Tag: allotment surpluses

Its feels as if summer is over

Here’s a photo I took during our Sunday morning walk across the canal and up over Bathwick Fields and then down into Smallcombe Valley, up the other side and down again to Widcombe. I’m only mentioning these places because their names are so delightful. The walk in itself is a long haul with over 150 metres of climbing and scrambling down. The footpath down to Smallcombe was particularly slippery after the recent spells of rain. We’re exploring the hinterland of Bath in a series of 5 mile loops and Madame is immersing herself in the history of our adopted city.

Everywhere, the hedgerows are filling the air with the heady, almost alcoholic scents of autumn. The bees are still busy pollinating the late flowers, but fruit is ripening on the trees. Apples, plums and damsons; sloes and lesser known delights like medlar. The allotment took a bashing as weeds relished hot weather followed by torrential rain and so today we spent the afternoon doing some urgent hand weeding. The compost bin that was far too large when I built it has now been full twice this season; but by tomorrow it will have heated again and sunk by six inches. The leaf mould in a neighbouring bin has shrunk by over a half now, and so has the hot bed – the capacity of our wonderful worms and micro organisms to reduce waste to compost exceeds our capacity to create it, it almost growls out loud when I walk down with a bucket of waste; and it also has a huge appetite for cardboard which simply disappears within a month or two.

It’s just a matter of experience with compost. We’ve read all the books and in the end, it seems everybody is right. There are very few systems that can’t create good compost, but I emphasis the word system because a neglected heap of weeds with an old bicycle on top at the end of the plot is not a system, it’s a dump. With compost at over £5 a bag in most garden centres, making your own is a massive money saver. The secret is regular and vigorous turning and keeping an eye on it – wet through is bad and so is dried out, as ever the middle way works best – moist; that’s the word! and now and again a bag of horse manure, or some fish blood and bone scattered in or – if you don’t care for animal byproducts, some comfrey leaves or liquid work as well as anything else.

With the air so full of the smells of ripening and over-ripening fruit it’s amusing to remember that John Masefield, the poet, liked to have a box of rotting apples under his desk for inspiration! The painter Stanley Spencer had much a weirder taste in under easel smells – but we won’t go there, except to say it wasn’t a madeleine. However, moving rapidly on, the Potwell Inn kitchen does smell pretty wonderful at the moment. Food is coming off the allotment at such a rate we’ve been delivering veg parcels to anyone that will take them. It’s a strange time to be dieting, I know, but with so many good things to choose, keeping to 800 KCal a day is a breeze. No vegetable is safe at the moment, and while we lose weight we’re laying up sauces and preserves for the winter. The tomatoes are producing trays of fruit which we’re converting to passata, sauce base, and today oven dried cherry tomatoes in oil which are like sweets. A couple thrown on a salad are wonderful little flavour bombs. Yesterday we baked figs with orange zest and juice and fennel seeds – delicious! I also whipped up a coulis with wild blackberries and James Grieve apples. I had to put it through a sieve to get the pips out – there’s no added sugar so it’s sharp, but it goes really well with plain full fat yoghurt or kefir.

Anyway, enough kitchen talk- we’re sad the summer has passed us by as far as trips in the camper van are concerned, but we’re hopeful of getting some winter camping in when the crowds have gone home – Madame said today “I don’t care if it’s raining, I just want to sit in the van and look at Ramsey Island.” The autumn is my time for a bit of civil engineering on the allotment – quite a lot of it in fact because we’re building a pond, creating a small open meadow space and a shelter for ourselves, as well as planting more fruit trees and bushes. It’s amazing what can be packed into 250 square metres.

Meanwhile I’m wondering why I let myself in for making a short video on urban botany. The biggest problem with being completely self taught is the ever present danger of mispronouncing a name or mistaking an i/d. But I don’t want to be an expert; I just love getting into the natural world and sharing my disconnected bits of knowledge with anyone who might be tempted to have a go themselves. So I’ve got to get the selfie stick out and ramble on for a couple of minutes without freezing, swearing or tripping over ….. what could possibly go wrong?

Back on the allotment

Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the darker tone of the recent posts; things are going well on the allotment, although this year it’s become ever more evident than ever that the stately procession of the seasons has been one of the early casualties of global heating. We’ve moved into an era of ‘all or nothing’ weather which means that unseasonably hot and dry weather is punctuated by fierce storms that need a rather different sort of rain harvesting.

In the past the steady drip of rain running down the greenhouse panes into tiny gutters and thence through small pipes into the water butts, was rarely enough to overwhelm the system. This year we’ve had to modify the gutters and downpipes to cope with the short bursts of very heavy rain which, otherwise, would overtop them and overflow on to the ground beneath. Even then it takes a lot of rain to replenish 1250 litres (250 gallons) of rainwater. Luckily we have access to a couple of water troughs connected to the mains water supply. We also have several underground streams running through the site and flowing out across the pavement below us. In a perfect world we’d dig a massive tank at the bottom to capture the water and then pump it up the hill to another tank at the top, but in the present economic climate, anything beyond two days is long-term planning. That’s to say it goes on to a long list and stays there, even though the payback through saved water bills would be pretty quick.

So today’s job, yesterday’s job and likely tomorrow’s too is to water. In order to get the maximum benefit from the land area we made wood chip paths and beds, but at this time of the year the paths are populated with large pots and any other temporary containers we can press into service. These need watering every day when the temperature is in the 30’s, and the inside of the tiny greenhouse can be like a furnace – good news for the hot chillies as long as they don’t dry out completely. Anything else needs a lot of TLC.

And so just at the time the allotment is absorbing a great deal of energy, the produce is demanding more by way of cookery and preparation and with added ingenuity since ingredients rarely come off the allotment in recipe form. We have courgettes but no tomatoes or aubergines yet so ‘rat’ is off the menu. At the same time much of the soft fruit is ripening and so the question of what to do with it arises, as it does every year.

One useful discipline is to check the cupboard before we make any more of anything. We have a surplus of redcurrant jelly already so there doesn’t seem much point in making more. On the other hand we eat shed-loads of blackcurrant jam so that’s worth replenishing, but much of the other soft fruit is going to be processed into multi purpose fruit compote for summer puddings and ice cream. This year we made a generic “allotment jam” which was very good, but freezer space is limited so the gooseberries are going to be bottled. The biggest overproduction offenders are chutneys and pickles which need to be made circumspectly if you’re not to land up with a garage full of chutney because you didn’t know what else to do with an impulse buy of plums at the roadside. We find that jams last longer than a year, and chutneys can easily last three if they’re properly stored – but eventually they deteriorate and although they probably won’t kill you they won’t enhance your table either.

So we’re very busy but not too busy to keep an eye open for new plants. Today I spotted a common blue sowthistle on the site. It wasn’t too hard to identify but it uncovered the subtle distinction that most floras make between natives and incomers. Plants and flowers escape from gardens and railway lines, even on the wheels of cars and quarry lorries, and if they find a suitable spot they can settle down and grow. This one is a 19th century escapee that’s doing well but – because it’s not a genuine native – isn’t featured in most of my wildflower floras. Even the Book of Stace refuses to acknowledge it, although he will often give a line or two to my seventh cousin from Devon .

Identifying wildflowers can become a bit of an obsession, but it’s harmless and gets me out. I’ve been pacing the allotment and the canal recently trying to sort out the ragworts and, trust me, it can be a challenge. But!- there is a book and a method that’s immensely useful and it’s just been published in a revised second edition. It’s called “The vegetative key to the British flora” by John Poland and Eric Clement and it does exactly what it says on the tin – it helps you to identify plants that aren’t in flower – and even better, different plants whose flowers all look the same but which can be sorted out by closely examining the shape, disposition and minute details of the lower parts, the leaves and stems.

A massively useful tool, you might say, unless I’m trying to identify an escapee like a blue sow thistle, when the Google app on my android phone at least gets me most of the way home. I suppose if it (the sow thistle, that is), continues to do well – and it probably will – a massively suntanned botanist with a gigantic souwester for storms will give it a grudging mention in the 2050 appendix to a slim volume of all the plants that are left. Anyway, thanks to a good magnifier, a copy of Poland and Clement, and a tolerant partner I now know what a hydathode is, and consequently what is definitely an Oxford Ragwort; but the common ragwort which I have known all my botanical life as Senecio jacobaea has changed its name in the hope of escaping detection and is now known as Jacobaea vulgaris. Taxonomists can be very snotty.

Last night there was a massive party on the green. The police have been out in force on Royal Crescent, and so those in the know have come down to the Green which, being in a much less salubrious area, is less likely to generate complaints from important people. Aside from feeling a bit left-out because we’re still self isolating and ignoring the government, whom we wouldn’t believe if they told us the date; it was lovely to hear the young people having so much fun and this morning – contrary to stereotypes – there wasn’t as much as a sweet paper left on the grass because they tidied up so well. I do so hope their optimism won’t be crushed by a second wave of the Covid 19 virus.

Raspberry vinegar


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There was a time, not so long ago, when raspberry vinegar was dismissed – along with Abegail’s Party and prawn cocktail – as a relic of the seventies, best forgotten as soon as possible – however it’s swung back into fashion in the last few years. Here at the Potwell Inn it’s never gone out of fashion for the obvious reason that its very good. It’s mostly suggested as a component of vinaigrette, adding both fruit and sweetness to the dressing, but we use it in other ways as well. It’s especially good, for instance, in preserving small beetroots – the later thinnings – when they’re still smaller than a table tennis ball. I wouldn’t recommend it for long storge because the acidity is a bit low to be completely safe, but for a couple of weeks in the fridge during the summer it’s absolutely fine and you can still pickle the old football sized beetroot, sliced in paint-stripper strength pickling vinegar in late autumn. You can use any vinegar you like to steep the raspberries – we like organic cider vinegar, but white wine vinegar works just as well. There are so many recipes out there you can just choose the one you like but they’re all much of a muchness  Yesterday we cleared out the last 2.5Kg of frozen raspberries from the freezer and started steeping them in just under 1.5 Litres of cider vinegar. We’ll give them a stir now and again and after 4 or 5 days we strain it through a jelly bag and measure the quantity.  Then we’ll add 450g sugar for each 600ml of strained vinegar, boil it for 10 minutes and bottle it in sterile bottles.  It regularly features in our Christmas presents for the family (along with sloe gin) and they all return the bottles quite soon afterwards in the hope of a top-up.

But why were there 2.5 kilos of raspberries in the freezer anyway? I’m bound to wonder. It’s all too easy to use the freezer as storage for surpluses from the allotment you’ve no idea what to do with, and a bit of discipline with planting along with extra generosity along the way can stop the freezer being stuffed with deteriorating food. If there’s a general rule about food preservation it’s the fact that it only improves (pickles and chutneys especially) up to a point after which it goes downhill. Late last year I had the chastening experience of throwing away pounds of ancient and flavourless jams and preserves that we’d not had the sense to give away when they were still good to eat.

Aside from that, the chillies, peppers and aubergines are all sown and sitting in their propagators, and as soon as the hotbed has properly heated up I think we’re going to sow early salad crops.  Storm Eric has gone its destructive way and after today we look forwards to a couple of weeks of more settled weather when we can complete all the winter work on the allotment.  But today is a celebration day with the family – two birthdays and a meal together.

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