Vegan MoFo

I've just found out about this- Vegan MoFo- which I am going to try and do next year, it involves blogging every day for a month about vegan food, am a bit gutted I have missed out on this year's, but never mind. I will endeavour to do it next year and thus incorporate some of my cooking life into this blog.

It was created by the very cool Post Punk Kitchen, an online vegan cooking/recipe website. See here if you're interested- http://www.theppk.com/.

Adios.

I've started to do my first proper seed saving!! Pretty excited about that! Have saved some French and runner beans. Have got the seeds out of the pods, just need to make sure they're totally dried out before putting them in envelopes and storing them for next spring. I would like to save some cucumber seeds too, I just need to look it up. I already did some runner bean saving on the food growing course I went on the year before last so vaguely remembered what I had to do. Not that it's really all that complicated. I mean you are basically saving the seeds!

Here I am in action.

Had a productive day all in all yesterday, it felt quite cleansing for both of us, as if we were preparing the allotment for the winter, clearing beds and covering the ones without green manure in them, cleaning out the polytunnel, harvesting the autumnal veg.

I was actually really surprised that we had so much to harvest, this is what it looked like:

The purple Brussel sprouts are really tasty, and that is not an easy thing for me to say seeing as I have been trying to like this vegetable for the last few years, in an effort to overcome my dislike for certain things (have conquered olives, beetroot and fennel also).

Here are some pics of Baz:

Harvesting the chard....

..parsnip..

..testing to see if the leeks are ready to pick..

..and the last of this year's spuds. These red ones were my favourite of the three types we grew this year.

Here are some pics of my seed saving:

I really love the look of the runner bean seeds, they're so pretty.

I planted some onion sets about two or three weeks ago and I was pleased to see them starting to sprout through the soil:

Not sure what they'll be like but out of the onions we harvested this year there were several that were still really small and as we just left them supposedly drying out on the soil for weeks, they had started to sprout again, so I replanted them in another bed.

Baz was very excited to see his first broccoli, or rather calabrese (I learnt recently that what most people call broccoli is actually calabrese broccoli). Here it is in all its glory:

Not the best picture unfortunately.

Ok that's all for me for now. -x-

Evil chilli

http://i.imgur.com/CmfZV.jpg

Had to repost this, it made me laugh, created by my brother!
-x-

Herb garden and pond!

Well Baz has been really productive up at the allotment these last couple of weeks, putting a small, but very lovely pond in, and creating our 'infinity herb garden'. He's also moved the rosemary to the top corner of the plot, which I completely failed to even notice when I went to the allotment yesterday, oops, but have seen in the photos I just uploaded. It's all looking really good at the moment, even though there are still areas that need a lot of work, and there are some empty beds, which in the future, during the winter, will have in them either over-wintering crops or green manure.

Here are some pics of the last couple of weeks-

Above: the new herb garden!

Above: how it's all looking from the top.

Above: our first harvest of Jerusalem artichokes.

Above: the rosemary in it's new home.

Above: Baz and Caleb chasing each other around the plot!!
-x-

Just spent a couple of hours at the plot.

We harvested quite a bit today-

We finally got some red chillies, so picked one of those today, a few raspberries, two tomatoes, loads of French beans, cucumber, salad leaves, chard, and lots of spuds, plus one of the squashes, which we picked last week, but hadn't brought any home till now.

I took a photo of each of the beds, so here they are starting at the top left and going down to the shed-

Above and below you can see the green manure starting to show.

 Above are the raspberries.

 Above are the Jerusalem artichokes.

Above- French beans, which I made a support for today. Besides the cucumbers, these are the best crop this year.

 Above- I always forget what these are, but I think they are Brussel sprouts.....?

I am SO excited that after all the blight and other things going wrong with the 25 tomato plants I started earlier in the year, today I picked the first, edible, actually delicious, tomatoes!!! Me, Baz and Fern each had one and a third tomatoes with our dinner. Here are the rest-

Here are the chillies and cucumbers in the polytunnel-

I will leave you with a few more pics, oh, we decided on a great idea today for the herbs, I thought it would be cool to have them in a circular-y bed, so we decided on an eight shape, and Baz started to prepare the area. Oh and we also changed the plan slightly so that we're going to move the compost down towards the shed and put the fruit trees near the polytunnel, with the herbs going in between.
-x-