down the road!

Anyway, the two pumpkins made 7 jars of chutney, now all I have got to do is keep my hands off them for a month or two while they mature!

late peas

These peas are still going, as long as the weather holds out then we shall be eating fresh peas at the end of October!

Sunflowers

The unusually warm and summery weather for the first weekend in October gave a new lease of life to various things, such as the sunflowers, but also the sweetcorn and the courgettes.

Allotment Report 9/10/11 - Still harvesting!

I don't know whether it was because everything got off to a bit of a slow start this year, but we are still harvesting plenty from the allotment.

The prettiest things have got to be what we think are borlotti beans  - we really ought to keep a better track of what we put in! However, these are the first of our "drying" beans to be ready to pick and store, the pods were dry almost to the point of cracking open. The unusually hot and dry weather during the past week or two (last weekend was 30 deg C - in October!!!!) has really helped, although I presume nature is a bit confused having gone from a not very warm summer into an autumn storm and then back to the highest temperatures since May! Autumn has now resumed with a wet and windy weekend....

This lunchtime have picked beetroot, broccoli, a leek (first one this season), and quite a number of reasonable carrots most of which have avoided the dreaded carrot flies... We are going back over the potato patch to locate any that we have missed first time round so we don't end up with potatoes in the middle of the peas next year!