How our mediaeval ancestors survived to breed us is a miracle. What did they live on between February and June? Without freezers? If you were poor with just a strip of land? OK, I know some of the answers, but it’s only when you make a real attempt at veg self-sufficiency that the challenge of feeding a family on a small plot becomes apparent. Yes, we’ve been picking leaves and lifting the odd potato plant, but it’s only in this past fortnight that serious quantities of food have been forthcoming. The glut is here – all at once as usual and despite some attempts at succession sowing. We should be freezing/bottling/pickling etc. but it’s more straightforward to give it away to family, staff and travelling monks, if you can find one.

The most enticing form of storage right now seems to be body fat. Current crops in abundance are peas, broad beans, new potatoes (big ones now), garlic, beetroot, spinach and all types of salad leaves. Dave’s especially keen on ‘Rebekah’s Hot Mix’, but I think that’s straight word association. We don’t eat that many potatoes as a rule, but Charlottes, an hour out of the ground, with warm lemony olive oil and chives are hopelessly moorish. How can they possibly be bad for you? Well they aren’t – not with my calorific needs. Dave has a new pedometer and in common with most people who must drive to the office and sit down for much of the day, he finds it hard to get to the recommended 10,000 steps. I’ve yet to borrow it, but I believe I would blow the target away by lunchtime. I almost never sit down, spend my days inefficiently perambulating between overlapping tasks and am permanently starving as a result. Sweet new spuds are just the thing.

Some of the peas make it to dinner time – more get eaten fresh from the pod in passing. Same goes for the strawberries, except that the blackbirds are getting more than their fair share. The string of old CDs twinkling above them has largely failed to work as a bird scarer, despite most of them being old Inland Revenue PAYE update disks. Enough to scare anyone, you would think! Still, a few strawberries are a fair reward for eating all our slugs, I think.

Elsewhere the garden smells divine with honeysuckle dripping from trees and pergolas and the spicy clove scent of pinks slipping tantalisingly down the nursery. It all looks good too. We got a nice mention on North West Tonight as ‘a hidden gem with homemade tea and cakes’ by the lovely Diane Oxenbury. (But for real weather forecasting afficionados, Eno Eruator is the one. She looked cracking tonight in a bright blue basque and pink skirt. But what about the shoes, Eno? Show us your shoes!)

I’ve been rubbish at posting pictures lately, but I took a couple tonight. I planted out a random selection of Dieramas last year in the new beds. Delightfully, some have turned out to be white. They look divine against the blue Nepeta and the dark green yew hedge.

And I do like this combination of Lychnis coronaria and Geranium ‘Orion’.

June 25, 2009  
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