it was a little windy this weekend ...

... would be an understatement, in fact it was so windy that this was the scene of carnage at our allotment:

in general the wind was pretty bad, but we hadn't guessed that this would be the state of things, yesterday, in all fairness to sheds from boxes, both of these sheds were empty, but nonetheless we can imagine that a little scottish hurricane cut a path right through wedmore vale ...

lettuce and a mild november

the allotment is in such a weird state right now, we have had a ridiculously mild november and everything is stuck in this strange holding pattern, it is too cold for there to be any real growth on most things, but it hasn't frosted yet ... right now we have two little lettuce experiments going, one in the cold frame:

that is obviously doing fairly well, and then lettuce in the mini-poly tunnel in the back of the house, and its been slow going for those seedlings ...

other things that are still in the ground with a fighting chance are our fennel (still going strong), rutabaga/swede, and escarole! in addition to all of our greens ...

pampas grass

one of the few things that we have done in the fleeting weeks before you-know-who comes is to do just a tiny bit of weeding, and part of that was to lay a small path of pampas grass down:

last year we decided that one great use for all of the clippings from our monstrous pampas grass plant in our backyard was to put it down on our paths in the allotment, remarkably it doesn't fly away and it is pretty durable too ... let's not be so 'pampas' about what we use in the garden!

very little, almost nothing ...

unfortunately, there has been very little activity in the allotment recently, aside from harvesting 2kg of borlotti beans and m transplanting a sweet little flower, there are a number of reasons for this, first, there is the small little matter of the imminent arrival of our tiny new friend, "any day now" are the words we have been repeating often! also work is a little hectic, and also there is the issue of the weather ...

like for the last 6 weeks the weather has been very very mellow, here is the always melodramatic guardian take on our weather, mildest november for 300 years made me chuckle, but nevertheless, it means no frost so far and none in sight, basically even our squash plants don't know whether to throw in the towel!  we don't mind though, if this is the season of everything mellow, that can't be a bad thing.

a random mini fall harvest

today i went to the allotment just to pick some lettuce (in the plastic bag below), but you can't just stop there and instead i walked a way with this random tiny harvest:

some of these are the forgotten, this massive cucumber that had been completely covered by our courgette plants (which are still trying to eek out 5 more squash before the season is over!) and a rebel carrot (from the seed we planted 6 months ago), but there are also two leeks, our first swede/rutabaga (cue applause), and I finally pulled the plug on our only celery root, which produced just a pool ball sized root, but we can use the leaves in dishes, ratty also got some attention too ...

the constant battle

like i've been saying recently, we have been struggling with lettuce, but at the least likely time it seems like we might have an abundance of greens soon, first there is our hugely successful arugula/rocket: 

this has been in the works for a while now, and actually in the accompanying bed next to it all of the lettuce that was planted at the same time has bolted ... now the rocket is under fleece, which it seems to like.

we have also started lettuce in our cold frame (it is our first true use of the cold frame even though it is two years old:

and there as you can see things are also going pretty well!

in addition we have escarole (a kind of endive) growing well under fleece at the allotment and finally there is our new mini-polytunnel where there are already second leaves on the seedlings, i swear that we will get a full bowl of lettuce out of our garden yet!  if this warm european air keeps coming we could have greens all the way through winter.

a ton(ne) of ...

if you were ever wondering, this is what a ton of horse manure looks like:

120 shovels full, it took 10 trips uphill to assemble this tiny little pile, right now manure is being delivered to our allotment, it's very convenient and cheap, i can't reveal all of the details as part of a non-disclosure agreement with the provider, but i think we overestimated the amount a tonne would be, and we will have to talk to our dealer about getting some more!

speaking of dealers, asda (of walmart fame) is selling "trugs" (aka floppy round plastic carrier thingies in american speak) for super cheap, so there is a very good chance that all of this manure will go to making new planters ...

passing of the guard

it was the end of an era in our kitchen this week as we ate the very last of the old, deformed, transplanted carrots and picked our very first planter grown carrot from our front yard, i present exhibit A:

the new carrot was gorgeous and actually is perhaps the nicest carrot we have ever grown, we have a 'late' crop in the front yard that should last us until late november or december if we're lucky, but we have been pretty lucky as no children or late night critters have messed with the planter yet, so fingers crossed!

cap'n kirk

after hanging out a little bit this morning negotiating with the septuagenarian clique that provides daily order and stability to our allotment about the delivery of 1 ton of manure for our plot (photos to follow), i discovered that a simple mis-remembered name (one of them thought my name was "kirk") has resulted in my being dubbed "captain kirk," but at least i'm in good company with other allotment personalities such as: "uni dave," "little chris,""big mike," and "heartattack" (who i was told knows it's going to be a bad day if he DOESN'T have a heartattack on any given day) ... m want's to know what her's is, all i know is that i've got william shatner on my side!

rent

here is a (dark, wintery) copy of the rent that is due on our allotment:

thirty one pounds and fifty pence, about fifty dollars, m and i were chatting about how this is probably the value of our artichokes alone, certainly a deal, i think in all we have spent at most £150 ($225--including this rent) on our plot this year, such a deal, and with zero, or very few food miles, unlike some of our recent purchases.

the frostman cometh

ok, so news reports here are bristling with doomsday scenarios for the arrival of a little frost, although the way they have been describing it is as if a sheet of glacier will be slowly moving its way southward consuming all in its path, in fact i don't even think its going to frost here ...

nonetheless! by noon today we still had potatoes in the ground as well as fennel and a lot of leafy greens, some still seedlings (because we have been gardening with summer time abandon! haha) ... the fennel is still there as part of a little gamble that it will not really frost, but our potatoes are all up ... now the problem is where do you store a whole bunch of potatoes?

you store them in this:

so that they look like this:















and just precisely what is it that is holding our potatoes? it is the world's quickest made box made out of the lowest quality materials, read not so new osb board, but there's glue involved and that's all that matters ...

will update soon about the frost (otherwise i am frozen).

finally, a polytunnel!

this year the thing that has bedeviled us the most seems to be the easiest thing to grow: a simple head of lettuce.

for some reason (most of which has to do with the strange long periods of mono-climate that we have been getting: continuous sun/continuous rain/continuous cold-grey no rain, in the order they appeared this year) we simply can't seem to grow a good head of lettuce to save our lives, our 20 some heads that we had growing nicely at the very beginning of the season bolted at the first sign of sustained sun after giving us just 2 weeks of lettuce, but now we have a more concerted effort in place designed to withstand some cold for the winter, we are growing lettuce under glass in the allotment and now we have our new tiny polytunnel in the back to the house:

it generated its first beads of moisture in today's glorious day of autumn sun, good luck seeds!

there are plans for a polytunnel in the allotment too, but i think that might have to wait for m's dad to get here, it could be our first project!

introducing ratty!

i would say that for the last 8 months-ish our allotment, or more specifically our new "dalek" composter, has been home to a little friend, one ratty m. ratkin ... before you jump to conclusions, we and ratty have worked out a deal, he or she gets an undisturbed house and an undisclosed share of everything that goes into our compost bin in exchange for the daily turning of our compost, which is done regularly without fail.

so far ratty really has been one of the most important of the many unsung heroes in our allotment, but no longer, in perhaps our most whimsical page so far i give you:

the life and times of ratty m. ratkin

more wind

today's brief visit to the allotment was just to check to see if our borlotti beans were still standing, we've had really bad winds for the last three days or so and there is only so much twine and bamboo lying around our plot to keep the beans up right ... luckily the beans are still there

and there's more tomorrow:

return of the slime mold

last year after we failed miserably at our attempt to grow cucumbers out of straw bails we had the arrival of a massive slime mold, which looked exactly like badger vomit, unfortunately it was disposed of before we knew what it was, but in the very same spot i just found this:

this is a close up of about an inch of soil, they are truly amazing, and this time we'll be able to see exactly how it grows, stay tuned!

more tidbits ...

as the cold weather has moved in there has been a little pause in our work at our plot (but that can't last long--especially because our borlotti beans are hanging by their last bamboo pole after the bad winds we got yesterday!), in the meantime here is another picture of our zen master cat:

he's just perched across the way, he will stay there for hours, surveying all of the bad photography in his domain!

also, yesterday i went to a proposal by the bs3 campus related to what will happen with the old bristol college near here, some of what they want to do is to open it up for self-build houses, which made me think when i describe the shed i can always say that it was "self-build" ha!

it had to end sometime

ugh, just a quick note to go on record as saying that i am totally depressed after watching our beautiful week of unseasonally summerlike weather disappear in just a matter of hours this afternoon, i walked over to the allotment and watered in spite of the fact that i knew it would rain in just a matter of hours!

here were the numbers (in fahrenheit):

so, for our celsius friends that's 25c (summer) to 17c (winter) in just about 4 hours, ugh ...

october tour

well, after getting the cooks back into the kitchen it is time to get back to the allotment with our latest tour, it has evidence of this amazing weather that we have been having, today it was a wonderful 24C/75F degrees, just like what summer should be ...

today was a lot of fun, m and i went to a meeting about "community food," which could mean a whole number of things: fair distribution of food locally, access to organic foods, real alternatives to cornershops/convenience stores and most importantly access to and support for community gardens, in this case the person who did the organizing for the meeting was affiliated with the reclaim the fields movement that seeks to garden in derelict spaces ... m and i got to meet two fascinating groups of people, first this group gardening just down our block at the old bristol technical college (in the grounds of the artspace lifespace project in south bristol) and then we met this woman who is organizing a food bank again just around the corner from our house, i think this is something we are definitely going to help with, can't wait for all these new things to get started!      

only a matter of time: mantecatura

well it was only a matter of time that food would come to be a big part of our garden blog, but in order to avoid blogging more about food than about gardening, i present to you:

mantecatura

it's our new food diary, so that we can recall all of the yummy things we come across and just happen to be made in our kitchen, the mantecatura is the final part of making risotto after all of the hard work has been done, adding butter and cheese to it all ... enjoy!

more goodies

this past weekend we had a wonderful time in london with jo, ed, and georgia, where we had a great dinner ...

 

that included sweet potato fritters and sweet potato humous!!!!  originally they were supposed to be made out of carrots, but it seems like global giant tesco had difficulty stocking the lowly carrot, so the sweet potato had to do (the cruel irony is that we may never be able to grow sweet potato in our allotment), but after we got back we felt in the mood to try fritters again, this time we opted for one half of an ottolenghi recipe, and dinner's main elements (minus the accompanying rice) looked like this:

counter-clockwise starting from the chard, pine nut and goat's cheese fritters (no, i am not joking - and they don't look so great in this photo but are really delicious), below there is corn from our garden, and then there are these:

breaded courgette/zucchini flowers!!! m referred to these as "vegetable donuts" and "naughty food," they were great, and at the end of the season when our plants get a little bit stressed they produce even more flowers, so we may be having this a little bit more regularly (baby likes this kind of donut!), but nearly the first thing we did when we got home on sunday was make these:

lavender shortbread cookies! we have slowly been working through a whole raft of lavender cookie recipes to find the greatest of them all and this shortbread recipe is surely in the running ... we are obsessed by lavender cookies!

silly nerds

in our ongoing fight against slugs and snails, m and i have been turning to some traditional methods, we eat a lot of eggs, have a lot of leftover shells, and instead of composting them we have been crushing them up, and it works wonders keeping snails away from things (you have you use a lot though).

recently, we read that baking eggshells makes them even sharper, so of course we couldn't pass up the opportunity to add an additional step to a seemingly simple process and we baked a batch, initial findings here at 16b labs indicate that ... not so much, we couldn't tell the difference, so it's back to fresh eggshells for our slimy friends ...

oven mitt potatoes??

i'm not sure this is an actual variety of potatoes, but we just picked our largest ever, in the distinct shape of an ... oven mitt?  we here at 16b were/are totally stumped, it weighed 1.2kg/just over 2 1/2 lbs, weird.

diy protein!

one of the strange side affects of vegetarianism is a possible obsession with processed proteins ... basically my own veggie trajectory went like this:

• became a vegetarian with no idea how to eat
• realized that i was eating like a meat-eater but just without the meat
• learned how to cook
• learned how to cook pretty well
• began to understand that anything you see you can make yourself

no matter what stage you're at, though, processed proteins are everywhere: veggie burgers, fake meats, quorn (whatever it actually is), veggie sausage, tofurkey, flavored tofu (and tempeh, but I have never seen this in the UK), nut roasts,  even premade falafel ... this makes sense only if you consider that the processed protein is the hallmark of modern meat-eating (of the truly cultivated meat-eater): the tv dinner, the chicken nugget, the fast-food burger, the bacon flavored cheese slice, or worse  ... so corporate vegetarianism simply took a page from the agri-business handbook on how to mass-market their protein, and i have enjoyed it for the 18 years of my vegetarianism, but no longer!

the problem with these "meats" is not that they are meaty trompe l'oeil (this is a different question altogether), but that they are processed, they come with a lot of packaging, they take a huge amount of energy to freeze and store in massive grocery freezers, and given the ingredients they are amazingly expensive (and in the case of quorn, there is no real proof that the matter we are eating is physically of this planet)!

so, i present to you our "chicken:"

it's seitan, made from wheat gluten flour and seasoned with one of mark bittman's seasonings, actually it's a hybrid of the vital wheat gluten seitan recipe, mark bittman's golden stock and a clever video from everyday dish tv that showed the trick to the holy grail of corporate vegetarianism: how to make tofurkey! most importantly, it was a snap to make!

here it is after an hour boiling:

and here is the end product, not bad for our first time ...

• 100g of store bought fake chicken "slices:" £1.50
• 1.25 kg of homemade fake chicken: £.90

• knowing that you are just a few steps away from liberating yourself from the freezer section at your local healthfood store/tesco/walmart forever: priceless

the next frontier is veggie sausage and then BACON AKA THE RASHER!!!

borlottis!

here is a picture of our thriving borlotti beans, doing so well that they are eclipsing our shed!!  we sowed beans late in august and the result has been a healthy bean crop much later in the year, which makes this grey, cold september feel a little bit like summer ...

and for those of you, including myself, who think the anti-badger pallet "apron" is over-kill, our little friends have been back recently, luckily just digging holes in empty spots though.

lazy cuteness

i couldn't pass these up, matches being ridiculously cute and lazy ...

typical matchy soaking up the sun (on an atypically sunny day).

another first

we have had a bunch of successes this year, but our three big disappointments have been:

1. the complete loss of our tomatoes due to blight (somewhat beyond our control) 
2. misplacing our cabbages (behind a row of beautiful flowers) so that they grew but never produced anything edible, and ...
3. doing everything possible wrong when it came to handling our broccoli and cauliflower seedings, started proudly in the propagator (a class of 20) and then left to fight all kinds of pests in our cold frame of death, until there were just two cauliflower plants left ...

but after 4 months we have this to show for all of our hard negligence, our only brassica for the year:

our first real cauliflower!!! about six inches across, on tomorrow night's menu is a cauliflower curry, can't wait!

neatly, neatly

wow, so how else do you tidy up a cluttered shed but by ... making more work for yourself!!! in this case in the form of these super neat supports:







these pictures are mostly for the benefit of m's dad, who we hope will feel satisfied by evidence of how absolutely complicated our little shed has become, and i've enjoyed every mistake filled minute of it!!

having said all that they ended up looking pretty neat!

ps. for those in the know, we really miss Ideal

two great recipes

basically, with the exception of mushrooms, we have been completely veggie self-sufficient since the beginning of july and things look set to continue like that for a while now, the last couple of years has established this pattern that by the middle of summer we are eating solely from the allotment ... the good news is that it is ridiculously healthy, the somewhat burdensome news is that you don't want to eat the same thing over and over again, so a constant stream of new recipes is called for, and just recently we have had two killers:

first, there is our great fennel red sauce recipe, i have no idea where we first got the idea for this, but we have been making it for the last two years now, and we picked our first fennel bulbs just the other days so i thought i would try it out with fresh fennel for the first time:

1-2 cups cubed fennel bulb (the more the better)

1 large yellow onion

2 400g/12 oz cans of chopped tomatoes

1/3 cup cream

this recipe is crazy simple and good, just:

1) cube the fennel bulb and dice the onion, sweat them together in a skillet over medium heat for 20 minutes, the fennel must be tender and it is ok if they get somewhat caramelized 

2) once the fennel is tender add the tomatoes and let the mixture simmer for about another 20 minutes, at which point you

3) take the skillet off the heat and mix in the cream,  salt and pepper to taste, and then serve straight away, it's an amazing sauce

the second recipe is a zucchini and potato charlotte, its just a little more complicated and comes from the Silver Spoon, but you can also look here to see a version of it ... this was insane, and it came out nearly perfect the first time we made it, the original Silver Spoon version has these changes:

1) use parmesan rather than fontina

2) 1/2 cup of cream rather than milk

3) one leek rather than a bunch of scallions (of all of the substitutions this is the one that i don't get, perhaps this is some kind of primordial culinary fault line that i am not aware of but leeks beat scallions any day in my mind)

please, all of our faithful readers (that is all 1 or maybe 2 of you), please make these two dishes right away!

allotment firsts/pretty pictures

we have had a number of firsts this year, certainly among the most exciting has been our corn crop, which resulted in these little cobs:

the cob on the right had an uneven, halloween-like surface, but still very yummy indeed!  (speaking of halloween, there's very little of it here, and that makes me a little sad, hahaha)

but here is also a real first:

a real leek, and we have 30 more of them in the ground!  we tried to plant them last year, but we had no idea what we were doing and i think our entire "crop" produced about as much edible leek as is in the single leek above ... this year though, we sunk them six inches in the ground when the were large seedlings, a basic case of just following instructions.

now for some pretty pictures:

m's gorgeous snap peas that are growing on the mesh of our compost pile ...

 

weather tidbits

this morning we woke up to the last remaining bits of hurricane irene, thanks for that little gift america, not much rain this far south, but a lot of wind, and a continuation of the general grayness of the last month ...

that grayness, which m calls "tupperware sky" and i call "florescent lighting," has resulted in the loss of all of our tomatoes and a lot of our late yellow raspberry crop, but its not just the lack of sun, this summer we have also had a nuclear winter-esque average summer temperature of 13c/57f.

it's amazing that we've grown anything this summer ... more on what's doing well and what's not shortly.

ps. still missing the little pooch!

r.i.p. pepe m. fannin: 1995-2011

this was a sign at the chelsea flower show, under "Pepe" it says: "relaxing since 1986," we will miss our magically lazy dog ... 

one day's harvest

here was our harvest on saturday:

starting clockwise from the carrots there are: carrots, green tomatoes (more on these below), fennel (from a test thinning) yellow beans, two lowly raddish, mixed baby greens, yellow raspberries and blackberries, a zucchini/courgette, two meals worth of broccoli rabe/rapini, and kale.

the bad news in the photo is our green tomatoes, basically huge rains caused all of our tomato plants to succumb to blight and now we are planning a big batch of green tomato chutney!

the picture above doesn't let you see the detail of the last of our grotesque carrots:

again the rule is never ever transplant carrots!

before/after

here are some before and after photos:

before: winter 2008 

after: summer 2011

nerdy note: the before picture looks starker because it was taken on slide film that ends up over exposing the negative!

colors/colours

a number of long awaited tiny projects (including finishing putting up hooks in the shed, installing the rain barrels, and making ridiculously cute, little signs for each vegetable plot) have finally received some attention, the most colorful is our plot number sign:

i can't remember the font that we used, but it was cobbled together with a silly little jigsaw, with the clear understanding afterwards that that was the WRONG tool for the job ...

the color scheme was determined by the limited store of spray paint we have hanging around, and yes, nasa has confirmed that it is visible from space:

who is that shadowy figure with the bump???


this weekend we also had some little friends come for a visit to our garden, and one of them was very clear about what we would find when we got there!

what's in the ground in august?

here is another update from our garden, it's another low production value film!

mugshots and numbers

we haven't posted in so long, but luckily that is not due to inactivity!  below are numbers on our harvest so far this year, it's been really amazing, and we are trying to get a second crop in many of our beds, fingers crossed ...

first, though, there is the matter of these guys:

this mugshot is not of carrots, but of a lesson, namely that you cannot transplant carrots!!!! no matter who says different, carrots should not be "sown under glass" to use the local parlance and then transplanted out in beds (and while we are on the topic neither should beets, although they are not hideously disfigured if they end up in different dirt than where they started).  we heard that carrots fork if transplanted, and thought we would try a little experiment, and now we have 60 forked carrots or so.  here they are with an equally ugly friend:

poor guys, or to quote colonel kurtz, "the horror, the horror" ... 

so, here are our numbers:

beets: 1.4 kg/3.1 lbs
broad (fava) beans: 3.8 kg/8.4 lbs
peas: 2.2 kg/4.9 lbs
potatoes 2.4 kg/5.3 lbs (this is just a 1/10 of what we have in the ground right now!!)
carrots: 1.3 kg/2.9 lbs (forked and all, about 3/4 are still in the ground)
onions 1.3kg/2.9 lbs (we have a "tonne" drying, this is just what we have used)
chard and kale: seemingly endless

red or green?

more pictures of what we have been picking ...

first, in the red corner, a plate full of strawberries (and some black currents thrown in for good measure):

then, in the green corner, this plate of broccoli rabe  (or rapini as they call it here):

this is the first time that we have planted broccoli rabe, and it turns out that it is easy and abundant in cold northern climes (where the weather can be a bit "drismal"), the dish to the right was amazing: toasted garlic, toasted breadcrumbs, rapini and parmesan on capellini pasta, yummy!!!

slow planters

i would like to introduce the latest addition to the planter craze, a big 10 1/2 foot long and 10 inches deep monster of a planter, this one was purchased from the bristol wood recycling project for only "a tenner," you can only guess what they stored in it before it was recycled: missiles or pythons or something like that ... basically all of the soil from the beginning of these planters to the white cold frame at the top of the photo was covered in trash when we first got the plot, although we were able to get most of it out, the plastic that was left in the ground disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces, moral of this story: PLASTIC IS EVIL, so we can't really plant things in this area, and our answer has been planters.

 

here is its profile, m and i are debating on whether to keep the cantilevered  effect at the front, a straight forward question of design over function (design will win!).





and here are some more of our neighbors:

 

three slow worms, which are actually lizards without legs (for those of you who make up our burgeoning US readership, ha!), and they like warm covered spaces, mostly under black plastic ...

 

i had to disturb them before i put down the planters, sorry guys!

(and just a technical note, although slow worms are very slow, they seem to be fast enough to prevent the camera on my cell phone from focusing properly)