Down at the allotment its all Fartichokes!

Its all excitement down on the allotment as today is our first bonfire of the year! Perfect weather conditions and a mountain of weeds and cleared vegetation dried out over the winter mean today’s the day. I’ve put 12 year old Sam and his mate Freddie in charge, foolish you may think, but my view with children and danger is you need to teach them to manage it rather than avoid it. Fingers crossed. Sam has done a great job in getting things going and keeping it stoked and I have really enjoyed the ‘man talk’. High points have been comparing themselves with their forks to the soldiers of Troy and a row over who made the Bayeux tapestry, monks or women!?

Meanwhile 10 year old Katie cleared out the pond, it all looks quite healthy but sad to say no frogspawn, despite having frogs last year.

I got on with the satisfying task of putting my onions in. The couple of hundred sets I bought cost me just over a pound from our co-operatively run allotment trading shed, which is good value which ever way you look at it. I love the neat rows you can make with them, and was pleased with my soil in the onion bed, not quite Christmas pudding consistency as they often report from the Gardeners’ World garden, but pretty close.

I’m not sure if the hard frost we had this week has effected the parsnip and salad seeds I put in last week. I’ll know soon if they are a no show.

I’ve removed the plastic housing over my rhubarb as forcing it this year seems to have really slowed down its growth, and with rhubarb at a £1 a stem in Waitrose I need quantity. We really loved my rhubarb and ginger jam last year and to celebrate my first stalks, I am making a rhubarb tart for Sunday lunch. See above, its a Waitrose recipe. 



I dug up a quantity of Jerusalem Artichokes and have made some delicious soup.  I used the Abel and Cole recipe, although I par boiled them first, a top tip from the vegetable Queen Jane Grigson, to mitigate their powers of wind inducement, hence the epithet, Fartichokes! Their unique nutty flavor are certainly worth the risk, perfect with a little crème fraiche. 

A quick postscript to apologise for any confusion over the changes I am making to my blog. I am trying to sort things out but some of the gadgets might take time to become dynamic as I am learning on the job, please bare with me.

Taking lessons from the greeks?

I'm off to the opera tonight. My Mother and I are going to see Idomeneo at the Coliseum. For those of you who don't know it the work was Mozart's first major opera and is set around the aftermath of the Trojan Wars. There will be much drama, loss and regret so perfect for my mood.

I spent the afternoon looking at new premises. Our fab HQ at London Bridge is going in for a major overhall and so we are out by February next year.The SEL lovelies have so much to put up with that I have promised that we will make the move work for us, so its got to be good. It seems that neither of the spaces I looked at today have room enough for us so its back to the drawing board. If you know of anywhere do let me know. We need 1000 sq feet with meeting room space, that's close to a tube for our members to have easy access, and nice, really nice. My preferance would be funky over corporate, clean and loved. Maybe you know of a local authority that fancies the UK's leading social enterprise development agency in its location? We are open to offers.

The good news is folk are still planning for growth. Every day we are approached by more and more social enterprises and would be social enterprises ready to hit the ground. I had a thrilling conversation today with Mervyn Wilson Principle of the Cooperative College. Mervyn and his team are enabling Cooperative Trust schools to set up all over. He told me by Friday they will have done 68 since the start of the year and no fewer than 100 by September! That was really good news, and his feedback on the issues coming out from the frontline was invaluable. I have asked Mervyn to join us in the launch next month of our Route Map to social enterprise for local authorities. He was really keen which is good news. Education is I think going to be our most rapid area of transformation, which is why SEL held a conference on it just before the election.

This evenings performance is 3 hours long so I shall need more than a couple of glasses of Merlot to weather the greek goings on. Still I shall be looking for some top tips on how to survive monumental shifts that I'm sure the Greek's would be able to relate to.