Lovely weather, great company and another use for pumpkins!

 We managed to sneak our Windmill session into a patch of good weather today - well deserved after yesterday's rain (and well done to Guy and Chris for all their hard work in the polytunnel during the deluge!)

Annette tackles the weeds.

Our main aim was to get the Summer raspberries other related soft fruit tidied up ready for the Winter today. The fruiting stems from this year needed to be cut down to the ground, and more importantly because the leaves are still on the plants with the warm weather, we needed to get the new growth tied up to the supports before the stems get damaged by Autumn storms. We quickly discovered that the supports weren't actually doing much supporting, so that we had to add some bracing struts. It also gave some of us the chance to get our biceps working, tamping bricks down around the posts to firm them in! A good weed round revealed the suckers that are sneaking into the path. Once the leaves do finally come off, we'll remove those and use them to thicken up other areas of planting.

Hassan gets the black raspberry under control

Joyce and Mark make a brace for the dodgy raspberry supports

Lunch meant us learning a new technique from Tracey, who turned up with a big box of fabulously orange pumpkin flesh from the Hubbard squash. We'll put the full instructions in another post, but you'll get an idea of what we did from the photos, as we used the pumpkin pulp to make gnocchi. If you follow us on Facebook, you may remember that this was the pumpkin that was stolen and discovered stashed outside the fence together with some other bits of our produce!

Tracey shows us how to make pumpkin gnocchi

The gnocchi cooking

Tracey also introduced us to something we'd not tried before - pumpkin juice! It's not just something in Harry Potter, and we all agreed it was pretty good, though the lemon juice, cinnamon and brown sugar certainly helped the flavour...

Taste testing!

Several friends of Windmill joined us for lunch, so the recipe got a good testing. A fitting end for the Hubbard, we all agreed!