Birthday Work and Apples!

Today turned out to be Tracey's birthday which was good on 2 counts - happy education worker and... cake! Even more exciting for us was the fact that she managed to pop some of the popcorn we grew this year, and it tastes great - much better than shop bought!

Our own popcorn!

As well as the eating, there was quite a bit of gardening. We started to tidy up all of the beds to prepare for the ending of the growing season and to spruce the place up a bit for our Pumpkin Celebration. This also meant that we realised some of the radish rats were still nice - these are the pods on radishes that have gone to seed. For each radish, you get about 40 - 50 pods, so it's worth letting them seed and getting a bigger crop. Some of us prefer them to the radish.

Hassan tries a radish pod - Joyce isn't so sure

Andrea is quickly proving to be an indispensable member of the team - and got a good morning's work under her belt before we had a lunch of fried green tomatoes with mayonnaise and chopped onion, followed by "the cake". 

Andrea gets stuck in to clear up

Then we had a bit of excitement as we headed off to Lenton Library to harvest their apple tree. We'll be using these to create our apple juice at the Pumpkin Celebration on Saturday 25th, and we're delighted that the Library staff are willing to part with these lovely apples.

Lenton Library's lovely apple tree

We got a nice big crop off the tree, although there are still more if you have a really long handled picker.

Hassan with some of the harvest

Even the telescopic pickers we took weren't tall enough for the tree! Still the team did a great job, and we picked up a bag of windfalls for the neighbour's horse.

Andrea and Amir using the long-handled
apple pickers

Sibel, one of our previous volunteers joined us for the day, and found an apple so perfect that looked like it had been sculpted rather than grown. Hopefully they will all taste as good as the ones we tried on site!

Sibel found the perfect apple