Harvest Monday - summer!

What's that? Summer has arrived (for a while at least). Following on from some very chilly autumnally weather we've had a lovely couple of days, and look......a strawberry

 

There would've been another one too but a beastie had enjoyed it first. This one was yummy anyway (Jan and I had half each). Hopefully the first of many.

I've lifted all my garlic, bad rust had developed and some of the plants started to rot in the ground. So it won't store, but we'll try and eat it up before any more of it rots. I might sow some carrots in the space where it was, as the garlicky-ness might put off carrot fly? In other years I've planted out squash after lifting garlic, which seemed to work ok too.

Brace yourselves.....this was my potato harvest today. My early potatoes are in flower so I thought I'd rootle around in the soil to see if I could find any reasonable ones to harvest. I think you can see how that went.

I also picked some baby chard leaves. The plants self-seeded in amongst my onions, so hopefully they won't affect the onion growth too much. Posh bags of salad leaves quite often include baby chard so it's nice to get some for free here.

My autumn-sown broad beans have started fattening up. The plants themselves look awful (having been battered by winds and squashed by cats or foxes over winter, then more-recently eaten by slugs) but they've hung-in there and produced some decent beans

I've probably picked about two thirds of them so far

Whilst I was podding the beans, Jan made us this tasty soup with a fresh garlic, the potatoes and then the beans and chard plus a bit of coriander and mint that I'm growing at home. Lovely, with a spoonful of goat yogurt.

Yesterday Jan really wanted a BBQ, so after all the effort of getting it going just to cook a few veggie sausages, I had a think of what else we could put on. Turns out that you can BBQ rhubarb, and there were some stalks that needed pulling from my pot in the back garden. After drizzlling with oil and about 10 minutes on the BBQ they softened up nicely. We ate them with balsamic vinegar and honey (it actually worked!).

And we've finally been enjoying salad leaves from the back garden...here's 'freckles'

I've planted out the lettuce on two sides, and have been checking for slugs most nights. Plus I'm trying out the bran trick, you can just see a white barrier of it around the lettuce patch in the piccie below (the bran's only been in place two days though, so will have to see how effective it is)

I've also finished off the rustic 'gate' made from buddliea prunings...the diagonal stem gives it stability (otherwise it's a bit wobbly). I'm quite pleased with it actually, I might make one for the other side too if I've got enough sticks.

In naturey news, I keep seeing this lovely toad on the allotment (pic by jan). At the moment it seems to spend most days under a pile of rosemary prunings. I'd like to tidy them away but feel a bit guilty whilst the toad's there. I saw a really big frog today too, hope it gets munching on those slugs.

On Saturday we got the bus over to the east coast for a walk. It was a bit misty to begin with but cleared up later....Here's a few of the famous Horsey seals. Well, their bums anyway.

And a beautiful blue sky by the time we headed inland a bit. We were lucky to see swallowtail butterflies and painted ladies (plus the usual marsh harriers, skylarks, stonechats etc , we're a bit spoilt for wildlife round here).

That's me for the week, thanks for reading and hope you've been enjoying nice weather, nature, and some harvests too.

 

I'm linking in with Harvest Monday, kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres

 

Oh, I forgot to include this basil, picked when pinching-out some basil seedlings (to encourage bushy plants), which we had with a pasta dish

 

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Harvest Monday

This week my harvest is rhubarb again but I wanted to show the difference between mine (grown in a large pot in my back garden) and my friend Andrew's, grown on his allotment.

 

Mine are the smaller ones!

If I hadn't seen Andrew's I'd be quite pleased with mine. Actually, I am still pleased with mine, I get about the right amount for us from the pot, without thinking 'what the heck am I going to do with all this rhubarb?'. Andrew didn't need anymore of his rhubarb this week so I gave all of it away to some happy recipients in my art class this morning (including the tutor, not that I'm trying to be teacher's pet of course, hehe).

 

I've started setting out all of my little plants grown from seed...about half the tomatoes (and as usual have lost track of which varieties are which....I'm hedging my bets by picking out groups of three from the trays, hopefully getting a reasonable mixture), some of my squashes (a few of which are already showing signs of powdery mildew, caused by dry conditions I think, so I really need to get a move on with these), my sweetcorn (which I've under-sown with dwarf French beans) and a few runner beans to grow up a couple of wigwams at the allotment.

 

I still have all my brassicas, lettuce, dill, coriander and peppers to sort out too. Wah! But I did get some really lovely well-rotted horse manure yesterday, so the squashes and tomatoes will hopefully be happy.

 

I've been noticing quite a lot more slug and snail damage...pea plants in the back garden are getting eaten, as are the bean seedlings that are popping out of the soil, and my little row of rocket seedlings are nearly all gone. I'm going around each day (most days anyway) checking under and behind things that might be hiding slimey munchers. It takes a while but is worth it to reduce the chances of losing plants and seedlings. I've also tried putting hair trimmings and cat fur around seedlings but tonight I found slimey trails going right over the fur and hair so that's obviously not working! Maybe I've made it too thick and it's too easy for them to move over.

 

A walk from Winterton-on-Sea to Martham Broad

I got the bus from Norwich to Great Yarmouth, then changed to head up the coast to Winterton. I haven't explored this area that much before and didn't realise how easy it is to get there by bus....and quite cheap too, only £6.50 for a special ranger ticket to cover the whole journey.

 

For this particular walk, I headed inland along pretty lanes to reach Martham Broad....lots of birdie treats including good views of a cuckoo, a marsh harrier and buzzard having a fight, and house martins swooping low over the water, dipping their heads expertly for a drink.

Definitely an area to explore more. I bumped into a couple out walking and birdwatching who were on holiday there for two weeks, even though they only live just south of Norwich....brilliant, why bother to drive miles when you have this on your doorstep.

 

That's me for the week, thanks for reading. I'm linking in with Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

 

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Harvest Monday and a walk around the Roman Town at Caistor St Edmund

I've been away on a 3 day course 'building with straw bales' in beautiful Stanmer Park in Brighton, and am feeling pretty tired (in a good way), where we learnt lots of principles and actually made a small Straw bale building. So much new information has gone into my brain it's odd focussing back on this stuff that happened earlier in the week. I'll do a separate post on the course but in the meantime here's the usual....

 

The purple sprouting broccoli plant that I'd salvaged from pigeon damage has gone on to produce more tasty shoots. I've now actually moved the plant as I needed to get the space ready for red onion sets. I occassionally do this with brassica plants in spring where they're in the way but have a bit more to give.

 

So I dug a hole in the bed where my leeks were ( which isn't going to be needed for a while) loosened up the soil all around the PSB with a fork and levered the plant out, plopped it in the new hole, filled in any gaps and also piled up extra soil around the stem as an anchor, treading the soil down firmly but trying not to damage any roots and gave it a good water.

 

The pickings are more leafy than flowery but they're very sweet anyway

Nice with cauliflower and a cheese sauce

This week I've also sown my parsnips (variety 'tender and true'). I usually sow them inbetween my rows of autumn broad beans but having been battered by the wind and squashed by foxes, they've grown out at odd angles, making it hard to sow between them. So instead I sowed them all in one bed where most of the broad beans hadn't survived...if I get a few beans too that would be good but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Anyway, there was a whole load of self-sown lambs lettuce in that bed, so I harvested it all....yum. I left most of it for Jan to use up this weekend whilst I've been away on the course. She's also been left in charge of my seedlings (I'm still away, visiting my folks now), so I'll be inspecting them all on my return ;)

A walk around Caistor Roman Town (Venta Icenorum)

We're very lucky in Norfolk with so many cool places to visit, lots of which are within easy reach of the city. A little way south east of the city is the site of the Roman capital of the area, where much evidence of the town still remains. Fantastically, most of the site is open to walk where you like, plus it's next to High Ash Farm, who carry out a lot of wildlife-friendly practices and provide lots of public access (permissive paths). The farmer (Chris Skinner) even features most weeks on the local radio, chatting about wildlife.

 

So on Tuesday we got the bus down to Caistor...it only took a few minutes. Walking through part ofHigh Ash Farm to get to the Roman town we found a few geocaches - this one was actually inside a fake plastic rock (not a fake plastic tree, for any Radiohead fans out there).

The Roman town was surrounded by a flint wall for protection, and there's still some lovely stretches of it In place

Here's Jan enjoying the spring sunshine

I took photos of a few of the information panels...so if you're interested, you should be able to click on them to enlarge them and have a read. There's a new mobile phone app too, which includes an augmented reality element....you hold your phone up at various places and it's as if you're standing in the town, with the buildings all around you....rather cool.

Couldn't resist these cute sheep

We walked back to Norwich following the Boudica Way trail but wandered through High Ash Farm again first. The wildlife friendly farming makes it particularly lovely to walk around....here's a large strip of teasel, grown for insects in the summer (lots of little flowers) and birds in the winter (lots of little seeds).

 

So that was another enjoyable trip into our lovely Norfolk countryside....where to go next?

Thanks for reading this week - I'm linking in with Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres

And here's a taster from the Building with Straw Bales course...ooh

More to come soon...

 

 

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