Winter has broken out

The clock went back at the weekend. Suddenly the weather has turned cold. Cloudless skys gives a hard frost and we had the first proper crispy frost overnight on the Tuesday 28th. Some people locally had snow. We just had a bit of sleet. It be interesting to see what state the soil is in at the weekend.

Over exercised

I have been on holiday this past week. I got about a bit, visiting suppliers that I would not normally get a chance to visit. It was nice to get about the countryside without being under pressure to be somewhere. I managed spend some time at the lottie. I dug lot of bed 2 but managed to strain the muscles of my lower back. Bit of a bugger really. The back is feeling much better by today so much so that I did the poo trailer run as normal.

I haver tidied up the green house and potted up some Buddliea that had self set in the front garden. I shall leave the back garden until after Christmas when the plants are truly dormant and then give everything a pruning. I dug out the dead annuals from the front garden and with H direction planted a load of bulbs, of different sorts, for the spring.

H and I have been busy making Chutney's of one sort or another. There has been a lot of pie making as well. We were given a very large number of Bramley apples. It seems a bit short sighted just to crush them all for juice. I have yet to make some Mint jelly. Surprising as it may seem but you need apples for that too.

Biting Wind

The last few weeks were a over shadowed by having to give notice to one of the Society members. It has been on the cards for ages but it is never a nice things to do but now it is done things can move on. The year has turned in the past week. Most of the trees are dressed for Autumn and the wind has an edge to it.

I went the lottie as usual on Saturday and manged to harvest various crops; another Red Cabbage for pickling, some Hispi, some Leeks which although quite small are very tasty and some very odd looking carrots. H came with me just to get out of the house. H tweaked her back a few weeks ago and means she has had a hard time sleeping and that of course affects everything else. She is feeling better by the day so healing is taking place. Under H's direction I bagged what was required. I dug up the remaining early spring sown Carrots, but they were a disaster. They had all split and peeled open. That is because they were not kept watered. However the ones planted late summer are smashing. I planted a globe shape variety. They are sweet and about the size of a gobstopper. They went in whole in to Sunday's stew. I dug up a few of the late crop just to see how they were doing. Very well is the answer. They still have to bulk up but they are nice and straight and without Carrot fly damage. Whatever the herb was a planted with the carrot has deterred the carrot fly. I am trying to remember, I think it was Coriander. I did not like the smell of it and neither did the dreaded carrot fly. So there is a lesson from 2008.

The Pumpkins are ready. I tried to move the vine to tidy it up but it just came off the fruit, ergo it is ready. We have plenty of Pumpkin. Nine in fact. All about a foot across and 5 to 6 pounds in weight. Since the clean up last week the Grape vines are very prominent. I had a good look at them. I still have to work out how to train them.

I went round to my friend Gloria and picked a load of her Apples. They are a bit beat up but should do for crushing. The shed is stuffed with trays and sacks of Apples. There is a fruity, fermenting small about the place. There is still the Salsify to harvest and eat. It is also called Oyster plant because of it taste. I think I will have to have an experiment before it goes on the table before the ladies of the house. I have not been brave enough to dig up one of the Japanese Burdock. I have found recipes for it on the t'interweb. I figure it will over winter until I have time to mess about.

I have this week off, if the weather allows, there will be digging at the allotment.

Harvest time

It is a busy ole time. Crops to harvest, hedgerow fossicking to do and making of preserves to say nothing of winter digging and general cleaning up of the plot. I have even looked at my back garden yet. The Green house is full a Tomatoes, all green, green tomato chutney anyone?

I harvested the remaining Sweet Corn yesterday and the outdoor Cucumber as well as the butternut squash. I bagged a couple of handfulls of Carrots and a nice head a cabbage. I got another Red cabbage for pickling. H has promise Lancashire hotpot which which you can not have without pickled red cabbage. It is a rule. I dug up the Caulis. The curds where really small, about the size of the your fist. They will go for Piccalilli. I cleaned the weeds up as a cleared the cauli. Slowly but surely the cabbage bed is being turned over. This bed is the root bed next year so it is due for a deep dig in the spring. The rain which weathermen promised, started on cue which put an end to Saturdays outdoor activities.

I got to the lottie early on Sunday. The morning was beautiful and it continued to be sunny and hot all day. Pete, my lottie neighbour, was there before me. He had got a bonfire going so I got a chance to burn off off the rubbish that is too tough or seedy for the compost bin. I even got rid of a couple manky pallets and other combustible bits and pieces. I managed to plant out the Savoy cabbage seedling which became very leggy from sitting in the greenhouse too long. I took down the bean frame and stowed the poles for the winter. I considered the "X" frame an improvement over the traditional "A" frame or wigwam so I will be doing that again next year. I think I will try proper bean/pea trench this winter to see if I can improve the crop. This year was all rush so I just threw the seeds in the ground and left them to it. I did not even have the time do proper pea sticks and the yield suffered. However if a I can catch the mice they should be quite porky having stuffed themselves with my Broad Beans and Peas. The Pumpkin are looking magnificent. Let hope nothing happens to them before the end of the month.

Now that the Bean patch is cleared I can see the Grape vines clearly. They look great. They must be at least six feet tall. I have to read my books to work out how to prune them to train them along the wires. No rush though, they have not died back yet. I will better able to see the stems once the leaves have fallen.

There have been developments at the lottie which is like having a weight taken off my shoulders. Still lots to do before Christmas. Most of which I dare not speak about in case I jinx it.

I got back later from the lottie and had to go straight out. I missed lunch so it was a good job I had had a big breakfast. I found a Butcher in Swadlincote that make very good Black Pudding. It is made with course cut fat which makes a very pleasant addition to my Sunday morning breakfast plate.

The Year is Turning

In the last few days the clues that tell you that year is turning are adding up. Firstly we have had the Statues Fair in Ashby. A fair comes to town about the second weekend in September for four days. They set up the length of Market Street, arriving overnight Thursday. On day the street is a busy thoroughfare the next it is a Fair. It stays like that until the Sunday night where upon it disappears for another year.


Another clue is the thick mists associated with the slow moving high pressure zones at this time of year. The fog, it is thicker than a mist, burns off when the sun gets going but not until at least 10.30 or 11am. The overnight temperature is beginning to drop. The leaves of the Pumpkins are susceptible to the cold and very soon start to wither revealing the orange pumpkins that have been growing in the shade of the leaves. It is a bit of a surprise as what you get in the Pumpkin line. Often you get more than you think because one is lurking and you have missed it when checking the plants. Same goes for the French beans except the pods are green. All of a sudden the bean frame is covered with pods that were invisible a few weeks ago.

The final clues is the pleading from the females of the house that it is cold in the evenings. H's nose is the barometer. When it is cold she tries to stick it in my neck to warm it up. I always try to hold out starting the boiler until the 1st of October but it is a vain hope.

All the spuds are in

No blogs last week because I had to up early Monday to go to head office in London. It is a 5am start so early to bed on Sunday. Last Sunday turned out nice which allowed me to get the remainder of the main crop spuds "Cara" harvested. It has been quite dry and I was worried that the soil would be solid making harvesting heavy work. I should not have worried. The soil was quite friable. H left me to it this time. There was a little blight but not as bad as previous years. The Cara's were a good size. Ideal for baking which is H's favorite way of cooking spuds. Miss L tucks away a baked potato quick smart too. I have them all in the shed in sacks but now I am faced with storing the produce in such a way that we can get at everything easily.

I still have a lot of produce at the lottie, mainly brasicass and roots. Luckily they can live out until I need them. Now most the tall plants have been cut back or harvested I can now see the grape vines. I put them in a foot tall sticks with a few leaves and now all the white grapes are six feet tall and showing no signs of slowing down just yet.

I have not done any pickling this year so I need to get busy with that soon. The garage is full of saved jars which are starting to get in the way. I have been distracted with work but also with the new extension to the allotments. We had a chat with the site foreman about what he could do for us. We agreed a plan and that was last Friday. When I went up to check on the lottie on Friday lottie because I had been away most I found the contractors had made a start on preparing the site. They did up to the old plantation hedge line. I have spent a few hours this morning undoing the staples that held the wire to the posts. I managed to save 70 yards of strand wire but as yet I have not been able to salvage the wire rabbit fencing. I hope the contractors will be able to complete the other section soon. Steve and I can then set out the areas for the hard standings and paths. Where we get the stone fill and top soil from is a mystery at the moment but things have a way of turning up.

Weather, RollsRoyce, Spuds, Tendons and Rossi

Is the change of atmospheric conditions called "weather" because you don't know whether to go out or stay in?

The week was changeable so by Saturday it was promised to be fine all day and remain so on Sunday. I took a chance on Sunday remaining dry. I hoped that the sun and wind would dry the soil enough to let me harvest some more Potatoes. I have had a very tough few weeks at work and was quite low So H said we should go out. H had seen a piece in a local paper advertising an open day at the Rolls Royce works in Derby. We went along. It was really good. It was the Rolls Royce engineering and restoration club. They had all kinds of stuff from the earliest car and aero engines through to the early jet engines up to some quite modern fighter and passenger plane's jet engines. They had the sorts of Rolls and Royce, who incidentally, met and opened there first car works in Manchester, planes, cars, trucks, tanks, rocket motors and lots of bits of special machines and intricate engineering. The museum had every kind of Rolls related thing but the highlight was at 3pm.

Rolls Royce have a restored Merlin V24 aero engine as used in WWII in Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mosquitos and Lancasters. This one happen to be bolted to the frame and they run it. Three o'clock came and the assembled crowd were treated to the massive V24, 29 litre piston engine being started. It had a little cough and chuff as it was turned over by the starter motor before bursting into life with a deep roar. At first it ran quite rough but as it burbled along on the choke which when reduced settled down into a deep, throaty purr. After a few minutes of ticking over, which is quite fast on areo engines, they pulled the throttles open to run at much higher revs. The sound was visceral. It was not ear splittingly loud but loud with a deep resonance. We were stood about ten yards away. They had a cut down propeller on the motor, no doubt for balance and to give the motor a load, but even cut down to 18 inches the prop still sent a hurricane of wind back to the operators stood at the back of the engine. They ran the engine at different revs. It was quite a thing to witness. When the engine was shut down the crowd broke into a spontaneous round of applause. We then went to find the canteen. A cup of weak warm tea later, my spirit restored, by the event and no the tea, we trundled off home.

The gamble paid off. Sunday was dry. H decided that I needed watching so came along to the lottie. I set about the spuds and H did the French Beans. Incidentally the climbing French Beans have done very well but should have been picked weeks ago. I have been growing them up an "X" shape frame rather than the tradition wigwam or "A" frame. It has worked rather well but next year I will make the "X" more pronounced. When I was fencing last Tuesday I bent the end of my little finger with Martingale attached to my sword. It a french gripped foil which is not what I normal use. It did not hurt much, in fact it was not until I took my glove off at the end of the bout I noticed anything beyond a little discomfort. H made me go to the Doctor the next day and they sent me to Loughborough walk-in centre who duly pronounced I had snapped the tendon that controls the end joint of the little finger, right hand. I have to wear a split for two months. ow try an dig up spuds without sing your little finger of your dominant hand. It is a bugger especially when you know you should not flex your splinted finger. So I was digging with my pinky stuck out as if I was having high tea.

H decided that she fancied a go at digging the potatoes. H has a go every year. Her back is not up to that kind of exertion but she like to have a token go. She loves seeing them come up from the soil "like treasure, like treasure" she says as they come up on the tines of the fork. The soil is in beautiful condition so digging is not too hard but the spuds are in deep so a lot of soil has to be moved. I did the first row myself and half the second row. H did the remainder of the row. She was having fun digging spuds. She would dig up two plants worth I would then go through the soil again for the strays H missed and tidy the soil up as a seed bed, It is heavy work for H and she does not have a method so the potato bed looks like a pack of hounds have been digging for foxes. When H finished I went back over the area we had been tramping over, turning the soil and using the fork to restore the soil to a level surface, more or less. We sprinkled on some Clover seeds. I hope they germinate and start to grow before the year turns properly. The Clover planted as a green manure last year worked really well.

As luck would have it the MotoGP in America was affected the hurricane Ike and was delayed so much so I was able to watch it live on BBC2. Another result! I watched another master class by Rossi. He cements his position at the top of the points table. The next race is at Motegi, Japan in two weeks. I had to be out of the house for 5am on Monday so early to bed.