I’m so sorry for letting the blog slide for so long. That won’t happen again. At last I am beginning to feel that I have found my identity on living on my own. Its not to say its without anxiety and worry, but I’m generally plodding on in a good way. I’ve had the most brilliant winter, it has been absolutely wonderful comprising of many trips out with various members of our newly formed gang of people I went to school with that were in my year. There has been shopping, singing, quite a bit of singing actually – who knew we all liked a sing song, from Christmas carols to rocking it to Meat Loaf hits at the theatre and quite a bit of drinking. The laughs come thick and fast and I think its something we have all loved. A lovely pair of them even took me in for Christmas Day, it was such a wonderful day, lots of laughs, games and the food never stopped… Brilliant. I really appreciated their generosity of spirit.

Now we are into the end of February so of course my thoughts have turned to the allotment. The greenhouse has been washed inside and out and this year I have removed all of the compost to replace it. It was quite a job but I got there in the end. Last year I noticed that a couple of my blueberries had died so this year I bought in three new ones, an early, mid season and late version, making it to five blueberries, which should keep me going quite well. They’ve all been planted in ericaceous compost and been fed blueberry feed, so I’m quite hopeful. I also bought a thornless gooseberry which will have dark purple fruit. I’m all for buying thornless varieties of fruit, it makes life so much easier. There was a lovely little gooseberry bush here but I’d never seen thorns like it, you couldn’t get near the fruit, that had to go.

I’ve been sorting through my seeds, there’s nothing like a good shuffle through your seed packets on a February evening to get the sap rising after the hibernation of winter.

With that in mind, I trotted to the plot in-between the showers yesterday and planted a few seeds, whilst listening to the birds and heavy rain drops.

Broad beans, early onward peas, sweet peas, leeks and chilli’s. I’ll plant a few more peas and beans in a couple of weeks for succession. Brassicas will be started then and after that it will be time for the runner beans, courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins and we will be off to a flying start. I’m going to start the parsnips, beetroots and lettuces at home over the next night or two in paper cases. Of course I will run out of room at the allotment but I think we can take that as a given, knowing how I love to pack everything in.

I’m currently weeding out the strawberry beds, they are full of twitch which has roots that go all the way down to Hades and is a devil to control. But try to control it I must, so it’s a long job. There are lots of big jobs still to do, I’m working three hours a day with one notable day that I went back after lunch and actually achieved a five hour day on the plot. I needed a long hot soak in the tub after that.

At the moment I’m trying a new to me plant based meal subscription kit by Planthood. Its main joy is that it is restaurant quality chef prepared, so much of the hard work has been done for you. We are in the middle of what is termed the hungry gap where there is very little left on the allotment and we will have a couple of months before we get anything to eat. Although I do have well stocked freezers to keep me going I thought this was the time to try some new ideas. I’ll let you know in more detail what I think of it when I’ve tried more of the meals. Obviously once the allotment is back in full swing it will become redundant, but this is the first meal.

This was high protein chilli garlic tempeh noodles with crunchy rainbow vegetables and toasted sesame seeds. I felt it was under seasoned and I’m not a heavy handed user of salt, so added some soy. I’d not eaten tempeh before, it is denser than tofu and I would say a nuttier flavour, although it has a back flavour on the palate that I’m not too keen on. I think I prefer tofu. In fact I’d go so far as to say that I won’t be ordering a tempeh meal again. But the prepared sauce was good. It is meant to feed two but there was enough for three meals so that was a win in a way, but I found that too much for just one, maybe I should have frozen a meal. The next two meals look interesting, rich & fragrant laksa with tofu, pak choi, vermicelli noodles, crispy shallots, chilli, coriander and lime and then sri lankan daal with crispy courgette & corn fritters, date tamarind chutney and organic soy yoghurt. The truth of the pudding as they say is in the eating, time will tell. Planthood have 40% discounts to try them with if you look around the net. I was hoping for a code to put on facebook etc, but the discount code only seems to work if you have peoples email addresses, which I don’t tend to collect email addresses like I used to.