Tag: home baking

Even slower cooking

The 36 hour loaf – showing very strong gluten development

This was an experiment that was rather forced on me because, (not for the first time), the oven door – posh hide and slide – has begun to offer just a touch of resistance and a faint grinding noise as it opens. Rather than wait until it breaks completely, we called out an engineer and he ordered the bits. Two weeks later we’re still waiting for the oven to be repaired, but at least it’s still usable with care. Obviously he can’t come to fix the oven if it’s in use, or even hot so we attempt to manage the situation by keeping the oven cool during working days.

The downside of this cooperative gesture is that under the previous 24 hour bread baking schedule there was no alternative but to bake during the day – so I wondered what would happen if we changed the dough cycle from 24 to 36 hours. So the new regime was to make the batter at around 8.00 am and make up the dough at 8.00pm. This length of time demands that things are kept relatively cool for the whole process – around 18C instead of 21C, in our flat at least. Once kneaded the dough went into its bowl to prove overnight until 8.00am the next day – outside the flat in a corridor that goes down to somewhere around 12C on winter nights. Then it was knocked back and placed in its banneton and shuffled around the flat from warm to cold to try to get it ready for baking at 8.00pm – 36 hours in total. All this sounds like a lot more work than it is in practice – it’s more like a kind of benign contemplative neglect.

By 8.00pm on the second day the loaf had risen like a pale belly, just above the top of the banneton – it looked lovely – so I turned it on to the peel, slashed it and slid it into the oven for 10 minutes at 220 C and twenty minutes at 180 C on full steam. The question is – is there a discernible difference between the 24 and 36 hour method? It makes absolutely no difference to the workload or fuel cost and since I work for free there’s no reason not to adopt it.

There’s no question that with sourdough, time equals flavour and the 36 hour loaf certainly tasted better. The crust is a matter of choice because I can’t bear those palate tearing loaves so beloved of Instagram bakers. The best justification for baking at home is that with a bit of experience you can bake bread just as you like it – never mind what the current fashion dictates. We like the crust to be firm but not hard and the crumb to be open textured but not so full of holes you could spread a quarter pound of butter on to one slice. Sourdough can be quite springy so it helps if it’s possible to slice it thinly for toast – but that’s just what we like. If you prefer the razor crust and the texture of Swiss cheese you can do that too.

Sourdough has a much lower glycaemic index than yeast bread made quickly with the same flour and for me at least it doesn’t provoke the weird feeling of bloating and discomfort that (delicious) white bread almost always causes – so it’s a win win decision. For UK readers we use Shipton Mill organic white flour and a starter that’s fed with their wholemeal rye. I’m sure you can bake excellent and equally well flavoured bread with dozens of other flours but being a creature of habit I’ve got used to the texture of the dough and the right feel during kneading. Years ago I was very fond of an 80% flour made by Bacheldre Mill but sadly they stopped producing it. I’ve yet to see any 100% wholemeal sourdough loaf that was worth breaking your teeth on. During the lockdown my son got me a 25 kilo bag of the typical refined white flour used by bakers. I could hardly use it, but it kept us going.

One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned about baking at home is to find an artisanal bread that you really like and then go all-out to imitate it. It’s a process, not a religion, and there are no penalties for heresy! All the important knowledge is in your hands rather than in any recipe – the feel rather than the theory – and even the most embarrassing failures (almost) always taste good even if they don’t look great. There are no secret ingredients, just flour, water and a little bit of fat – and ignore all that unhelpful nonsense about very wet doughs unless you like scraping two foot diameter flatbreads off the floor of your oven. Amazingly, and completely in accordance with common sense, if your loaf spreads out like a cowpat when tipped out of the banneton, you need to make it a bit stiffer next time. And that’s about it. With a bit of luck nobody dies!

Flour, water, salt and a little oil

Grumbling about the misdescription of allotmenteering and natural history as being necessarily therapeutic has become a bit of a theme for me at the Potwell Inn, and I feel it’s time to balance things up a bit. Last weekend, in the Observer, there was a fascinating piece written by Jay Rayner, who’s a proper food writer, unlike me, about the film director, actor and foodie Stanley Tucci – centred around the cooking of an Italian dish known as a timpano – which originates from Calabria where his grandparents were born. Great article by the way, but one thing led to another and so we watched the film of the dish – “Big Night” and then, because Tucci was acting and directing, we watched “Julie and Julia” – his film about Julia Child whose two volumes on French Cooking were fundamental to my own cooking journey; oh and then we watched “Pig” which was the most dark and philosophical film about truffles you’ll ever watch but nothing whatever to do with our hero. Naturally we bought Tucci’s latest book as well so you can see the way we, at the Potwell Inn, pull the shutters in late autumn and console ourselves by thinking about and cooking food.

Meanwhile, and because the allotment has been too wet to get on to, I’ve returned to some serious experiments with bread. Among the many false dawns of hope and grace in my life the consolations of bread baking have never let me down – not in fifty odd years. Sourdough was late on to the scene for me, probably because until it became fashionable again in the US it stayed firmly below the media radar. Then, of course, everything changed, except that whenever I saw the subject mentioned it was always in the context of huge difficulties and arcane practices that put the whole thing beyond reach – until, this is, I gave it a go myself.

There are other posts here on the subject of getting a starter going; and after getting bored with dancing naked under a full moon and collecting stones of divers colours whenever there was an R in the month I made the elementary discovery that when you mix flour and water in a pot and leave it exposed on a window ledge it will sometimes, but not always, ferment in a helpful way. But it was always very hit and miss and I was too busy to do the groundwork until one day I started a controlled experiment. I’d already figured out that flour and water were the only necessary ingredients although the initial starters used bottled – ie non chlorinated water to give the yeasts a leg up in the first week. So all I did was mix a starter with each of about half a dozen flours I had in the cupboard for yeast loaves, tended them all equally for six weeks, and selected the best performing – ie the most lively starter; discarding the rest.

And the winner was – dark rye (which I could have found out in almost any book, but I’m stubborn like that). The downside of dark rye is that it’s very – well, dark and coarse and so it can make an 80% white loaf look surprisingly like wholemeal. The other thing is that it’s got a remarkably strong (and beautiful) flavour that can sometimes overwhelm the foods you’re eating with the bread. In the end, this half pint container of starter has kept us in delicious bread for at least the last ten years.

I should say that the final arbiter in the matter of crust and crumb experiments is Madame who loathes having butter run down into her armpit via the large and overrated holes in what’s come to represent the gold standard sourdough loaf. She loves butter almost as much as Julia Child did) – and so like all sensible cooks, I bake bread the way my customer prefers. For a couple of years the go-to recipe has included (all organic) wholemeal wheat flour, hard white flour (for the elasticity) and dark rye in the starter and as a final addition during kneading. That gives us a loaf that keeps down to the last slice and tastes lovely – OK it tastes like the granary floor, which in my world is the highest compliment! But it is a beast of a flavour and anything less than strong home made marmalade, or a mustard, marmite and parmesan sandwich is likely to be overwhelmed.

So I wondered what would happen if I made another starter using only light rye flour because all of the original white flour starters had been slow and bad tempered. So beginning with the original master, I began feeding the experimental starter then I used the light rye starter with white flour to make a batter and discovered that it worked really well – not quite as energetic as dark rye, but less rustic, paler and more genteel in its fermentation. Then yesterday I took the first loaf out of the oven (pay no attention to size in the photo; the darker loaf is the end crust because we’d eaten the rest, and the two loaves, baked in the same banneton were broadly identical in size. My only thought was that the “white” loaf could easily have coped with a longer second rise in a bigger banneton because it was still quite energetic.

All this is not so much to show off but to demonstrate that there’s really nothing complicated about sourdough; however the variables in play stack up really fast. What flours? what starter? how much or little salt? oil, butter or no fat? how long to ferment the batter? one or two rises? what starting and what finishing temperatures? with or without steam? The interplay of all these variables can send you screaming to a recipe book to take away all the pain; but honestly, most of the variables remain unaltered and even the difference between summer and winter can change the timings. The take-home point is that baking has huge consolations so long as you don’t for one moment imagine that there’s a right or a wrong way to bake bread. Over the years you get better; you develop a sixth sense through your hands in the dough and as you watch the rise – which is always faintly miraculous.

Michael Pollan wrote a marvellous book entitled “Cooked” which uses bread as an example of cooking with air. To accompany the book, a film appeared later following the same framework of elements – earth, air, fire and water; and in the section on bread he talked about the way in which sourdough transforms the flour which – if you ate nothing else would cause you to starve – into bread which is one of the few complete foods – doubling in size and food value along the way. The best thing about the new loaf was that Madame really liked it and so – in a larger banneton, a longer second rise and a few artistic slashes it will become the new everyday bread unless I miss the old growler recipe too much.

The term everyday bread deliberately references the daily bread in the Bible because it shares the same shape shifting quality. In fact the Greek word that’s used in the Lord’s Prayer and was translated as daily bread (I think) by Miles Coverdale, back in the day – is epiousios and no-one knows what it actually means, and so I’ve always thought of it as meaning something like “give us today the around and about us things we need”. Those things that promote our emotional and spiritual lives as well as meeting our material needs. The King James bible wisely recognised that bread is just such a thing; food, consolation and joy all in one transitory moment. I reckon that’s a genius bit of translating!

I abandon all my principles to bake a blimp.

My excuse – do I need to make excuses? – was that I was worrying that my aged supply of dried yeast was beginning to play up. There’s not much that can go wrong with a loaf after all. Water, salt and a bit of olive oil are vanishingly unlikely to give problems so it’s almost always down to the yeast or the flour. I’ve had dried yeast give problems before and so when I open a tin I always write the date on the lid because the use-by date really is important. With flour, it’s usually 100% wholemeal that gets problems – apart from weevils that will get into any flour if you leave it uncovered. Wholemeal flour, kept in a warm and damp place – i.e a kitchen – will occasionally go rancid, which is why I never buy it in large quantities.

So yeast then. A few weeks ago, and bearing in mind the possibility of a second wave of the Covid pandemic I stocked up on yeast by buying a 500g pack of professional bakers yeast online. This morning I decided to test it because there were absolutely no instructions on the packet, and so I just made a white loaf in exactly the same way as normal – 500g flour, 350mls water, 15g salt, 15mls oil. But staying in experimental mode, the flour I used was part of the 16Kg sack of commercial white that I managed to buy off a local baker during the shortages. I’ve already said, it made a perfectly good sourdough and an OK yeast bread. If I say that the brand name was “Tornado” it may be a clue to what it was especially good at.

The mixture was so fast it almost doubled in size while it was sitting in the bowl for 1/2 hour before I kneaded it. The kneading was harder than usual because it felt quite tight. So much of breadmaking expertise is in the hands, and I could feel the difference. In the first proving it went completely bonkers while we were up at the allotment, so it was more than ready for the second rise, in the tin. This can be bad news because the dough can be exhausted if it’s left too long and you don’t get the spring in the oven. In this case, though, it was barely forty five minutes and it was fighting its way out of the tin again. I’ve never seen a meaner batch! So I slashed it and it opened cleanly like a flower; this is a really good sign. In the oven and with full steam it just went on growing – so bags of spring there. It’s cooling down now but I can’t wait to cut it – I fear it may be very open textured, but from the outside it looks just like the white bread of my childhood!

If I’m absolutely honest I was rather pleased. We spend so much time knocking white flour and yeast bread – perhaps we forget that most people want their bread to be neutrally flavoured so they can spread stronger flavours on it. But the take home point is that there’s a direct trade-off between speed and flavour. ‘Though I say it myself, my 24 hour sourdough method will make far better flavoured bread than this – but that’s not the point. The fun of baking at home is that you get to make bread exactly the way you like it to be. I love all kinds of bread and it’s great to be able to make a range of shapes, tastes and textures – just like you’d find in France for instance.

So I’m not going to get sniffy about commercial flour and yeast – if that’s what you like go for it and enjoy it. Then you won’t have to inflict tooth breaking, gum shredding pain on your partner as they try to reduce your finest razor crusted doorstop to a swallowable condition. Tomorrow morning I’m going to make toast with this one – just on the point of being burnt – and eat it with slices of butter. We shall eschew all jams, marmalades and spreads in favour of life threatening indulgence, just this once.

On a gloomy day with rain threatening we had a few hours on the allotment but the rewarding bit was cooking zucchini al forno for the first time this summer. I also found a marvellous YouTube video on grass identification by made by a real enthusiast who goes by the name of “Dr M”. He teaches at the University of Reading and if I was eighteen again I’d be banging on his door to join one of his courses. Anyway in case you’re interested here’s the link – but I’d advise you to make notes, it’s really worth it.

Don’t food photos always look messy? Mine always do anyway. This is supper before it was coated with parmesan and fresh breadcrumbs and baked in the oven. The lumpy things that look like potatoes are actually hard boiled eggs. It tastes lovely – honestly!

Zucchini al forno – from a recipe by Patience Gray in “Honey from a Weed”

Jamming

just when it seemed safe to contemplate a short break from our longstanding routine, the longed for rain came along at the very moment we needed some sunshine for us to pick the soft fruit. So we’ve been glued to the weather apps every day and grabbing any couple of hours we can, to gather the crop. There’s a moment every year when we wonder whether we’ve got enough of one particular crop or another. Every year we worry that we’ve got the strawberries in the right place and the answer is always no – and so they continue their perambulation around the plot. The red and black currants are on relatively new bushes and so they’re beginning to crank up production. One of the the gooseberries was moved in the winter, but they’ve put up a decent showing; the strawberries haven’t been helped by the weather and the slugs but as ever the old faithful white currant bush has produced a lovely crop.

The red and white currants are best used as jellies, and it always seems a wasteful process except for the fact that the pips are quite large and the resulting jelly – particularly the whitecurrent – is beyond good; the rich intense acidity is more like wine than anything else. We try to be self sufficient with our produce, so it was good to open the last of the 2019 jars of jelly this week and have them replaced with another year’s supply. The gooseberries were divided into two batches with some bottled and some jammed. Then we kept a bit of everything back in a mixture for summer pudding fillings and eating with ice cream. So I’ve been spending a lot of time at the stove and that meant I could also bake cakes and bread while other things were cooking. It was all going swimmingly until first thing this morning when my juggling all went wrong and I landed up with a large quantity of very wet yeast dough as a result of my lack of attention; and so we have a loaf rising and some unexpected bread rolls waiting to go into the oven. As soon as the bread’s out I’ll have to make the blackcurrant jam – so it’s going to be a long day. However, there’s a marvellous ‘harvest home’ feeling as the cupboards fill for another year.

Up at the allotment everything is flying at the moment, with the silks out on the corncobs and trusses of tomatoes setting, courgettes and squashes clambering everywhere and even the risky outdoor chillies, aubergines and sweet pepper setting fruit. All the regulated tidiness of the early season has disappeared into a riot of marigolds nasturtiums and chamomiles which we more or less throw into the beds. We’ve been feasting on broad beans and early potatoes so yes – apart from the small matter of a deadly epidemic being fanned along by our beloved narcissistic sociopath – we’ve been living high on the hog – well, high on the mixed veg??

Life in the neighbourhood continues in its usual anarchic way. A tame jay seems to have taken up residence, and our previously quiet green has been the scene of regular revels involving dozens of mostly young people who (also mostly) clear up after themselves. A couple of nights ago after a particularly boisterous night there was a lot of litter left behind. While we harrumphed as we surveyed the damage, the most unlikely person on the entire square came out and cleared up the mess – which ought to be a warning about judging books by their covers.

The other source of entertainment this weekend was a couple who very drunkenly made love in full view of – and being discretely spied upon – through the hundreds of delicately drawn curtains behind which we all wondered if they’d ever get it together and then after about four hours wondered whether they’d ever finish. Dog walkers, stumbling upon the couple made dramatic alterations of course and even a group of young men gave up their game of football after being distracted by the frolicking. I tell you, it’s nature red in tooth and claw in our neighbourhood.

Mercifully I was able (honestly) to concentrate on some grasses I’d gathered on the path up from the allotment. I won’t bore you with a list, but there were eight species. I’m concentrating on grasses at the moment because I’ve finished doing the car park and most of the riverside, but mainly because back last year when there were field trips, I mentioned in passing to a very distinguished botanist in our group that I found grasses difficult. “Oh” she said, “Grasses are easy!”. Oh well, maybe my grasses are difficult, I consoled myself, and over the past twelve months or so I’ve been climbing a mountain of auricles, glumes and awns to the point where I can key out a new species with reasonable expectation of being right. I’ve even had to buy a x20 hand lens because some of the features I’m trying to look at are so tiny. I very much hope that I shall have my return match at some time in the future when I can ask her the name of some fiendishly difficult plant and experience the great joy of helping her out with the answer; revenge being best served cold.

These are strange times, as everyone keeps saying, but we already miss the quietness of the lockdown. There’s a rather theatrical and exhibitionist side to the partying that seems symptomatic of something broken. The lack of concern or preparation for this crisis is absolutely mortifying and even though we find ourselves really busy, and in truth our lives aren’t so very different from the way we lived six months ago; there is something missing. The trust has gone, and without it you have to wonder how society will continue to function.

A purple variety of broad bean – delicious

If I told you I’d have to kill you!

This is really an extension of the posting on May 25th – “The flavour is in the ingredients” – because if ever there was a vindication of slow food and local food networks it’s this. The problem is that I don’t want to give away too many of the details because slow and local also means there’s not very much available; certainly not enough to cope with a sudden rush.

Flours, and I mean bread flours, are very personal and I’d never want to get into the “best X in the world” kind of discussion because slow and local absolutely demands variability. All you can do is keep searching for the ingredient that makes your perfect loaf; and this one I’m pretty sure, is mine. I found a similar one years ago with Bacheldre Mill, when in their early days they produced what I called an 81% flour; a buff white with some but not all of the bran taken out and based on the old wartime “National Loaf” flour; but I believe they were selling up and anyway they stopped milling it.

Meanwhile I’ve tried all sorts; organic if I could get it, but most of it came from imported wheat. They said that only the Great Plains could grow the kind of high protein wheat that bakers need. Well they would say that wouldn’t they. For my part I’ve learned that too much protein is a bit of a no no with sourdough if you want that lovely open textured crumb; and often I’ve resorted to adding cake flour or spelt flour to get the best results. Over the past months of the crisis I’ve gratefully worked my way through a sack of commercial “Tornado” white flour and it’s been perfectly good. The sourdough made with it always tasted better than the yeast bread even when I slowed it right down. So don’t knock the big millers too much even if their only virtue is consistency.

But I’ve kept my ear to the ground – so to speak – and finally I’ve found a flour that ticks all the boxes: organic, stoneground, locally grown wheat, small producer; and the result proves beyond doubt that slow and local can also be unequivocally better as well.

I don’t advertise here and in any case I don’t want to compromise my supply but the big point is that wherever you live there are almost certainly local millers and local farmers who could work together to produce flour that’s fresher, good to bake with, good to eat and doesn’t need driving and shipping around the world. One of the blogs I subscribe to is a cooperative food group up in North Wales where they’ve taken exactly this approach and it seems to be working.

The loaf in the photo is my perfectly standard “everyday” loaf. The starter is about 10 years old and is fed (when I can get it) with dark rye flour. It’s a 24 hour bread from start to finish and it’s very un-temperamental, keeps well and toasts beautifully. There’s nothing difficult or secret about making good bread it’s 99% common sense once you’ve got the hang of it and, as I’ve said before, sourdough especially and bread generally thrives on a bit of neglect. I would be prepared to sell the pyrex bowl in which I’ve been proving dough for 53 years if someone made a suitable six figure offer. I know the internet is groaning with pictures of loaves made by the sort of people who call themselves master-bakers after standing next to a bread machine for ten minutes, and it’s true there are a lot of master-bakers around on the internet, (fear not, I shall eschew the double entendres immediately).

So give it a go; check out a farm shop or food co-op near you and you could be baking the kind of bread for a pound that you used to pay a fiver for.

Seasonal earthly delights

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It’s funny how other people see allotmenteering as a kind of gentle therapy in which you potter about the garden very ……. very ……..  slowly ……. and mindfully …… taking in the sights and scents and sounds whilst healing your mind with thoughts about the beauty of nature. In my experience you can only do that in other peoples’ gardens, and then only if they’re very good gardeners. It’s amazing how catching your silk meditation robes on a rusty nail can disrupt the pattern of good thoughts!

This is one of those times in the gardening year when meditation has to give way to the huge list of jobs to be done.  Plants can be very restful but at times they spend their time shouting at you – “have you seen my leaves wilting? Will you please re-pot me immediately or I’ll expire and then you’ll be sorry ……!” And it’s hard to keep your zen composure when you’re pouring five litres of your own carefully saved urine on to the compost heap. Slugs can destroy a row of seedlings in a single night and so you have to deal with murderous thoughts of revenge.  One vegan allotmenteer on our site told us she was gathering slugs on her allotment and then roasting and grinding them up to make a deterrent powder.  Even I’d never thought of that one! The weather can turn on you like a banshee and confound the forecasters by shriveling the leaves on your beans  – oh my – it’s nature red in tooth and claw out there, and so I’m inclined to growl at people who insist that it must be therapeutic.  Really it’s up there with playing a musical instrument, writing a blog or painting landscapes – very hard work that occasionally offers intense rewards. 

So the delights of gardening could be over-egged if you focus entirely on the hard work aspect, but the real pleasure comes with harvesting. I never quite know whether to describe purple sprouting broccoli – which is effectively a biennial – as the final delight of last year or the first in the current year. It’s been there on the plot taking up space since it was sown in March or April of the previous year, and it really does take up space. Half a dozen plants is far more than we really need, but when it comes to planting out we usually put in a couple of spares – just in case – and that’s about thirty square feet taken up for a little over 12 months.  Every year around October we mutter about not growing it any more and then by the following March we’re urging it on, desperate to taste the first sweet florets. Then – and this is one of the great ironies of allotmenteering – after let’s say three weeks or a month of cropping, the pleasure begins to pale a little and we’re eyeing up the space. Seasonal foods are like holiday romances – intensity followed by – let’s be honest – boredom.  Who hasn’t looked at the 500th courgette and wondered what to do with it?

So this week the purple sprouting plants (trees) came out and the plot was immediately re-sown.  Once the flowers start to open it becomes a losing battle and so off they went to the compost heap complete with their intractable woody stems, smashed into fibres and pulp with the back of a small axe. Now the asparagus is gathering momentum and we have far more lettuces than we could possibly eat, will we ever get bored with them? The answer of course is yes, because seasonal food is – well – seasonal! Our tiny savoy cabbage seedlings wouldn’t cut the mustard in midsummer, but come the autumn they’ll be objects of desire. Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its fruits away – but they come back next years as fresh and beautiful as ever. Seasonal food, if I dare be serious for a moment – teaches us something about love and loss.  If there’s a therapeutic lesson in gardening it’s probably something to do with carpe diem – seizing the moment. Supermarket food is stale and dull; costly to the earth, fatal to the digestion and it’s unreliable as we now understand only too well as we (well, not me) stand in endless queues separated by an ocean of anxiety.

IMG_20200507_074922Last night, after a hard day gardening, I was baking and decided to try to imitate the old split tin loaves I went up the road to buy, as a child. It’s curious but just as everyone else seems to have turned to making sourdough, I’ve spent more time baking with yeast and trying to recapture the loaves of my childhood. I was particularly pleased with the results of the deep slash. To get that effect you need to prove the loaf under a tea towel rather than in a sealed and moist atmosphere so that the rapidly expanding loaf, when it goes into the hot oven, finds it easier to expand through the slash than by lifting the slightly toughened top. This was largely white flour with a handful of wholemeal spelt to liven up the flavour and texture. I’ve yet to produce one of those exuberant cottage loaves that resist rational slicing so have to be torn apart so everyone can get a piece of crust.

IMG_20200507_154625The closure of the garden centres has left us to improvise our own potting composts from whatever ingredients we can find. Today I wanted to fill some large planters to put on the patio area, and so I emptied all the spring window boxes on to a polythene sheet mainly to get access to the grit and sand in them and then mixed in new soil and compost with a few handfuls of chicken manure pellets, and filled lots of big pots.  It was great fun and represented another step towards the allotment as it was first imagined.

This is the time of year when inattention can cost us dearly. We scan the weather forecast morning and night to see what might catch us out. This weekend, for instance, we’re expecting high winds and a ten degree drop in temperature – enough to unsettle  and set back some of the plants we’ve already got in the ground. As I type this I’m looking across my study to a propagator full of replacement borlotti and runner bean seedlings – just in case. Earlier in the week I set up some improvised wind screens with some jute sacks and insect netting to protect the strawberries from the anticipated east wind. Later in the year I think we’ll invest in some hazel wattle fence panels because although our prevailing winds are south westerly; east and north easterlies are almost always bad news. Earlier I finally got the water storage organised but there’s no sign of rain for the next two weeks so as the temperature hits 23C we have to hand water.  Every morning  we unpack the greenhouse to give the plants some sunshine therapy and then we put them back at night.

There are brief seasons where an allotment can run away with you, and this is one of them. Bindweed, which is never truly vanquished, can grow two inches a day; and annual seedlings blown from neglected patches can germinate in green drifts overnight. I can almost hear our plot thinking – thank goodness for the lockdown, there’s no prospect of them going off in the campervan for a fortnight! I’m not entirely sure I agree.

 

 

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