smoothie charity

I guess if you have an allotment or garden you will normally make your own smoothies (we have this year with our raspberries, strawberries and the rhubarb made good ones too). However innocent smoothies are tasty too (when the fruit runs out) and now they have just got cute and charitable as well.

To raise money for age concern they are asking for people to knit little hats for their smoothie bottles, these will then be sold in Sainsbury's during November and 50p from each bottle will go to age concern. They got 230,000 hats last year (so £115,000) and this year are aiming to raise £200,000 by getting 400,000 hats on bottles. My mum gave me a leaflet on it and I have knitted my first one this afternoon:


modelled here by a Thirsty Planet water bottle (you don't have to buy any innocent products to join in).

If you want to join in they you can find the patterns and details here. Any little knitted hat of a similar size is acceptable, so if you have rather more advanced knitting skills you can go to town rather than following their 3 patterns. Check out their blog section for photos of some amazing ones in shapes of animals etc.

Happy knitting!

Back after another break

I know, it is all holidays with us.

This time our friend L came into water and harvest for us, she more usually resides in London and has her name down on a very long list there, so this was an opportunity to pretend she had an allotment of her own.

Most stuff seemed good when we got back, apart from the courgette and the beans. All the courgette's leaves had gone brown and flopped over (the squash was similar) and the leaves of the bean plants (way over the other side of the allotment) were floppy and brown too. I've taken all the leaves off the courgette as the rest of the plant still seems healthy, but I'm not sure what to do about the beans, they are only small plants and if I remove the brown leaves there won't be much left.

It has been wet so I don't know if it is some kind of rot. Any ideas as to what is going on, and how to deal with it, welcomed.