Bat Watch

We attended a bat walk at Lloyd Park, Walthamstow. We got to see and listen to Common pipistrelle and Noctule bats under the light of the blue moon.

♥ Strawberry Pie ♥

We've made a reluctant decision that we're going to reduce the number of strawberry plants we grow as they take up so much space. Our 40 or so plants are going to a new home on J's allotment. To cheer ourselves up and celebrate our final berries of the year we made a rhubarb and strawberry lattice pie.

We also inaugurated our ♥ new pie dish ♥ Thanks to Kwyjibo for carting it in his luggage despite threatening to pack it with his dirty smalls and M for lugging it over the Atlantic.

Recipe:

Crust:
• 300g plain white flour
• 150g butter
• 2 tbsp caster sugar
• 3-4 tbsp cold water
Filling:
• 4-5 stems rhubarb
• 500g strawberries
• caster sugar to taste
• knob of butter

Chill the pastry for 30min before rolling out half for the base; return the remaining half to the fridge until needed for cutting strips for the lattice top.

Preheat oven to 180c.

Line the pie dish with pastry and blind bake the base.

Cut the rhubarb into equal sized pieces approximately the size of the strawberries. Halve the large strawberries, keep the small whole.

Melt the butter in a thick bottomed frying pan, add the rhubarb and strawberries.

Once the fruit has started to release juice add sugar to sweeten to taste.

Stew until the rhubarb is just soft, don't stir otherwise the fruit will quickly disintegrate. Spoon softened fruit into a colander placed over a bowl to catch any juice that strains out.

Reduce the juice in the frying pan until it coats the back of a spoon.

Check sweetness is to taste, place cooled fruit and reduced juice into the base of the pie.

Roll out remaining pastry and cut strips to weave lattice and trim the edge.

Bake until pie crust is cooked through (15 - 20 min).

Camping on the Crouch

Six-spot burnet moth, Zygaena filipendulae on common mallow.

The rain and gales held off for the day and we took a short walk along the Crouch on the sea wall from Burnham-on-Crouch quayside.

The sight of ragwort strung with cinnabar caterpillars took us back to when plot 57b was an allotment plot. We'd assiduously weed around the ragwort plants whether they'd germinated in the very middle of a vegetable bed in anticipation of the Minnie-the-Minx-striped caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth.

Queen Anne’s Lace or Wild Carrot, Daucus carota(?)

The common Red Soldier Beetle, Rhagonycha fulva was out in force.

Black-headed gull, Chroicocephalus ridibundus

Saltmarsh horsefly, Atylotus latistriatus

We chose Burnham-on-Crouch to try out our new tent on our inaugural UK camping trip. We can highly recommend Silver Road Caravan Park the manager is helpful, the campers friendly and the ablution facilities spotlessly clean. The site is just off the high street and minutes walk from the quayside lined with weatherboard cottages and weathered brick taverns. The nearby tiny, quaint independent Rio cinema is well worth a visit too.

We also recommend Brian Dawson's seal viewing trips. The weather didn't hold for taking photographs but the trip went ahead and we were able to observe several groups of harbour seals and their pups, curlew and avocet.

We look forward to returning and taking the ferry to explore the Wallasea Wetlands.

Blue Skies

We visited the Walthamstow Garden Party and came away with a haul of creeping thyme and lawn chamomile from the fabulous Herbal Haven stall.

We also bought three iris from our very own gardening club open day. Thank you Barbara.

Beautiful Berries

We put the bounty to good use in a chocolate sponge, raspberry cream cake for our gardening club open day.

The first Costoluto Fiorentino.

Teasel

Bombs Away!

It is a suicide mission taking the kitchen waste to the compost bin at the bottom of the garden. What with the heat wave the apple tree has been dropping surplus fruit from its 28ft height and now the feral rose-ringed parakeets have set to.

More Paved Paths

Tubby tabby checked and signed off the levels.

No rain as forecast however we made good use of the cooler overcast day to level and pave another path. We also managed to chisel 3 stone path slabs out of the spot where we plan to create a patio and haul them to a shaded, screened place under the plum tree. We are going to put a bench here.

To make sure the path doesn't fall away at the edge we laid the bricks and levelled them, then removed those along the edge and recessed a channel to hold a layer of cement.

We set the edge bricks into the cement, this will anchor them in once it cures. We used a bag of all purpose concrete mix as we had it on hand. If you were laying paving to a higher degree of accuracy you would need to use bricklaying mortar which will allow you to level and space the pavers more precisely. All we had to do was add water as per the instructions. The fine concrete does fly up when emptying the bag so do wear eye protection and a dust mask.

Cement is caustic so prevent it from getting on your bare skin. Don't dispose of excess concrete or gray water from cleaning your tools by washing it down a drain.

*This pic is inserted here but was taken a week on after we'd back-filled the soil.

Sunshiny Day

Large skipper,Ochlodes sylvanus

Speckled bush-cricket, Leptophyes punctatissima

We've started the high potash feeds on the Tigerella as it is first to set fruit.

If your raspberry plants are starting to go yellow between the veins and turn brown at the edges don't slosh the remnants of the tomato feed on in the vague hope of addressing a mineral deficiency - like we numpties did. The symptoms are the plants clearly communicating they require magnesium, toute de suite! We learned in our internet research later that we'd made conditions worse by watering with high-potassium tomato feed as plants will absorb potassium over magnesium. We are now remedying the situation by applying an Epsom salts(magnesium sulphate) foliar feed as per RHS directions. We're not sure whether the raspberries will forgive us.

Hover fly, Syrphus ribesii (?)