Christmas Dinner

☆ Merry Christmas to you.☆

☆ Artichokes, salsify and parsnips for dinner tomorrow.☆

Sunday Pickings

Bonanza!

The bumper courgette crop is paying dividends.

♥ A basin of apricots from a friend down the road.♥ These are reserved for a gallete, bien sûr.

♥ A basin of cooking apples from our friendly neighbour.♥ Apple pie, mmm mmmmm.

Beans, Beans and More Beans

We identified this Silver Y, Autographa gamma by the black stripes on either side of its head, it has been feasting on the sweet peas. We've also spotted a couple of the adult moths sheltering amongst the climbing beans nearby.

An exhausted Comma, Polygonia c-album.

Sunday Sunshine

♥The first of the Golden Sunrise tomatoes.♥

A Large Skipper (♂),Ochlodes sylvanus, supping on the lychnis coronaria alba.

Every evening the neighbouring apple tree is teeming with a chattering of starlings, which makes evenings in the garden feel a little Hitchcockian at times.

A flutter of Speckled Woods have descended on the tree too, though they seem to spend much of their time in mid-flight territorial squabbles.

Roots

   

♥ The first of the Long Red Surrey and Yellowstone carrots. ♥

Abundance

Peas and Beans

First of the 'Kelvedon Wonder' and the 'Magpie' dwarf beans.

The Medlars are swelling. The crawlie is possibly a fairy-ring longhorn beetle, leptura livida, we thinks.

First of the 'Old Fashioned'. We're having to spray these with water regularly to keep the aphids at bay; the spiders are looking too well-fed and languid.

A Small Magpie moth, Eurrhypara hortula taking refuge under the leaves of the Magpie dwarf beans; of all places.

The first blossoms on the cukes.

      

     

The green and pleasant corner.

The Last of the BroadBeans

Radishes and Dwarf Green Beans

The 'Bob and Mary' dwarf green beans have started producing pods before 'Magpie' despite being sown 5 weeks later.

The Milan Purple Tops are redolent of the illustrated plates of roots and tubers in the 'Album Vilmorin. Les Plantes potagères (1850–1895)'. This book, reprinted by Taschen, ISBN 978-3-8365-3599-1,is another favourite of ours that is pulled out and perused to while away winter.

First Courgettes

Angelica Jam

We trimmed back the angelica in an attempt to thwart the leaf miners. The trimmings were too fragrant to compost so we made a little time capsule pot of jam. We followed Jekka McVicar's recipe.

Something to put away for winter when there will be time to experiment with it.

Get Your Wellies On

♥ Our first cauliflower.♥

The plot is wild, wet and woolly. It'll be weeding and more weeding for us next weekend if we don't want everything to go to the gastropods.

We Blew The Raspberries

Ours wouldn't win a bake off but this chocolate brownie meringue cake with raspberry cream* proved an effective way to spread the joy of homegrown raspberries.

*After the taste test, we decided we'd cut down on the total volume of sugar used when making this next.

Aint We Jammy!

We made our first ever batch of homegrown strawberry jam this evening.
♥ sweet heaven ♥

Oh Bounty

Why yes those raspberries have been collected in an unused slug trap! Hmmm we really must sort ourselves out some sort of trug for ye freshly gathered victuals.

Beans To Replace The Has Beens.

AAaaarrghhh slugs! We're struggling to produce enough beanlings to garland the bean poles.

In this time of great sogginess and damp, we've taken to growing our own sunshine.

Salad Days

Finally, our first radishes are fattened and ready for eating.

Admittedly we've not been consistent in our successional sowing but, there's plenty for a couple more salads yet.

Lovely Lavender

This is what we got up to yesterday:



Lavender to scent our smalls and keep the clothes moths from our woollens. It is usually harvested in late summer, but we had little opportunity to do any allotmenting in 2011. Scant pickings, but the scent cheered us up enormously.

We've established a row of eight Lavender Angustifolia bushes that provide a permanent wildlife corridor across the plot for allotment critters. We presume this has been mapped as integral to the site's logistics infrastructure, because the allotment kittehs go out of their way to patrol this line in their wanderings.





We dug and prepared the last 3 of the 9 beds and planted the King Edward and jerusalem artichoke tubers for 2012. The photographs are a bit uninspired but the light was fading and we were cold and ready to go home.

Pancake Day

We opened the treasured jar of gooseberry jam made from our first ever harvest, 2011.

This year we'll strain out the pips as they hurt our teeth.