My Allotment Contributes to Dinner

Tonight I was very proud to be serving a tasty, nutritious, satisfying meal to Mr R but which cost the total sum of £0.45! How did I do that?

Well, we had sausages, jacket potatoes, yellow courgettes and rainbow chard.

The sausages were turkey sausages and were a gift from a visit yesterday to Kelly Bronze Turkey Farm in Essex.

The courgettes were sauteed in a small amount of butter, salt and pepper and came from our allotment - free!

The Rainbow Chard was pan fried in a bit of olive oil and a tablespoon of sundried tomato paste with a little white wine. The chard was grown on the allotment so free and the tomato paste an item in the goodie bag from last month's Food Blogger Connect conference.

The cost of this meal can be attributed to the bag of four baking potatoes I bought at the supermarket, originally priced £1.89 but reduced to - you guessed it - £0.45!

And for pudding we had Rachel's organic, low fat Mango yoghurt which was also sent to me for review. This is a creamy pot full of yoghurt with pieces of mango and low fat.

Thanks to Kelly Bronze Turkeys and Rachel's Yoghurt for their part in tonight's dinner.

Where there's muck there's ..........

You know the old saying; 'Where there's muck there's brass' or 'There's gold in them there hills'.  Well in my case where there's muck there's me putting it into bags for the allotment!

We have several farms in the vicinity of our house so every trip to the allotment now means stopping by a huge pile of well rotted horse manure and bagging up as much as we can fit into the car.

Mr R won't help me bag up the manure and is ready to laugh should there suddenly be a landslide and I get buried underneath!

Today we bagged up 6 bags ready to transport to the plot and most of these went into the new bed that we dug up today.

In order to cut down the amount of grass we have to dig through we have a couple of pieces of carpet and we rotate them around.  The piece that we moved today yielded a lovely patch which we dug up without too much trouble.  Tomorrow I will be putting in some tomatoes, peppers and chillis.

Apparently my courgettes are looking better than those on plots around mine. I think it is the tyres that keep the roots warmer and moister and being higher than ground level offers some protection from the elements.  Most garages or tyre centres will be only too glad to give you old tyres.

I finally got the water butt up there too so we are really starting to feel right at home!

Today's pickings included some radishes, mint for the Jersey Royal potatoes and the first pieces of Rainbow Chard.

There is still so much to do but no rush and with a bit of warmer weather I will be spending more time up there.