Monday 31 March 2014

More allotment bushcraft cooking

It's shop duty time again. But it was really quiet for the first hour. Nobody came by. Not even my partner for the stint. But at 11am she rolled up. Chalk up another victim of the clock change. Yes we are now on British Summer Time. This, in theory, gives us "more time" in the evenings. Actually we don't have "more time" since we cannot create time. It just makes people get up earlier and use their time more wisely. I fail to see why this is necessary.

I've mentioned before about the kind of cooking I do down at the allotment. So I thought today I would try out another trick. Take a can of tuna in oil. Or any fish in oil for that matter. Simply remove the lid...

Place a piece of toilet paper or kitchen towel over it and push down well into the oil. In my case I have a roll of kitchen towel. I took one sheet, folded it into quarters and firmly pressed it down. Place in a safe area and light the corner.

This burned for nearly 10 minutes. The wicking of the oil meant that the whole tin cooked. It was so hot I had to use my garden gloves to pick it up afterwards. Although it looks burnt, it isn't. It tasted really good.

So to date, I've cooked bannock, eggs, now tuna. I guess later in the year I'll have to rig a barbecue of some sort to go for the full effect.

Meanwhile, whilst breakfast was cooking, I had a lot of water to shift. The tank that is located between myself and the plot behind has a job to do. It will be moved into a new area of the allotment site where there is quite a gap between the watering taps and tanks. Later in the year we will be installing additional piping so that this portion of the site is well watered.
But I don't want to lose all the water that is there. So I need to transfer as much water as possible into my water butts to save for later. Cue endless rounds of bucketing to fill up the butts. Finally when it was empty it could be dragged (with the help of an additional allotmenteer) round to the far corner of the site.

My potatoes have been chitting in the greenhouse. I'm a little confused about this chitting business because I cannot really see any changes in the spuds. Though there are little shoots on them, those shoots do not have appeared to change in any way. So either I suck big time at chitting, or they are already ready for the ground. Cue the digging. Two lines of spuds ready to go. You can't really see it, but there are two stakes closest to the camera and two bamboo canes at the far end marking the lines of the spuds.

It was after this digging when I heard a crash. Remember the leaning tower of water I fixed a couple of weeks back? Well the water that I emptied from the tank was placed into it, filling it up. Guess I hadn't fixed it as well as I thought, because the leaning tower leaned a little too far and fell over. Fortunately away from the greenhouse, but all that lovely water I had transferred was now leaking into the ground. Time to re-build the water butt, yet again.

So now is the time to get the carrot bags sorted out. Despite the foxes taking up residence again, I have a need for all that lovely composted weeds and topsoil. So out with the shovel and sieve to fill the bags. Shovelling all this in the hot sun is hard work.

I have also sown some new sets of beans, following on from the frost damaged ones before. Hopefully, these ones will survive. If they don't come up within the new few weeks, I'll drop some peas in the cane wigwam and leave it at that.


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