A long, overdue catch up post on our allotment this year. I think this is our fifth summer with it?! And we love it more than ever. To have our own piece of land to nurture and cultivate, to switch off from everything, to sow and to water and to harvest. My favourite part is the harvesting but we just love spending time there. It feels different to our garden and it's an evening ritual to walk there most days. Everybody asks how we find the time, it's very much Ben's project so I can't really take much credit other than choosing what to grow and picking the produce! But it doesn't take too much once it gets going. It's his version of going to the gym, I go running, he goes to the allotment. This year with the hot weather it's gone CRAZY. Most things are flourishing, the paths are overflowing. Luckily it's next to a river so the water table has remained high enough that we don't need to stress about watering everything all the time. If you're new to allotmenting or this blog, you can find all of my past posts on it here, here, here and here. This is more of a photo catch up from the season so far for us to look back upon, and that you might want to have a look at if you're into that kind of thing...

Is there anything that screams October and Halloween more than pumpkins do? And is there anything more instagrammable for those autumnal few weeks of the year more than the mini white variety? If you know anything at all about me it's probably that I'm pretty mad on this time of year {one of the reasons we're flying to New York tomorrow is for their fall celebrations and pumpkin farms} and in particular growing pumpkins ourself at our allotment. I've been posting photos of our harvest recently and been getting so many messages asking if I'll write a blog post about how to grow them. So here are my tips, talking every stage of the growing process along with all of our favourite types, which incidentally have super cute names, from Baby Boo to Jack be Little to Crown Prince.

I'm long overdue an allotment post and er, this is a pretty long one.. {remember this one from last summer and the original post here}. It's something that I don't often post about on Instagram or the blog but it really does play such a big part in our day to day life. It's become a ritual to walk there before or after dinner and at the moment it's overflowing with fresh pickings. This is our third year, and summer, with it and considering that we've been rather busy with the house renovations this year {and probably put the least amount of effort in so far} it's amazing just how well everything has done. It's the fullest it's ever been, I think we could do with an extension already! Crazy considering we were so overwhelmed with the size of it when we began. 

Last January, we got a call from our local allotment to say that a plot had come up for rent if we were still interested. Ben had put our names down at the end of 2013 as his Mum has an allotment there and it was just a two minute walk away from our house. I wasn't too bothered either way, sure it would be lovely to grow some fresh produce as we love eating healthy, I love to cook and we both love being outside but most allotments have a waiting list of up to five years and we had loads going on last year with a wedding to finish planning and I didn't know if we'd have enough time. So I kind of thought we would never have a chance of getting one and didn't give it much thought. But Ben was super excited when a large plot was available and he promised he'd do most of the work, so we took it for the grand total of £15 rent a year! Bargain. 23A was now ours. It was a big plot but mostly covered in grass and generally looked unloved when we took it over, the previous owner was old and had been ill for a while. It had an old shed that was falling down and had so much vine weed and cooch grass to dig up. But within a couple of months we had transformed it and had more produce than we knew what to do with by the end of the summer! Ben is well and truly hooked, it's not always my first choice on where to spend a weekend, and without gloves your manicure is ruined but I've really really loved our first year of allotmenting.