Turnips on the allotment

Rain was forecast here on Saturday, but thankfully it didn't really arrive until after dark. It was a bit damp and drizzly before that but not so bad that it stopped us getting over to the allotment to check on the turnips. I've been looking forward to picking these and pairing them with some lovely pork chops. As we'd bought pork chops in the butchers, we headed off to see if we had turnips to pick.

And we did. I pulled up four to take home with us  - as well as our second cauliflower, which you can see in the top left below - and counted at least another ten to follow. Some won't be very far behind these, and then hopefully the row that I sowed direct on the plot will follow after those.  Ideally I should have pulled these sooner, but with busy weekends yet again this was our first visit since the start of November. 

And that cauliflower, well it's already a soup with cream cheese and cheddar, yum.  And very easy to do. Chop an onion and a clove of garlic and soften these in oil and butter. Add the cauliflower and almost cover in chicken stock and cook for twenty or so minutes until the cauliflower is tender. Blitz this and add half a tub of cream cheese, some milk if it needs it and then some grated cheddar (or blue cheese if you have it). It's a soupy cauliflower cheese, and lovely.

If we can pick something every time we visit, especially in winter, then we'll have been doing something right, I think. That might be restricted to turnips for a little while, but hopefully the brassicas won't be too much longer. The weeds, I showed you last month are still there - no weed fairy on our allotment! - and it isn't until I looked back at those pictures, that I've realised how much our cabbages have grown, so that's heartening.

The cavolo nero especially has grown and while it still has some more growing to do, it looks like cavolo nero should with its knobbly leaves. I'm very much looking forward to picking our own, and as well as the weeds still being there no one's planted out my extra brassicas or composted my sweetcorn and tomatoes. Shocking hey?

I'm hoping that the weather is good enough to get over there again next weekend and in the time between Christmas and New Year, although with everything I'm putting on the list for those few days, it's going to be busy! 

Elsewhere on the plot

The celeriac is still there, and alongside the brassicas full of weeds, I need to check when to dig these up. I think it's probably about now, but I have no indication of how big they could be. I guess that's part of the fun. As I thought of it I've just checked on the RHS website, and they say celeriac can be harvested between October and March, so I've some time yet. The picture on their page shows the celeriac almost out of the ground, like the turnip above. Mine aren't like that yet, so I'll leave them there for a while I think. The website also says to cover with straw or bracken incase the ground freezes, if the weather turns again I'll be off to find some straw from somewhere...

It was noticeable how bare the crab apple tree was. All the leaves - and any remaining crab apples - were down. The crab apples littering the floor around the tree, so that's another job to do next time I'm there. It's a fun one though as I use this opportunity as shot practice, throwing the crab apples to the compost from where they've dropped, with apologies in advance to the nearby plot owners when I get a bit enthusiastic.  It would obviously be much more effective to pick them up, put them into a trug and carry them over. But nowhere near as much fun!

With the crab apple tree bare, the climbing artichokes are once again visible - they're not climbing ones at all, but normal artichokes which grow under the tree, so I think they grow taller to get the light, we'll see next year won't I? They are pretty much dead now, but the flowers (fruits?) have now turned fluffy. The stems are rotten and I suspect it could be a good time to move the plant to where I want it. If the tomatoes had gone, that would be a relatively simple job...

So once again I've a list of jobs from this visit, but it amazes me that each time we visit we're enthused by what needs to happen, and one of these months we'll find time to actually start on that list.

To save me time for my next visit the list of jobs is currently:

• Target practice with crab apples

• Take a black sack to pick up the rubbish the foxes have brought onto the plot (including a couple of nappies... not so nice)

• Compost the tomatoes and sweetcorn remains

• Consider moving the leeks (the ones that have survived MOH trampling on them)

• Compost the beans, sweetcorn and any remaining squash plants

• Pot out my extra brassicas, currently in the back garden: Kale, PSB and some more cabbages I think

• Prepare the leaf mulch compost bin for the new additions from the garden

• Weed the cabbages

• Move the climbing artichoke

• And as usual, do some more digging!

Let's hope the weather stays good, and I find some more hours to put into the day...

Sunflowers on the plot

It was the middle of August when I picked my first bunch of sunflowers from the allotment, and that seems a while back now.  I picked them then as they'd been in flower for a while and it made sense to enjoy them at home. And one month on, I'm still picking bunches of sunflowers to have at home.

MY FIRST BUNCH OF SUNFLOWERS PICKED MID-AUGUST

It's been fascinating to watch them develop from the tiny seedlings I planted out back at the end of May.  Not all of them survived, a row was swamped out by the rhubarb leaves and more were subsequently eaten by the slugs and snails community. But plenty did survive, and there's still more to flower, which is a vast improvement on the one or two that flowered last year.

Admittedly I did sow more seeds than last year, so that goes some way to account for that. But even so I've had a high success rate. On the plot I have them at all stages of their lifecycle, and I think that's right too.

I'll leave the seedheads for as long as I can so the wildlife can also make the most of them. And while I've grown most of them alongside canes, near my runner beans they're not tied into the canes. I think next year I'll grow them separate to the beans, but keep the canes.

Sunflowers are, I think the kind of flowers with personality. Don't believe me? Well, just look these two are deep in conversation!

It's been interesting to see them unfurl - and there's still a few like this, so if the weather is kind i could be picking sunflowers for a while yet.

It's not surprising though that more of them are looking aged and red (in this hot weather I know how they feel), but unlike me they're still managing to look good.

Sunflowers will definitely be on my growing list for next year.  What are you definitely growing next year?

Ripe tomatoes and courgettes out of nowhere

On Saturday I popped over to our plot to pick a few tomatoes as our supplies were getting low, by which I mean we were down to one bowl. We hadn't managed to make it over there during the previous week, and in that week it'd changed a lot.

The tomatoes had gone bonkers. At first glance it looked as if there were more red ones than green ones, so I picked as many as I could fit in my bag. That turned out to be just over a kilo, we went back on Sunday to pick the rest, another half kilo. 

There's still more to come, which is great news as I had wondered how we'd get as I think we planted them a little too close together in another case of "more-plants-than-space", which happens a lot. 

I thought the tomatoes were crazy, and then I saw the squash bed - that's a grand name for where we're growing our courgettes and pumpkins - had also changed. The plants had filled out and there were plenty of yellow flowers from the veg and red nasturtiums enjoying the sunshine. And plenty of bees enjoying the flowers.  

Our butternut squash are getting there now and we've six or seven of them on a couple of plants. They're still a bit on the small side, but they look butternut squash shape and will be plenty for MOH and I, meal-sized in fact. 

I did have a bit of pumpkin-envy though as I spotted pumpkins the size of beach balls on the next plot - yes they are huge, and will easily need two people to lift them. 

PUMPKIN-ENVY

Spurred on by the success of others, I hunted through my pumpkins and found this:

MY MUNCHKIN

IT doesn't quite compete does it. I guess it was never going to as it's a Munchkin variety. Checking further I'd had more success with the courgette plants. Out of nowhere a baby marrow weighing half a kilo had appeared, so that and two round courgettes came home too.  

I'm hoping that the sweetcorn will soon be done too, the tassels are darkening but at the moment the corn is still a greedy-White, but some are just turning yellow. They've done well among the weeds, ahem.  

The tagetes seem to like the artichoke and are thriving. At home they've been pretty much eaten by the slugs and the snails, but not here. I've just spotted some seed heads in the photo below, so I'll be saving those so I can grow them again next year.  

We've also dug all the potatoes now too, as I'm coveting the space for my brassicas which really need to go out so they can establish themselves before any change of weather. Sunday we dug almost five kilos of two varieties. It's amazing how many of these Shetland Black potatoes we mistook for stones, and how quickly we adopted our behaviour to tap the stone-looking ones on the fork. If it clunked it was a stone, if not potato.  The purple Arran Victory was much easier to spot and in both cases it was easy to see how the soil had improved. 

I'd say we're not big potato eaters, but we've already plans to grow plenty more potatoes next year. Well that's assuming we up our digging game in a part of the plot which we've not used (or dug) yet. In the meantime our crop is double-bagged (paper and canvas) and stored somewhere cool and dark. 

What have you had success growing this year?