July 2008

1 This is an active month for card making with a wedding anniversary and 6 birthdays, 5 of them male.  I don't know why, but I find "female" cards much easier to design.
Sadly, I've finally given up on my fig and olive plants in the conservatory - they were both consigned to the compost heap.
Outside, I prepared a tub for a courgette seedling, sowed a pot of summer savory, a pot of parcel  and a trough of salad leaves, the latter two placed in the potting shed.  Two more lots of golden berry were potted up and the greenhouse and pot tomatoes fed and watered .
Harvest:  my first ever red currants and white currants, one fig.
2 I followed my gym & swim session with Pegularity shopping, then chicks early to bed for a visit to mummy-in-law.  She's baked me two fruit cakes for Pegularity which is a great help.
A fair while since I've given you a knitting update.  I'm just finishing the front of my jumper.
3 Potted up and planted out two courgettes and tended my tomatoes.
Harvest:  7oz strawberries, first 3.5oz green beans
4 More good news from the gym.  June stats show that I'm 4th in the most weight lifted category at 79403Kg and 5th for most calories burned at 4691.  Now I've got a reputation to maintain...
Sowed a pot of cumin and pot of cutting celery and in the tunnel mizuna, salad leaves, cumin & cutting celery (where yet more carrots failed to germinate).  
BIG Ooops as our laminator went pop when only four notices were made for the Pegularity.  I had to make emergency calls and finally borrowed the machine from where I used to work.  Phew!  It took us until 7:30 to put them all out in the field, woods, orchard and menage.
Harvest:  3 cucumbers, 1 courgette
5 Peg cooking & last minute shopping & other preparation consumed this day.
6 Our first Pegularity of the year and sadly, the first one at which we have had rain.  Luckily, everyone was prepared and still joined in all of the fun.  See results and photos here. We raised £110 for the Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Collapsed on the settee when we were finished to watch the British grand prix followed by the men's Wimbledon tennis final:  Federer v Nadal.  Good news as Hamilton won the grand prix and wow, what a tennis display.  I was too tired to watch it all, so had to leave some for tomorrow.
Harvest: 2 cucumbers
7 Bit of a rest today, apart from the gym, of course.  I had to delay my gym trip to watch the end of the tennis final in case I overheard the result.  A truly classic final, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
8 For my sins and in a moment of sheer madness (what, another one?), I volunteered to design the last round of this year's table-top rally championship.  Got to get it ready by 22:00 on 30 July so I started wading through maps (on the computer, that is) to try to select suitable areas for routes.  I also discovered that today is an eBay 5p listing day so another 16 items went up for sale.  Of course, I had to buy something too - a new laminator!
9 Relentless rain, it's rained every day since Sunday, so I had a little foray into the greehouse to check on tomato progress, but no outdoor gardening.  Instead I continued with my table-top design.
Harvest:  12oz courgette
10 At last, the rain has stopped so I ventured out for weeding, in and around the tunnel and in the veg garden.  How boring.
Harvest: strawberries, 1 cucumber, first purple sprouting broccoli
11 I have a feeling this table-top rally is going to take me a long time to design...
12 I've potted up the remaining 12 golden berry plants, 3 pots of 4 each.  One smaller pot has the four most feeble plants in it and I've put this temporarily in the greenhouse to see how it comes along.  No room for the others in the greenhouse or the potting shed so I've had to put them outside the stables alongside my outdoor hanging tomato baskets after making wire pot surrounds for both of them to act as both chicken/rabbit deterrents and plant supports.
Bonus:  one of our Pegularity teams sent an extra £30 charity donation to us, raising our total for last Sunday to £140.
Harvest:  2 courgettes, broad beans, basil, mint
13 Been creating 7 new strawberry plants for next year as my original troughs are exhausted.  I'm taking runners from the new plants and pinning them down into compost in three inch pots.  I can then detach them from the mother plant when they're established.  Sounds like a good plan anyway.  Meanwhile, potato success as we dug up two plants in the veg garden and got a decent yield of 6lb potatoes.  Strawberries, however, are sadly coming to an end.
Harvest: 6 lb potatoes. 45oz cabbage, 3 cucumbers, 1st green pepper, 3oz dwarf beans, 2.5oz strawberries
14 I'm unhappy as I have had to return to the dentist with a very painful tooth.  It's the eye tooth supporting the front of my bridge, so I'm a bit concerned.  Back next week (luckily he had a cancellation) to resolve it, hopefully.  I have a very good dentist but I still dread going there.
Finished my jumper this evening and I'm pretty pleased with it.  Then I finally finished stitching up a jumper that I knit weeks ago for my (sort of, through marriage) great nephew - it's his 3rd birthday next month.  Now I have to make something really quickly for his little brother whose birthday is the end of this month!
Mmmm - check out this month's recipe.
15 I'm staying indoors today, except for essential watering of tomato baskets, greenhouse and potting shed.  It's very humid and 26C in the shade, far too hot for me to put in any effort out there.  So indoors I caught up on some household paperwork, finished the Cloverleaf Bassingbourn roadbook and did more on the TT route cards.
Harvest:  probably the last 4 strawberries, 2 more cucumbers
16 I've started to crochet a little jacket for my second great nephew.
Harvest:  10oz courgette, radishes, basil.
17 A new swimming record of 72 lengths, that's 1440 metres, just over 0.89 miles, before a trip to mum-in-law's for a delicious lunch and collection of fruit cakes for Sunday.
18 Time to start preparation for our second Pegularity day, in the form of all the printing.  My second lot of eBay auctions ended tonight and I sold 50% (8 out of 16) items.  Not too bad, I suppose.
Harvest:  3 courgettes
19 Cook, cook, cook!  I've been watching and enjoying Celebrity Masterchef, but I couldn't cook to minute timing like they do, nor produce some of their wonderful results.  However, hopefully I won't produce any disasters either...  I'm making a Sundried Tomato, Caper & Basil Loaf, Potato Rosti Bake, a big pasta salad and my own sandwich fillings for tomorrow.
Harvest:  basil, mint
20 Pegularity day 2 - more fun, this time in the sun.  And a magnificent £262 raised for charity.  To see photos and results and find out who has been crowned the 2008 World Champion, much to Crow's embarrassment, click here.
Harvest:  4 more cucumbers
21 My potted golden berry in the greenhouse is so big I've had to risk it outdoors.
22 Oops.  Now a potted bush tomato plant in the potting shed has become so big, it is unstable on the bench - so it's outside with that too.
Harvest: 1  11oz courgette
23 This week is turning out to be very hot and I don't really like it.  17C overnight is especially unpleasant.  At least the plants I've had to move outdoors aren't suffering any temperature trauma.
24 Had to give in and water with the hose but I'm hoping the forecast of some rain at the weekend will be correct.
Harvest: 2 courgettes (32oz) and 2 cucumbers (16oz)
25 Full steam ahead to get the Table Top route cards finished.  This is really hard work for me.
Hottest day of the week so far, at least 26C in the shade so Tesco was an air-conditioned joy this evening...
I never dreamt I'd get so many cucumbers from one plant.  I think I'll have to pickle some.
Harvest: 1 cucumber
26 More bargains on eBay.  I've just managed to get a brand new Cooking Mama game for my god-daughter's up & coming birthday for less than half the retail price and £6 less than the cheapest I could find elsewhere at Amazon.
Harvest: 2 courgettes (29oz)
27 I'm panicking a bit about the Table Top - will I finish in time, without having to call on emergency help from Crow?  I hope so!
Harvest: my first squash (7oz), broad beans
28 We're struggling to get enough entries for the Cloverleaf Rallies.  Could be that high fuel prices and the credit crunch is going to be our undoing.  I'm sending out a reminder email today.
Very hot 28C today with a tiny bit of relief in a very late thunderstorm.  Not enough rain to really water the garden though.
Harvest: 8oz cucumber
29 Phew!  After four intensive days of final preparation, the Table Top rally is all ready to go at 22:00 tomorrow.  At last I had an hour in the garden to tend my greenhouse tomatoes and top up the compost in my tomato hanging baskets.
Harvest: 40oz courgette, broad beans
30 Out to lunch with mummy-in-law after gym.  Started my next knitting project - a 4ply long-line cotton top.  Quite fine knitting and half patterned, so that will keep me busy for a while.
Harvest: 16oz courgette, 5oz haricot beans
31 Some rain at last has saved me from the dreaded hose and made weeding of the vegetable areas a little easier today.  It's also time to start dealing in earnest with all the courgettes and cucumbers or soon I won't be able to close the fridge.  Let's fill jars and the freezer...
Cooking: 2.75 litres of curry zucchini soup, 6 generous helpings of courgette rice, courgette griddle cake (see recipes)
Preserving:  3 jars of pickled cucumbers
Harvest: 2 squash (30oz)