Roaming Zebra

Blackcurrants (Image Wikimedia Commons)

Last night was spent making up some blackcurrant sorbet as well as preparing to make blackcurrant jelly…

One of the other allotment holders has a number of blackcurrant bushes on one of their plots, and they very kindly offered to let us pick some blackcurrants from their bushes - they said they’d already taken huge numbers home, made jam, frozen them …. and there were still loads left on the plants (there still is now and we took a couple of kilos!).

Decided to make blackcurrant jelly rather than jam, given the number of tiny seeds in blackcurrants. Ended up grabbing a recipe from the Internet as my preserves and jams books doesn’t have blackcurrant jelly - mostly its knowing how much water and sugar to add for the type of fruit. Well, I left that dripping through the jelly bag overnight and now have a bowl of very finely sieved blackcurrent juice ready for the second stage (incidentally, I found that at the local supermarket, the “jam” sugar with added pectin was about 2/3rds the cost of normal granualted sugar, I’m sure jam sugar is normally considerably morse expensive!).

Also mixed up a batch of sorbet - we’ve had an ice cream maker for ages, but it can’t have been used for at least 5 years I guess (since we moved to the West Midlands at least…). Having prepared the sugar/syrup solution and cooled it, I found the drive link was missing from the ice cream maker, which then involved searching all the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen, all to no avail! I did however discover that the drive on our old food processor (which is still in the garage) was very similar in shape, so with the application of a hammer, screwdriver and a Stanley blade, I refashioned the drive so it fitted … and hey presto, 40 mins later, enough churning to transfer it to the freezer. We haven’t yet tried out the sorbet, so I don’t know if 40 mins was long enough or if the ice crystals will be too large and we’ll get a gritty sorbet… At least I don’t have to go with the manual option of freeze, blend, freeze, blend, freeze, blend ….. I think I’ll try and get the proper drive for the ice cream maker - looks like Partmaster have the drive and paddle available.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Aconcagua.

Sunday ending up being quite a pleasant day, so we managed to get a couple of hours in on the allotment - the first time we’ve got more than a few mins up there for a while. All the rain over the past week has encourage healthy growth of the weeds on the plot… but then everyone seems to be suffering from that quite a bit!

Charlotte potato harvest

Harvested the Charlotte second early spuds - the tops had all died down, and given the weather we thought it would be a good idea to avoid blight! We got a pretty good crop from the eight or so seed potatoes that went in. Some of them towards the one end seem to have been attacked by some type of tiny worm, but mostly a healthy crop! At least a couple of kilos anyway. Hopefully the Pink Fir Apple and King Edwards will be doing just as well for later in the year!

A number of the courgette plants had also produced some rather large fruit again, so I guess some of those will be going to people at work!

Close-up of cut broccoli heads

The second batch of broccoli seems to be coming along nicely - looks like we might actually be around to harvest this crop! Took a couple of heads which were well formed, though there’s a number which will be ready in the next week or so!

The sweetcorn seems to be coming along nicely, its a good couple of feet tall now (seems bigger than most people’s on the allotment site!), and it looks like it might be starting to produce corn, maybe if we’re lucky and get some sun!

All the peas seems to have been eaten by the pigeons whilst trying to grow the first couple of cm above the soil and its a bit late in the year to be sowing now, better protection needed next time I think!

The sturon onions seem to be coming along nicely, though the red baron seem less well. I also harvested most of the shallots, there’s just one variety left in now which probably need a couple more weeks. I planted some of the gizelle shallots at home, but had pretty bad crop failure with those - they seems to have rotted in the last few weeks, and clearly some of the ones at the allotment were going that way as well, so removal was needed. I did get a pretty good crop of shallots, though none are particularly big.

In the spaces where the spuds and shallots came out from, I’ve already done some replanting - on Saturday we had to go to Telford to DHL International to collect a parcel, so we came back via Bridgnorth. One of the stalls on the market there was selling plug-plants of cut-and-come-again lettuce and wild rocket for a couple of quid each, so we thought it worth a punt along with a butternut squash plant… no doubt the slugs will have a go at them, but hopefully there’ll be some left for us!

And finally, I ordered some stuff from Suttons this week - 2nd main crop potatoes, which should be ready September - December as well as some over-winter varieties of onion which should be ready July next year. Last of all, I upgraded WordPress to 2.6 this morning, and it seems to have some changes to image handling, mostly for the better I think, though I’ll have to see how the post formats in the end!

On Saturday we travelled to Liverpool to see the arrival of the Clipper Round the World Race. My uncle was one of the crew members on the Hull & Humber yacht, so we thought go and see him arrive back after 10 months sailing around the world.

In the overall race, the Hull & Humber came second, beaten by just a few points by New York. In third place was Glasgow.

The race consists of 10 yachts, each one sponsored by a City. The crew is mostly members of the public (no previous experience required!) who can be either “Round the Worlders” or “Leggers” - the overall race is split into 7 legs, with each leg consisting of a number of races between ports. Points are calculated based on positions in each race, with deductions for any equipment that is replaced.

Technically the overall race finished at midnight on Saturday morning with a “first past the post” elastic race just a few miles outside of Liverpool. Basically towards the end of the final race there were a number of markers which could be added or removed as needed to ensure the boats mostly arrived on time…

We arrived around 10am into Liverpool by train, having found there’s a Merseyrail (Underground) link from Lime Street to James Street, just a few minutes walk from the Albert Dock. Given that the yachts were still a few miles outside of Liverpool, there was a final race (not counted towards the overall race) called the Mersey Dash -  a number of markers bringing the yachts to the finish line at the Albert Dock. Basically the race was to get the boats to the Canning Half Tide dock in time for the tidal level to allow them to safely enter.

After watching the arrival of the yachts, we moved round to the Canning Half Tide dock, where they paraded in in overall race order, led by the host boat Liverpool08.

During the Dash and movement to the Half Tide dock, we were “entertained” by the sports reporter from BBC Radio Merseyside, and whilst he did have interviews with members of the crew, some of music was rather cheesy! (And I still don’t get the relevance of some of the tracks chosen for the arrival of each yacht, which were presumably meant to be representational in some way!)… So there was much waving and cheering from the crowd as each yacht arrived.

Eventually, the 10 yachts made it into the dock do that the gate could be closed and the water level matched to that of the Albert Dock, given that it was going to take several hours, we decided to depart for lunch… as did everyone else I think! The crew’s however would have to wait until they finally landed in the Albert Dock (though they clearly had copious deliveries of beer…).

After lunch we made our way round the the Albert Dock in preparation for the final journey of the yachts and met up again with a number of other family members. After a long time, the yachts eventually started to move into the Albert Dock, this time in reverse order. This process seemed to take an excessive amount of time, however eventually the Hull & Humber arrived into the dock…

Unfortunately, our vantage point wasn’t next to the landing point for the Hull & Humber, so we had to shuffle through the crowds to try and get a better view of the crew and see the presentation of the 2nd Place flag, champagne and all.

I don’t think this is something which will have affected us - we only applied 1 small bag of manure to our plot (though some sites indicate the effects can last up to 3 years, so we don’t really know). I heard some mention of this a few days ago, but it was mentioned on the TV this morning, so I thought I’d do some further investigation…

There are reports (see here, here, here, here and here in the comments) of crop problems at a number of allotment sites and it looks like the cause is from manure which is contaminated with a herbicide. The contamination seems to have been caused by having been sprayed on grass which is then either used as food or bedding for cattle or horses. As some farmers buy in feed for their animals, they may be unaware of the spraying themselves so it might actually be quite difficult to determine how safe the manure is for use on food crops.

The RHS have posted some advice on the causes, symptoms and what to do, though basically it looks like you shouldn’t eat affected crops.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Malene Thyssen.