A non-gardening week

Last week the second national lockdown here in England came to an end. In our part of the country it has made little difference as we are subject to tier three restrictions that are more or less the same thing as being in lockdown. People living in tier three areas are not supposed to visit areas in lower tiers or vice versa. It makes you feel a bit like a pariah. 

I fully expect signs to be placed on our boundaries, a bit like they do when farms suffer from outbreaks of foot and mouth. It's also reminiscent of the story of the village of Eyam in the Peak District National Park that cut themselves off from the outside world when they suffered an outbreak of plague in 1665.

We didn't go to the allotment at all last week nor did we pay a visit to Nostell Priory. Our only outings were local walks with Ruby. Nostell did feature in the week though as we chose an image to use for an acrylic print for the dining room. I would have preferred one with more autumn colour but in the end we went for photo quality.

We already have one acrylic print on the dining room, the photo that we used was taken some years ago in Scotland.

The company that produced our first print isn't trading at the moment so fingers crossed that the quality of our new print will be as good.

Another photographic project was to print out our Christmas (there I've said it) cards. We have made our cards for a few years now. I pick a somewhat festive image and this year opted for one of the photos taken on our night time outing to Fountains Abbey.

Another project last week was to experiment with some spice mixes for making curries. I found lots of suggested recipes on the internet and wanted to try something using whole spices. The problem was that the grinder that came with my stick blender doesn't work very well with spices. It's fine for grinding things like nuts and ginger so either the blades are too high or my quantities are too small. Does anyone have a grinder that works on spice seeds?

That brings me on to last weeks cooking. One meal was a vegetable and bean curry 

Homegrown vegetables that went into this recipe were, potatoes, carrots, along with sweetcorn and peas from the freezer.

We fairly recently started to cook with quinoa but up until now I've used it as an accompaniment in much the same way as you would use couscous. I wasn't sure about incorporating it into the main part of the meal so decided to dip my toes in the water and made a quinoa pilaf.

Some of our carrots, onions and frozen peas went into this and I also added a red pepper that needed using up. We really enjoyed it, the only problem was that the portions were a bit small. I think in future I would add a bit more vegetables, maybe some French beans.

I'm now busily searching for promising quinoa recipes - any recommendations

We are at a stalemate with our decorating; all the painting is finished and now we need to wait for the paper to arrive hopefully next week.

We also managed to do a lot of decluttering by offering items on Freecycle. All the items that I posted were snapped up minutes after I hit the submit button and all were collected with social distancing in mind. Most items were left on our doorstep just before they were due to be collected. Much better than throwing away things that other people can make good use of.

Martyn is making progress driving his trains. He didn't crash last week, although once he actually got the engine going he was prone to ignoring red lights and speeding through stations where he was supposed to pick up passengers. When he did manage to stop he overshot the platform and left passengers unable to reach the train!

Any finally some colour in the garden. Our flying flowers just love sunflower hearts.

As always stay safe and well. Hopefully it won't be too long before the vaccines take effect and we can experience a more normal life - whatever that may mean

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett