We had a lovely evening up on the plot this evening… plenty of digging, weeding and larking about

The herb garden on the plot is going crazy!

Sage is enormous, thyme flowing everywhere, chives have seeded all over the place and the applemint that we thought had been dug up is also popping up where it shouldn’t!

This is great, but we need to find a way to use or preserve them asap…

The most popular, and possibly easiest, way to preserve herbs seems to be to dry them, so that’ll do for us to start with!  First one we’re trying out is sage… we’ll let you know how it all goes

We’ve also had some tips on oven-drying and freezing which we will certainly try out in the coming weeks.

Please let us know how you like to preserve your herbs… we have never done this before so need all the help we get!

With BBQ season already started we thought we would try making some dips with things we are growing on the allotment. We’ve had to use market bought tomatoes here as ours are not quite ready yet.

Dips from top left are:

Spicy Tomato Salsa made with tomatoes, onion, garlic, tomato paste and cajun seasoning.

Avocado Dip made with avocados, sour cream, mayonnaise, olive oil, tabasco sauce, garlic, lemon juice and fresh coriander.

Sweet Chilli Dip made with low fat cream cheese, home made sweet chilli sauce and fresh coriander.

Tomato, Chilli and Coriander Dip made with tomatoes, lime juice, home made sweet chilli sauce, fresh coriander and tiny bit of brown sugar.

All very scrummy and we cannot wait to try them again once our tomatoes have grown!

Well we do like to think we’re rather charming, but today we planted our Cauliflower ‘Candid Charm’

We have never grown cauliflower before, so we’re a little nervous… we have read we need to fold the leaves over the florets as they grow, so they’ll need a little more care than our ‘shove it in and see what happens’ approach!

Forgot to take pictures though, sorry!

After all the laziness over the bank holiday weekend – which was spent mostly eating and drinking rather than sowing and growing – we had planned to spend our evenings gardening and crafting… unfortunately those plans were scuppered by this cute little thing!

Siobhan’s cat, Mia, had bit of an accident jumping up onto a shelf which had no space for her… she landed badly on her leg and off we rushed to the vet.

An overnight stay was needed – we collected her yesterday and we’re pleased to say all is fine – a bad graze, but no broken bones.

Many thanks to the vets and nurses at Best Friends in Oakham and Peterborough

With only rhubarb on offer from the allotment and only four sticks to share between us we decided it was time to try TasteBuds’ rhubarb bellinis.

So into the oven went the rhubarb – chopped and topped with sugar, cinnamon and star anise, then covered with foil – for about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes the revolting-looking mess that is stewed rhubarb was strained, giving us a nice sweet frothy rhubarb pulp.  Once cool, and once we stopped dipping our fingers in it, two teaspoons of pulp went into each champagne glass and was topped up with a rather fabulous Prosecco (Riva di Rocca) from Ben’s Wine Shop in Oakham. Bit of a stir and it was ready to drink…

Delicious!!  More of a Christmassy flavour though, so we’ll save this one for winter – next of the list will be to try out some summer bellini recipes (any excuse!).

Links:
TasteBuds Kitchen Garden Blog: Rhubarb Blog Post | Blog | Twitter
Ben’s Wine Shop (Bat & Bottle), Northgate, Oakham: Riva di Rocca Prosecco | Website | Twitter

Tonight we’ve deviated from the true allotmenty-ness of digging and weeding and we have got crafty!  Our mosaic trays and watering can cards… are you impressed?

Today was a perfect Spring day… warm sunshine, birds tweeting and much happiness from allotmenteers!

Peering beneath the groundsheets we found the Rhubarb has survived and is looking rather healthy… with a bit of luck we’ll be over-run with it – we love it!  Perhaps we shouldn’t mention that, it’ll be our summer equivalent of the allotment-owners courgette glut!

We had a good old digging and weeding session (as always!), and planted some radishes (Scarlet Globe), lettuce (Tom Thumb), spinach, rocket and salad leaves – from the old seed stash though so whether they come to anything will be a miracle, especially as we forgot the bird scarers again.