Not so glorious mud

If we were hippos or some other such creature we would be wallowing in the muddy soil on our allotment. As we are no such creature we are not enjoying the conditions at all.

The general appearance is typical of winter on the plot. Things look bare, bleak and unloved with smatterings of winter vegetables waiting to be harvested.

It's when you get close up that the true state of this year's ground is revealed. The photo below is of our parsnips bed. If you watch the video taken when we harvested a few roots last week you will appreciate just how muddy it is.

We expect the ground to be wet during the winter months, but this year things are rather extreme. Goodness knows how long it will taken for the soil to be workable again.

The reason for venturing to the allotment site last week was to gather a few vegetables. There isn't much on offer at the moment and what is available is anything but in pristine condition.

If everything had gone according to plan we would have had enough brassicas to see us into spring. Unfortunately, the weather conditions have conspired to throw a spanner into the works. Cabbages and cauliflowers have either given up or have become soggy messes. There are one or two cabbages that are worth trying but, as you can see from the one on the left in the photo above, the leaves are spoiled well into the cabbage heads.

Sprouts too have suffered. Something has gouged holes in them. We're guessing that the culprits are slugs - we can't blame wood pigeons as the plants are under enviromesh. Again lots of the outer leaves need to be removed leaving some small sprouts to hopefully enjoy.

The bed of leeks looks OK but, as I've mentioned before, the weather has spoiled these too. We took home far more parsnips amd leeks than we needed for the next week so we have cleaned them off and frozen them. It's not something that we would choose to do, we would prefer to harvest them fresh but with the conditions as they are we can never be sure when plot visits will be possible. It's times like this when having an allotment three miles away rather than growing vegetables outside your back door is a distinct disadvantage. With lots of waste on the vegetables it’s also difficult to judge how much useable material we will be left with.

I've mentioned before that as well as planting over wintering onions as sets we planted some seed sown plantlets. Well the planlets were a complete failure as can be seen above. I used up a row of sets on this bed too. The remains of the sets can be spotted if you look carefully but I doubt that they will produce anything.

Fortunately the other bed of sets are growing as expected. These were planted eight  days before the plantlets and left over sets so did the earlier planting make a difference or were the leftover sets the poorer specimens?

In the past we haven't had much success with growing garlic and I was ready to give up trying but, you know how it is, I relented and planted a couple of bulbs. At the moment they are growing well but will they bulk out and will they form cloves?

Our local garden centre had onion and shallot sets in so we ordered some and some dahlias. We used click and collect as this way we could pick up our order from the car park without venturing inside.

We had intended to add more colours to our dahlia collection last year but with lockdowns we never got round to buying any.

Now, onto how we used some of our vegetables last week. 

Thursday I made a vegetable bolognese  which used carrots, onion and tomatoes from the freezer.

On Friday I took green beans, peas and some basil from the freezer and used them with some onions to make a Thai green vegetable curry. I'll have to make this again when we have our own courgettes. I couldn't find  the recipe on the Internet so I've copied it here.

On Sunday I made a Quinoa pilaf which I think I have mentioned before but this time I used our onion, carrot, frozen peas and frozen green beans. I added a few mushrooms. I usually substitute stock for water in recipes to improve the flavour so in this recipe I used vegetable stock.

The quinoa that I used was a mix of red, black and white grains.

My gadget for this week is  a mini whisk. There's not much to say about it really, it's just very useful for whisking small amounts such as an egg for glazing the top of a pie.

Ruby had an eventful week as she went to be clipped. Her groomer usually comes to the house but due to Covid restrictions we took Ruby to the groomers house and then picked her up when the groomer rang to say she was ready. 

We also took part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch but more on that later

On the vaccination front it appears that there will soon be five viable vaccines in our armoury which I think is incredible in such a relatively short time. Let's just hope that the vaccination war that reared it's head last week cools off and we can get back to the important task of fighting the virus rather than one another. Has anyone had their jab yet?

Harvest Monday is back up and running on Dave's Our happy Acres blog so I have linked to him this week

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