Spent the morning at the allotment on Saturday and tidied up the collapsing bean wigwams/structures.
I collected all of the withered beans first and filled a huge carrier bag with these.

I have now tidied up all the canes for the winter and since the roots are rich in nitrogen I also left the bean plants in place to rot back into the soil.

Not much left on the allotment now – I did bring home one Kohl Rabi – there are still lots more but they are not swelling up yet – I guess it has been too dry and I have not made enough effort to water the plot recently.
my cabbages were a real disappointment – I picked a few on Saturday and they are all riddled with slugs and snails right through to the middle – I guess I should have used more slug pellets.
My Brussel Sprouts, Kale and Brocolli plants all seem to be weathering OK though.
I had an on-site feast of raspberrries – think that was the last of those though.

Another job I finally got round to was pruning the huge cherry tree. I am sure it is the wrong time of year for this but I have been too busy since getting the plot back in March.
I chopped all of the pruned branches down to managable sizes and have put them in my log-store (it will be soon time to start using the open fire at home) – and the leaves were all raked up and pushed around the base of my raspberry canes – I felt they would make a good mulch.

Anyway – once I was home I podded the withering beans and collected plenty of seeds for next year.
I only got half way through the beans that I had collected and had plenty – so I threw the rest onto my compost heap.

I now have plenty of white and black french bean seeds for next year – plenty more than I need I am sure – I’ll have to pack them up in envelopes and give them away.

Made some sloe gin at the weekend.

I was on a walk around the countryside surrounding Eastbourne – walked from Polegate to Hankham and then back via Stone Cross.
I was walking up a country lane and saw the largest Sloes I had ever ever seen. This climate change seems to be doing us some amazing favours. The long extended summer this year has obviously meant that the sloe growing season has definitely not been slow. it’ s been long and fast.

I picked as many as I could reach and took them home and used my usual recipe to make up 7 bottles of sloe gin.

Quantities for 7 x 750ml bottles:
4 x 750ml bottles of gin
About a bucket of sloes – or about a mugful per bottle.
About 3 mugs of sugar – granulated or castor – I don’t think it matters.
dash of vanilla essence

Half fill each bottle with sloes – pierce or cut them before they go in the bottle.
cover these with sugar
top up the bottle with gin ( I have also done this with Vodka in the past)
add a drop of Vanilla essence.

Job done!

But over the next few weeks and months try to give each bottle a turn to keep the sugar from settling down to the bottom for too long.

After a year I usually sieve and funnel the flavoured gin into other bottles and it will probably make a lot less than you are expecting but should hopefully still equate to the original 4 x 750ml bottles – although the sloes will have soaked up some of the gin. This is where I usually decide to re-use the gin soaked sloes in a chutney – and then spend the rest of the year spitting out the pips when eating the chutney. If anyone has any better ideas what to do with the gin soaked sloes please let me know.

You don’t have to leave them for a year but a year always works well for me – as that is when I need to use the bottles again for a new batch.

Here are 5 of the 7 bottles. I like to use a big black marker pen to write over the existing labels.

visited my girlfriends grandmother the other day in her care home. I took the dog for a short walk round the gardens before going in and discovered this sad sight – a lovely old potting shed / greenhouse that has been left to fall to pieces. It was a sad sight indeed – because you could see that it was a perfect little place not that long ago. It almost looked like a gardener had died and nobody had known it was there – but it is not that hidden.

I feel partly like I should offer to fix it back up – or I should salvage what is still usable and take it to my allotment.

Went on a long walk yesterday starting from Balcombe station intending to take in the viaduct and the reservoir.
I think we got the scale of the map a bit confused as that walk would have probably taken us about 8 hours.
Once we saw the viaduct off in the distance we realised it was quite a way to walk so we re-adjusted our expectations.
But we did still see the viaduct from up on the hills opposite (instead of walking beneath it) and we saw some amazing bit so of countryside – and amazing houses/halls/gardens. The public footpaths take in quite a few of these places but they also lead you down into a dead end at the reservoir. We had no choice but to wander around the banks of the reservoir which was luckily very low due to the lack of rain these last few months.
We passed through lots of pheasant woodlands where there were lots of tubs of pheasant food and obviously lots of pheasants – so the 2 dogs we had with us were in their element – chasing non-stop for about 4 hours. Luckily the pheasants have the power of flight and managed to escape every time. They certainly do leave it till the last minute though before taking off – I guess they have learnt over time that flying is not usually the way to stay alive.
The only photos I took however where of a boat shed that was jutting out into the banks of the reservoir.

Here is a picture of the route we took – And it took about 4 hours – although we did stop for about half an hour to eat our picnic.

Altogether though this was a beautiful area to walk round – and I would love to go again and manage to get closer to the viaduct this time.

Found a lovely collection of bright purple amethyst deceivers the other day. I left them in the car for too long and forgot to eat them – but these small wild mushrooms make a great accompaniment to other wild mushrooms but they do not taste particularly of much on their own.

Obviously though – do not go out and eat these unless you know exactly what they are and what you are doing.

A big thank you to Vegatableseeds.net for my voucher – I have ordered the following seeds to be sowed early next year.

I’m going to grow a few more root veg next year – and keep up the supply of oriental leaves for a summer of sun-packed salads.

I also need to get some sort of herb garden going on the allotment – all I have so far is a short row of Sorrel – so I have ordered some Chives, Parsley, Cumin and Marjoram – and these can be joined by some Mint, Rosemary, Thyme, Oregano and sage from my back garden when I get round to splitting them in the spring.

I was working at the Grand Designs show in Birmingham last week and had the chance to have a little look at their future gardens section. I was not that impressed – but it can’t be that easy to create a small garden in 2-3 days.

Here were the small garden installations…

Quite a spherical theme going on here – It was a simple idea and worked quite well.

This one was quite a beach/coastal garden theme and obviously consisted of quite a few donations from the shows exhibitors as the driftwood sculptures were abundant at this show.

This one was the vegetable garden – it wasn’t particularly well laid out – but again was obviously a number of donated items laid out on a woodchip floor area.

Also at the show – there was this spherical summerhouse that rotates to face the sun – quite a high-tech monster really! Available at John Lewis – prices range from £6k to £15k

Went along to the local stables at the weekend to collect some manure. They charge 50p per bag or for £1 you can take all you want. so we took my work car and filled it with 21 large sacks of well rotted horse manure.
It was just enough to tip onto the top of my empty allotment beds – hopefully the worms will pull it down into the soil and turn it all in so that by the time spring comes around we have well recovered beds – all ready for a good crop of summer veg.

I still have another collection to make this year I think – It’s looking like I will soon need to pull out and eat the brussel sprouts, cabbages and brocolli. We’ll see. If we keep getting this good weather down here we’ll have nothing left in the winter.

Anyway – as the summer veg has been removed from the majority of the beds now it is time to start planning any changes to the layout of the plot. Time to lay out the paths a bit better and make sure that the central path goes right to the back of the plot now – having a few full width beds this year was quite annoying.

anyway – here is a little picture of the plot with the newly manured beds on the left. still a few beans going on the right.