Spuds in, first shoots, and a mystery herb

Potatoes planted! Hooray! 30 Kestrel, which always perform fabulously for me, and 30 Maris Piper, which I haven't tried before. I won't bore you with a picture of the bare earth under which they lie...

Instead, look at this!

I was very jealous when I read yesterday that Soilman's asparagus was shooting up already, so I had an extra careful look today and found this little spear just showing its tip.

So spring springs on. The tadpoles have hatched, the fruit trees look fantastic covered in buds, the herbs are coming back to life, and yes, the weeds are starting to grow. And so are the pests...

Something has mown down or pulled up ALL the broad beans, which is a major bummer. Slugs or birds? We strung a loose cage of strings around the plants which I thought would keep the birds off, and considering the number of empty snail shells lying around everywhere, I thought the rodent problem (they keep making nests in our compost heap) was doing a pretty good job of combatting the slug problem. I always put organic slug pellets down too! No fair... I will plant another trayful just as soon as I've written this.

I have a mystery herb growing in my herb patch! I didn't plant it - at least I'm pretty sure I didn't - and I just don't recognise it. It's really aromatic; quite similar to lemon balm but without the lemon, if that makes any kind of sense... Quite like feverfew, but the leaves are fleshier. Anyone got any ideas?

Horseradish

Here is some of our horseradish haul from last week. And our cat, Samson, who seemed fascinated by the stuff:
I'm no big horseradish fan, but I like a touch on my roast beef now and then, so I whipped up a fresh horseradish cream sauce the other day for a big roast dinner.

First I peeled and grated the horseradish root. Open the window if you ever do this - WOW it's pungent stuff! I was surprised how dry the horseradish seemed - no juice at all. It looked more like dessicated coconut then a fresh vegetable.

Then I mixed about 2 tablespoons grated horseradish with half a teaspoon each of salt, sugar and mustard, a big pinch of black pepper, a generous dash of lemon juice (most recipes use white wine vinegar but I only had a strong cheap malt vinegar, which I wasn't too sure about) and 3 or 4 tablespoons double cream. Obviously, all the quantities could be adjusted to taste.

It was delicious! My only complaint might be the texture; the horseradish gave plenty of flavour to the cream, but I didn't think much of the tough strandy bits which remained. I saw one recipe which recommended soaking the horseradish in hot water first - I wonder if this improves it - or perhaps I'll have to find a way of mincing it smaller next time...

Next task is to find a way to preserve the rest of it! Seems to me that with such a low water content, it might freeze well. Anyone have any experience of this? Otherwise it's going to end up in vinegar in jars in the fridge, I think, but I'm not sure how long it'll last there.

The roast dinner also gave us a chance to eat some more of last year's parsnips, which I keep forgetting about and really mustn't - they taste soooo good!

Updated

Just been doing a bit of blog maintenance; updating broken links and whatnot.

I have posted my allotment plan for this year, and my crop rotation record, which you can see if you click the pics below, or in my notes in the link on the sidebar.

I also hoped to slim down the picture diary kinda thing on my sidebar, since most of what's there is really old now. But when I started editing things (adding the year to the ones I want to keep) the pictures shrunk, and I can't get them back to their proper size! Any blogger-users got any ideas?

A Great Day!

Spent half of today at the allotment, and a couple of friends came along to help! Despite a few showers, we got loads done and had a lot of fun. Thanks Kathy and Brian!

Thanks to Kathy and Eddie, the two potato beds are now dug, manured, and ready for planting next weekend.

The onions and shallots are planted, along with two rows of parsnips (White Gem) and one row of carrots (Flyaway, since I can't control the damned carrot-flies). I realised too late I didn't have enough carrot seeds for the second row - I will have to take some more down next time.

And Brian did a great job of weeding the herb garden and a few other difficult spots.

The three remaining beds down the left-hand side are covered in dead weeds which we dug up and left where they lay last year. I didn't want to compost the stuff as we've had both blight and white rot (I think) down there (and let's face it, the place isn't tidy enough to safely burn them) so I'm planning on leaving it all in situe to rot away, planting the pumpkins and squashes here in pockets of compost, and letting them scramble all over it.

That leaves just two beds to clear; one will hold salad greens and the other courgettes and a few beans.

I'm very excited to see the lovage coming up, and looking forward to my favourite chicken stew with lovage and mint! It didn't do very well last year so I must take extra care of it this year. The giant poppies next door are crowding it rather - I will have to give it some more room...

Camera back in action - where do I start?

So. Here's what we've been up to the past few weeks.

We finally dug the bottom end of the plot - the only bit we'd never tackled so far! It was full of old tree roots, and not very nice soil, and we've had it covered in plastic for two years now while we tried to forget about it... Now it's dug over, manured with our lovely compost, and home to 30 new raspberry canes. I'm a bit worried I planted them too close together (as per usual), but time will tell. Picking the fruits could be a spiky experience!

We have planted a new strawberry bed: 9 each of three varieties for a longer harvest period. Today I popped the garlic in between the plants - it's supposed to keep some of the nasties away. I just hope it's not too late to get a decent garlic crop too...

We planted three rows of broad beans back in February, which today are just peeking their noses up into the (patchy) sun:

And we've weeded the pond. Turns out water mint is just as invasive as its landlubbing cousins; it was really difficult to extract the plant pot, and when I finally got it out there were still new mint sprigs looking at me from all corners of the pond. I spent ages trying to pick them all out without disturbing the FROGSPAWN(!) - at least they came out fairly easily.

We've dug the horseradish too, in that lower left corner. I don't know what possessed me to plant horseradish so close to the pond. I watched the whole pond shake as Eddie pulled up one of the long roots! Planning on roast beef and Yorkshire puddings this week so I can put some of what we dug up to good use! And in the top right corner is the asparagus bed, newly weeded and manured. We usually see the first asparagus shoots in the first week of April, but I get the feeling it might be a bit later this year...

And there are our baby tadpoles, taddling away. The water is pretty murky at the moment - it'll be great when the pond life gets going again and things start to clear up.

It's also good to see our miniature apple trees budding all over! We got one delicious apple last year - hopefully more this year! Alas, some mysterious fate has befallen the pear tree, which has been reduced to a dry little stump, and I don't think it's coming back :(