Bank Holiday weekend

It's been a lovely weekend. The late summer bank holiday is a traditional time for us to spend time at home, rather than join the fraught, exhausted and boiling hot masses in motorway queues so we enjoyed a peaceful weekend here in sunny Bristol.

One of the constant jobs of summer is strimming the paths and the areas of grass around the old apple tree and by the pond and I'm afraid I leave that to J. It's a man thing. He doesn't do weeding because it's too girly (fiddly) so I guess it evens out. Anyway, he manfully strimmed the whole allotment on Sunday, while I did very little but yesterday I was back to lugging cans of water up and down from the trough. It's finally been dry enough to need a bit of water and I was watering in liquid feed around the roots of all the vegetables. They need a bit of perking up at this stage of the growing season. I found an old bottle of Maxicrop at the back of the shed, heaven knows when I bought it, it must be years old - and I diluted it by loads because it had turned into a thick treacly sludge. It seemed ok though so I'm hoping it will pep up the production now everything has started to slow down a bit. It's got to be good stuff - it smells so awful. It's made of seaweed and has a bouquet like seagull sh*t. I'm following the theory that medicine only does you any good if it tastes nasty!

The slowing down means we get time to do other things too. I've been swimming in the lake a few times and we had a bbq on Saturday. Amongst other things we did skewered vegetables and mounds of beans along with the grilled meat. Here's a recipe for using some of those beans:

A pile of french beans
Hard boiled eggs
Chopped garlic (loads)
A little bit of butter
Sea salt
Fresh ground coloured pepper (I use the one with red, green, white, black and pimento all in one grinder, it's called Bristol pepper)
Parsley

Cook the beans al dente, peel the eggs and quarter, melt the butter in a little dish in the microwave and add the garlic. sizzle for a minute and then combine everything into a serving dish. Add the seasoning and parsley.

It takes only minutes and it's good enough to have for a main meal with crusty bread but on Saturday of course it was just an extra side dish.

Happy gardening (and barbecueing)