[food] Tedious dietary restrictions

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[growth] gotta tend the earth if you want a rose

Image the first: allotment circa June. Image the second: allotment as of last week, with all of the foreground raised beds cleared -- I've since made further progress clearing the next bed back in the second row from the right, and today I dumped a bunch more woodchip mulch on my squash and around my pak choi. (Maybe it will help with the slugs! Maybe it won't. Who knows.)

Of very great excitement to me is the compost bin, in the middle at the back, being large and black and looming. It is a hot bin, made of expanded polypropylene, that I can put pretty much everything in (including perennial weeds and "compostable" kitchen caddy liners), because it's running at a cheerful 60degC and quite happily steams things. I don't get mulch out of it for another 2-3 weeks, but it will give me fully matured compost after 90 days with no turning.

Currently in the ground are four butternut squash plants (on the right, receding into the distance) behind which are some white-stemmed pak choi (which the slugs are greatly enjoying); behind that the grape vine has actual grapes on, but who knows if they'll ripen. In the adjacent bed to the left I have some fennel growing, somewhat experimentally; this crop I intend to just eat all of, but next year I intend to additionally harvest copious amounts of seed, some for cooking as-is and some for saving and planting again.

At home I've got nine or ten green calabrese working on getting big enough to plant out, and I've started sowing onion seed and my walking onion sets in modules where I can keep an eye on them. (WALKING ONIONS: instead of growing a sensible allium flower, they... grow tiny little bubils where their flower should be, and then eventually they fall over and self-seed a foot away. They're absolutely an indulgence BUT ALSO I do like spring/bunching onions and they'll make me smile, so.)

At some point when A isn't Death Of Flu I'm going to induce him to drive me down to a nearishby builders' merchant so I can buy some cheap scaffold board so I can actually reconstruct the raised beds with an edging other than cheap plywood, in a more useful shape. Once that job is Sorted Out, I am intending to give one bed over to allium various and one (half of?) one bed over to winter spinach, and then the rest is going to get green manured and possibly mulched and left to think about what it's done until spring.

In the meantime, I have begun plotting with U to spend some time at the allotment social next week cornering the site manager and establishing from her whether the plot in the very back corner, that's neck-deep in brambles and nettles, is actually as abandoned as it looks. Because if it is our next question is "great, can we have it?" -- the plum tree on it is magnificent (I've been scrumping them, as nobody else seems to be), we've both got less than a 10-pole plot each (in that we've got a 10-pole plot in total, as far as I can tell), and we'd quite like somewhere away from our main growing beds to put in the lovage and the comfrey and the chamomile. As a bonus, U is successfully persuading me that we probably do actually want to grow quinoa, and between the two of us I expect we'd actually manage a large enough harvest to be worthwhile...