Where is summer?

Yes, where has summer gone? We woke up to a particularly grey and rainy day yesterday so any thought of a trip to the allotment went out the window. It had to be a day of baking, sewing and drilling instead. It turned out to be a rather productive day. 

I started off baking the muffins I thought I was baking last week. This time I found the right recipe and boy are these ones delicious. They're from a recipe book for children by Johanna Westman that my children were given a few years ago. 

This is how you make them:

1 dl sugar
1 egg
2dl milk
6 tbsp oil
2tsp baking powder
4 dl flour
1/4 tsp salt

Mix the sugar and egg until fluffy. Add the milk and the oil. Mix the baking powder and salt with the flour. Add to the egg mix and stir well. Half fill 12 muffin cases with the mixture and add berries of your choice. I added chopped up rhubarb. Then make a crumble:

2.5 dl flour
1.5 dl sugar
2 tbsp vanilla sugar
125g butter

Mix these ingredients to a crumble and put on top of the berries. Cook at 200 degrees C for about 20 minutes. They are truly delicious! I managed to make 14 and there are none left now. And no, Mrs.G. and I haven't eaten all of them. Only one each.

After that Mr. M. got the drill out and we finally put up curtain poles in the older master M's room. The poor thing has been in his new bedroom for 2 months now and not had any curtains. He's got two windows so I had to make 4 lengths. I bought the fabric a while ago but haven't been able to get on with making the curtains as we hadn't put up the poles. They're now up and the curtains are done. He'll be able to sleep a lot better now!

Curtains drawn.

And the other end of the room. We now need to get him a bigger book case...

I've been thinking about our tiny plants a lot over the last week. As the allotment area is quite high up, the plot is very exposed and the plants suffer a lot from windy weather. Several allotmenteers cover their plants with some form of wind shield and I 've been thinking of ways to do this. Maybe get some willow branches, curve them and make tunnels? A trip to the local garden centre yesterday proved to be very exciting as I found tunnels with fleece covers in the sale! I bought 2 and Mrs. G. and I put them up today. Hopefully the tiny spinach plants and the purple sprouting broccoli will now have a chance to grow.

A long row of tiny spinach plants.

Two rows of purple sprouting broccoli were too wide for the arches so we used our imagination to cover the plants.

We spent an hour weeding and the beds look really lovely now. The early potatoes are blossoming so maybe we'll be able to harvest them in a couple of weeks' time. 

The lettuce is also looking good.

I mentioned in my previous post that something, most likely pigeons, had munched on the broccoli leaves. Well, covering the plants with netting seems to have done the trick. All the plants seem to be recovering and some have even grown quite a few new leaves. 

It was quite cold today so after an hour's work we had to have a coffee break. Not-Bob was around and clearly thought we were not working hard enough...He obviously hasn't understood that part of having an allotment is also the enjoyment of being able to stop and have a lovely cup of coffee with a good friend. 

Mrs. M.