Shrooms!

In preparation for returning to work tomorrow (clearing my head, getting some exercise you know that sort of stuff) MozzyMr and I went for a couple of woodland walks taking photos of the masses and masses of mushrooms popping up.  (Love autumn for that.)

Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Allotment geekery

It has been a busy, busy week at work so I haven't been able to get to the allotment during the week, we'll be heading off to plant more seeds and dig things over today.  To get my allotment fix I've been monitoring the progress of the following:

Borlotti beans, I cannot wait to get these out when it's warm enough I dug compost trenches back in the autumn and have been filling them with kitchen scraps and newspaper etc  because apparently beans love compost rich soil.  I  dug compost trenches last year and it seemed to work quite well, fingers crossed the beans like it!

Tomatoes and chillies, I really can't take credit for these, tomatoes and chillies are MozzyMr's pet project, we're still using the chillies he grew last year which we dried.  Plus the amount of passata we're still getting through is astonishing!  Great on homemade pizza though so no complaints here.

Pfft mushrooms.  These were supposed to be butternut squashes but nothing has happened with them so I'm going to have to buy more seeds because the butternut squashes we had last year were the best.  The compost we bought from Makro was riddled with fungus, green and blue mushrooms have been popping up all over the place.  The umbrella looking ones here only stay looking like that for a day and then they shrivel up to virtually nothing.  Whilst I haven't got the butternut squashes I really wanted it has been nice to see these develop, they're really delicate and beautiful (photographs them and unceremoniously chucks them in the compost bin).

Interesting Things Growing in the Kitchen

We've been growing some closed cup mushrooms this time rather than the posh ones we were growing a while ago. When they're growing they look just like those pixie/fairy house illustrations you see in children's books. Whilst I have a slight issue with the mouldy, fungusey nature of the mushrooms they do look super cute and taste amazing. The kit was a bargain £3.99 at Aldi and we've had absolutely tons of mushrooms from the kit so far and they don't look like they're going to stop any time soon either.

Weird and wonderful things are happening in the kitchen

I bought MozzyMr a gourmet mushroom kit for Christmas and before he'd even activated it (you should in theory soak the bag of coffee waste which contains the mushroom spores overnight) but these came poking through the corner of the box so we thought it was best to open it up and give them some room.  They're weird things, sort of velvety and ear lobe like *shudder*.

On the other side of the kitchen on the windowsill we have the tomatoes coming up, another week and they'll be ready to transplant to the polytunnel...