No potato famine here!

This Sunday, Matt had his family visiting while I went off to a friend's wedding. Normally you would expect a family visit to involve tea, maybe a nice dinner or some wine. But oh no, Matt put them to work on the allotment, they had to earn their keep!

They filled the water butt (well needed!), pulled up the spent beans and dug up the early potatoes. The potatoes have suffered from the lack of water and too much heat somewhat and the first earlies were hit by frost so we were sure that we wouldn't get much of a crop. How wrong we were!

The first earlies, which looked very pathetic, produced a nice little crop of new potatoes (Chopin):



The second earlies were more impressive. The kestrels in particular, with their lovely purple splodges, produced some whoppers! One of them will provide us with a nice sized jacket potato to share!



The Condors have produced some lovely red potatoes, which I reckon will be good for fat chips. Yummmmmm!



We need to sort them and store them to make sure they don't go mouldy (we are a bit rubbish at storing produce normally!). Excitingly, we still have a bed of maincrops, which have lots of foliage, so fingers crossed they will produce some good sturdy potatoes for storing. We'll leave them in the ground for a bit longer and keep our fingers crossed that the Blight stays away.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

July is always a busy month for us. Not least because it starts with my birthday and I do like to celebrate as many times as I can (I figure I'm getting to get older no matter what so I might as well have a party!).

Matt and I don't buy each other gifts for birthdays, we buy "experiences"! This year he treated me a trip to the Kentish seaside town of Whitstable to celebrate the final year of my 20s. I have wanted to go for ages and it's only 45 minutes away so perfect for a day out.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather, it was a beautiful sunny day (dare I say a little too hot!) so we really made the most of it. We wondered around the lovely little non-chain shops (bliss!) - Frank is a gorgeous shop with wonderful little gifts, the cheese shop where we bought a selection of Kentish cheeses to take home, Sundae, Sundae which does delicious flavoured ice cream in little boats, and numerous other lovely shops.





We visited the seafood market and treated ourselves to some fish and chips:




We spent a good while wondering along the beach and even went for a swim in the sea!




Here are some of the other highlights:






If you haven't been I would urge you to, particularly on a sunny day, it really is lovely!

Egg count - June

Start of a new month so time for another egg count. We've seen a bit of a dip this month:



This can be mainly explained by Blue, who was laying the most regular beautiful brown eggs, is having a bit of a tough time. A lot of hers come out soft and are gobbled up by the "old girls" in seconds, and the rest of the time she is laying tiny brown eggs with no yolk. She seems fine apart from this so we will just need to keep an eye on her as always. The others seem to be doing ok though, we have 2/3 most days. It's also probably down to the hot weather - I wouldn't fancy trying to squeeze one of those things out in this heat, would you?!

We can't really complain with this month's figure, which averages out as more than 2 a day. We are still selling them relatively regularly which is paying for their food. All you can ask really considering their poor start in life so well done girls!

Broad bean and pea falafel

We have the inevitable glut of peas and broad beans at the moment and we've now had our fill of pea and bean salads. We had our first pea and bean risotto of the season this week, which until now has been my favourite early summer dish, but not any more!

Courtesy of Jamie at Home we discovered the recipe of broad bean falafel, and I have adapted it slightly to use some peas by including a pea and mint dip.

For the Falafel

1kg broad beans (add smoe peas if you don't have enough)
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 chilli
1 tsp cumin
1 small bunch mint
1 sprig coriander
1 tbsp flour

Blend all of the above, adding the flour last. Once blended make into dumpling shape falafel, 8-10 of them. Cook them in a deep pan of oil until brown on the outside.

For the dip

Some peas (couple of handfuls probably - I can't remember how many I used!)
Half small bunch mint
Small pot natural yoghurt
Zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
splash of olive oil

Blend everything except the oil together, adding more or less pea/mint to taste, and a bit of salt and pepper. Splosh oil in at the end.

Serve with pitta and salad, like this:



Absolutely delicious! Try it!

We are doing so well at making home produced meals - we've at least 5 now which are almost entirely from our own garden/allotment. Hurrah!

Cheesemaking

We had our second attempt at cheesemaking today and it was much more successful than the first.



In our first attempt we made lemon cheese, which was fae too lemony so a bit bitter, this time we tried curd cheese. Yesterday we got it going, heating 4 pints of whole milk and the curd cheese starter in our cheese kit, which started the process of seperating the curds from the whey.



Last night we cut the curd and poured it into the cheese cloth, and hung it to drain it. We left it until this evening et voila, curd cheese! It is just like ricotta and absolutely delicious!





We didn't want to hang around to taste our new creation so hot footed it down to the allotment and picked some mini-courgettes with flowers. We stuffed the flowers with the ricotta mix, battered them and fried them (healthy!). Jolly delicious!

Meg the Moggy

Well, here she is, our car for 2 days a couple of weeks ago. As she's a Moggy we named her Meg, and what a lovely character she was. hard work to drive - crunchy gears, massive steering wheel with no power steering, and an indicator that I kept forgetting to turn off. But, oh wasn't she fun! Pootling around the Cotswolds was just lovely, we even managed to get the top down a couple of times, and it was lovely to hear so many people comment on her - a real pinup!





2 days is definitely not enough for the Cotswolds but we managed to make the most of it, with National trust properties, pretty towns and villages, and the Domestic Fowl Trust!

Garden of England

Yesterday saw the annual Slade in Bloom gardening competition - run by our residents association - and judged by a senior lecturer at Hadlow College (our local agricultural college). I entered for the first this year, front and back garden, and had a mad panic yesterday morning to get everything ready. This would have been a slight challenge on any normal day but on Friday night I had done a little too good a job of drowning my sorrows at England's abysmal World Cup campaign to date that it was even tougher!

That said, I was quite delighted with how both gardens looked in the end. I'm quite realistic about the fact that we have some very tough competition in this area and it's unlikely that I'll win but it was fun to enter anyway.

Here's the front garden, absolutely stocked full of plants:



Front left is one of my favourites, Ligularia, with massive leaves with dark purple undersides. Front right is a lovely lavender which is ready to burst into flower. The Iris are now finished in the middle but back left are the Crocosmia which should give us lots of colour for the summer. Back right, standing tall, are the Hollyhocks, which aremy favourite flowers in the garden - lovely vintagey cream colour, with dark pink stamen. Vase at the ready!

This is the back garden:



It was really nice, when the judges asked me, to reflect on everything that we've done in 2 years. When we moved in it was just a strip of grass with a scraggy bush at the side and now look at it! It's still in transition - we will be putting a pergola up in front of the girls' run with a patio underneath, and the bare grass patch cunningly hidden under the table and chairs will be returfed with the turf we remove from the patio area. The flower bed is looking really nice, although it's in a bit of a gap between the Spring flowering and summer flowering plants. The judging was bad timing!