Navigating the worldly winds

It’s been a difficult start to the year. This week we were told of appalling funding cuts in Birmingham, which will affect me personally but – far, far more importantly – will have a far-reaching and long-lasting effect on children, young people, disabled people, and those who are on the breadline. How many times in my career have I had to write crisis comms statements, had to re-budget due to yet another cut, had to sympathise with charity Chief Execs who feel personally responsible for each and every one of their employees, freelancers and beneficiaries as they receive yet another knock-back from their local authority or national funder? It does not help when politicians give their opinions from London (which is definitely not in recession, from what I can see) thinking that they can ‘fix us’ in some way, without knowing the local context or understanding just how hard people’s lives can be outside of the South East. There’s an economic crisis and it feels like no-one in power notices (or cares) and in the meantime public services and assets continue to be eroded and then eroded again. I am so tired of it all. And angry, really really angry. I know this feeling will pass. But right now, it’s hard.

Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. I have a garden, an allotment and a kitchen, all of which offer respite. As does a car: during half-term I took Harry down to the Cotswolds to explore Cerney House, with its snowdrop woods and walled garden. At this time of year very little is growing, which allows the bones of the place to reveal itself and the beauty of the lichen-covered apple boughs to shine through.

Half term at Cerney House and Gardens
The walled garden remains the dream!

At home, the garden is emerging into life after what has been an odd, warm, wet and stormy winter. The hellebores are at their peak, with their delicate markings at odds with the sturdy toughness of these stalwarts. Pots by the front door bring some colourful cheer – I particularly look forward to the Iris reticula, in particular ‘purple hill’, with its regal purple richness.

Helleborus x hybrida
Iris reticulata ‘purple hill’

On the allotment it’s meant to be the season of tidying and preparation, which was going well – Matt has been busy cleaning the bramble thicket next to the stream. Sadly, as was ever the case, he’s now got distracted by work and so the pile of rotten pallets and dried prickly stems is languishing as I await their movement to the tip. As soon as he’s done I can get started with removing the plastic sheeting from the beds and maybe putting on some green manure to get some nutrition into the soil. There is life emerging already, with the peonies, rhubarb and fennel all showing their fresh new shoots to the sun.

The allotment, mid-clear of the brambles by the bank.

At home, I am looking to the future. It took a few weeks but the antirrhinum seedlings have finally emerged, including ones from last year’s saved seed – these were F1 hybrids so I have no idea how they will behave, and I am interested to watch their progress. I popped some broad beans into pots today too, impatient for the season to start.

This morning, after days of grey and rain, the sky was bright blue. I wandered out to the back garden, Gertrude trotting behind me, to take in the changes. Fresh new growth on the viburnum. The catch of a sweet floral scent from the skimmia. Green shoots from the allium, narcissi, tulips. The magpies are busy building their nests, as they do every year. The neighbour’s dog plays with a squeaky toy. The bergenia has sent up a single pink-flowering stem. The periwinkle has run rampant during the winter, with its pretty purple-blue flowers (but I make a note to cut it back before it takes over). Gertrude sniffs around then hops onto the cold frame for a spot of sun bathing. I notice that there’s a new view of the garden because I took out the ancient hydrangea, which has opened up a large space next to the equally-ancient Rosa ballerina. In the veg trug, there’s chard for cooking plus sweet peas and cornflower seedlings. Harry wants me to come in to look at the new level he’s made on Super Mario Maker. Matt texts to say he’s bought me a chelsea bun. The sun is briefly warm on my face.

I remind myself that after the dark comes the light, and all will be well.

Also this month:

Allotment/garden: Started off broad beans; potted on cornflower seedlings sowed last September; cut back raspberries (despaired of the brambles); pruned hydrangea. Antirrhinum seedlings have germinated including the F1s saved from last summer, interesting to see how they develop. The back garden is full of emerging bulbs and early perennials. Allotment still under cover but some hints of emerging peonies, rhubarb and euphorbia.

Cooking and eating: Forced rhubarb making its way into crumbles and cakes, but only one rhubarb bellini so far because I have a recurrent alcohol intolerance. Moussaka. Amazing home-made pizza at Lizzie and Rich’s house. Fruit compotes using last summer’s frozen berries. Haricot beans, soaked then braised with soffrito and tomato. Am cooking simple food for comfort, to distract from the outside world.

Also: Too tired to read, really, but dipping into a bit of buddhism/yoga for spiritual sustenance. Half-term trips to Science Museum, Lego Store, Cerney House. Travel/documentaries on the telly. Attempting to set boundaries on the Switch.

Dark Rye and Honey Cake

January, named after the Roman god Janus who had two heads: one for looking forward, one for looking back. It’s a good time for reflection and planning and I habitually use this slow, dark month for taking stock and making plans for the year ahead.

I would love to say these plans are profound but usually it’s far more prosaic, less ‘let’s travel around Mexico for a year!’ and more ‘what variety of kale to attempt on the allotment?’. With the weather cold and wet, there are worse things than taking refuge in my notebooks and catalogues and putting in orders for seeds, seedlings and tubers. As usual I have over-extended myself (do I really need 8 more 1.2m tall dahlia plants, given that the slugs usually eat them anyway?) and I will have to recruit parental support to get all these seeds going…memories of last spring’s seedling-apocalypse linger. In just a few weeks I’ll get the snapdragons going, and then the new season will definitely be up and running.

Putting together plans and seeds for 2024

Given the quiet outside, one of the great luxuries of this time of year is finding the time and space for reading, thinking and learning. I bought myself Regula Ysewijn’s Dark Rye and Honey Cake as a late Christmas present; it was released several months ago but I don’t tend to buy so many books these days, particularly cookery books, which tend so often to be style over substance. Curiosity eventually won me over and thank goodness that it did. The beauty of this extraordinary, brilliant work is that it has substance in spades – but delivers that substance with the greatest style.

The exquisite Dark Rye and Honey Cake by Regula Ysewijn

I’ve written and cooked from Regula’s books before; an anglophile (Regula is Belgian), she has published extensively about British baking and food culture and history. This new work takes her back to her roots in the Low Countries, and takes us on a tour of festival baking culture from the last four hundred years or so. There are recipes, of course, but most interesting are the essays explaining how sweet treats work their symbolic meaning into the high points of the year, from St Nicholas to Christmas to Lent, and the legacy that lives on into the everyday lives of today.

Regula’s extraordinary photography takes inspiration from the Dutch masters

As well as a baker and food historian, Regula is a photographer (I’d describe her as an artist really) and the book is dense with considered, thoughtful photography. It would be easy to dismiss this with the brush of ‘style-above-substance’ mentioned earlier but look closer: the images are lit as if by a 16th century Dutch master; the styling references that of the Dutch still life tradition; the ceramics are Belgian or Dutch…every tiny detail is executed with care, precision and intelligence. Paintings from the 1500s sit alongside these new images, centring pies, fruits and breads as part of the visual culture of the age.

16th Century Dutch still life centred around imagery of feasting and food, including this work by Clara Peters (1594-c.1657)

I came to this book knowing very little about the food culture of the Low Countries, save that they like a waffle or two. Well, Regula has made me a convert. From the tradition of frying dough at the kermis (fair), to the multi-day method of preserving pears by slow cooking and transforming them into vlaai (pie), to the influence of the Dutch and Belgian immigrants to the food culture of Minnesota, there is revelation after revelation. As is usual with Regula she bears witness to the truth that so much of contemporary Western wealth arose from the shoulders of enslaved people, via the trades in sugar and spice. And from that I learn about how the sugar processing industry led to the rise and fall of cities within what is now Belgium and Holland, and how the switch to domestically-grown beet sugar (rather than imported cane) changed the nature of the cakes, pies and breads that we cook today.

If that all sounds a little niche then the recipes also look enticing. There are 13 (13!) different ways of making waffles, all of them rooted in places across Belgian and intended for different occasions. I love that there is an entire page dedicated to discussing which waffle iron is best for which type of waffle; food geekery at its best. There is, of course, much discussion of spekulaas (spiced biscuits) and peperkoek (gingerbread), including the wonderful but sadly increasingly rare art of printing the dough with handmade wooden moulds, literally stamping biscuits with festive symbolism.

One of Regula’s 13 (13!) waffle recipes

Occasionally a book that comes along that, when you finally reach the end of it, you feel sad, as if it’s a bereavement. That’s exactly how I feel of reaching the end of Dark Rye and Honey Cake (apart from the bit at the end where Regula introduces tenets of the Dutch language through the medium of pies, which made me laugh. If only all language lessons used baked goods as a reference point in explaining singular vs plural).

It’s a wonderful book and if you have any interest in food, art, baking, festivity, history, photography, there’s something here for you. I in awe, and in slight envy, of Regula’s brilliance.

Also this month:

Harvesting: Chard, rosemary
In the garden and allotment: Replaced the ancient redcurrant. Matt has attacked the wilderness area with his rough neck mattock (seriously), many further weeks of work lie ahead in shoring up the bank by the stream, clearing roots and bagging up rubbish. Ordered seeds and tubers for 2024.
Cooking: Panettone bread pudding, roast beef and yorkshires, turkey chilli, pear and chocolate pudding, gingerbread, waffles, coconut porridge, massaman curry. Making full use of the summer’s soft fruit harvest with compotes stirred into porridge, cakes and yoghurt.
Also: Winter colds, easing back to school/life, hot baths, big jumpers, TV, Wonka.

Approaching the solstice

With just over a week to the winter solstice, this is peak SAD time, which we humans inexplicably decide to make worse with all the Christmas-commercial pressure, looming January tax bills and (in my case anyway) an intense period of work activity, what with December ticket sales traditionally bank-rolling the rest of the cultural year.

An excellent way of alleviating the winter gloom is to immerse oneself within nature, be it the woods, the sea (I don’t mean literally but more on that later) or the garden, and in so doing, tune into the natural rhythms of the world. There is wisdom in letting go of leaves in the autumn, and giving space for the rest and quiet renewal of winter.

1 November, capturing the autumn colour at Westonbirt

I would recommend any quiet that involves one’s hands – even in the results come out as disastrously as mine and Harry’s gingerbread houses.

This year’s terrible attempt at gingerbread construction

Having spent much of November indoors, last weekend in Mawgan Porth finally gave us some open skies and great sea vistas. And the wind, with all its rajasic energy and furious life, was actually quite fun. I do not think it is possible for me to love a place more than I do the beach at MP, particularly when it’s only us and a few dog walkers there.

Winter sea at Mawgan Porth
A picture taken in a reverie – then ten seconds later the sea came into my mid-calf

Although this year, for the first time ever in twelve years of visiting, the sea finally captured me into its energetic grasp. As I wandered in reverie at the sky and the rocks and the sand and getting the perfect Instagram shot, a particularly determined wave swept in. I jumped onto the rocks in panic but no use, I was up to my mid-calf in swirling December water. It was actually a bit frightening for a few seconds, but then I mostly felt like a townie-idiot who got what she deserved. Jeans and boots ruined, I spent the rest of the weekend wearing yoga pants and ancient, holey wellies that I happen to keep in the car at all times. The message: keep your eye on the sea at all times.

Literally soaked boots and jeans
Me and Harry at our favourite cafe at Carnewas

I have been quiet on the allotment front for a few weeks, leaving Matt to get on with some overdue clearing and hacking back of the brambles. The last harvest came on 22nd November with an armful of chrysanthemums; these lasted two weeks indoors in the house and I’ve now moved them outside the back door to wilt at their own pace.

Matt has been attacking the wilderness, clearing brambles and debris
An armful of firework chrysanthemums (22nd Nov)

I think this means that there’s been a flower harvest from March to November this year, so 9 months, which is not bad going at all. (If I planted early narcissus I could probably stretch it to a ten or even 11 month harvest.) The veg obviously get a far shorter run, and next year will be a slow start given that only one PSB plant survived the slug/crappy-compost double bill disaster of spring 2023; usually I’d have a few kales as well to get me through until spring. There is chard in the veg trug however so all is not lost.

We got the dahlias mulched over just a few days before the real cold weather came. This year I’ve used bark chippings, which should give a good thick insulation and also keep the weeds down.

Dahlias mulched with bark, just a few days before the proper cold weather arrived

And so back to the solstice. The tradition is to have evergreens in the house at this time of year, and whilst I can see the beauty in that, my preference is to use the dried remains of this year’s harvest: allium, hydrangea, echinops, cornflower, and so on. All I do, once the flowers have been cut, is to trim off the leaves then dry them upside down in bunches, in our sun room, for a few months. The best dried flowers both keep their colour intact AND have extraordinary shapes and textures, which come into their own when dried.

Today I tied an armful of dried sorrel with hydrangea, allium and a few other more delicate stems into a swag for the front door, and the remaining stems have gone into two vases for the dining room. No skill necessary or tools other than a bit of string and maybe a wave of hairspray to attempt to keep the delicate petals intact. These will stay until the first narcissi come in a few weeks – and with them, the hope of spring.

Two vases of dried summer flowers – hydrangea, allium, echinops, love-lies-bleeding
A swag for the winter solstice, with sorrel, allium, cornflower, gypsophila, sweet william, calendula and hydrangea.

Also this month:

Harvesting: Very little! Last chrysanthemum came on 22 November. There is rosemary, bayleaves, chard, and in the sun room some ripening peppers and chillies.

Jobs: Sowed sweetpeas in November, once germinated moved them and the cornflower seedlings to the veg trug to get some cold weather. Matt has been clearing enormous brambles and debris from the wilderness. Cut back and covered dahlias.

Cooking and eating: Chicken and barley broth, mince pies, panettone, gingerbread, fish curry at Rick Stein’s (wearing wellies), making full use of ragu, puddings and chillies from the freezer. As usual at this time of year, my ability to drink alcohol has reduced to zero.

Also: Loved The Change by Bridget Christie on C4 – highly recommended viewing. Generally trying to hold onto sanity in what is the dangerous month for mental health.

Soil analysis, seed saving & plot clearing

The autumn clear-out has started earlier than normal this year. I’ve learn from years of wrestling mulches and black plastic with painful, numbed fingers that it’s best to get the bulk of the work done before the frosts come, even if that means ripping out the last of the cosmos, snapdragons and nasturtium before their natural end. It’s also, I admit, a sigh of relief; Calling another year done lets the mistakes of the year slip away, and I can get the planning for next year’s glorious successes (perhaps)!

First job is seed saving. There’s a tray of runner and French bean seeds drying out in the sun room, some destined for the cooking pot, but others I’ll plant in March in hopes of another harvest as good as this year’s. I’ve also saved seeds from the tall, florists snapdragons, which is good because the bought-stuff is super pricey (about £6 for a tiny packet). Alas the sweet peas fell to some kind of fungal infection before I could get their little black balls, but I’ll make a note to set aside some squash seeds after halloween is done with. We had a good harvest of squash this year, green and orange and knobbly, and now adorning mantlepieces as we head to the start of winter.

French and runner bean seeds, dried ready for storage
18 squash & gourds this year, curing in the sun room alongside the dried allotment flowers

Clearing started with the perennial issue of creeping buttercup and grass, which had carpeted the length of the shed-side bed. This area also has a few perennials and shrubs in there (rosemary, peony, fennel) as well as spring bulbs, so I can’t simply cover it over and wait for the offending plants to die back; proper remedial work is required. Over two lengthy lunchtimes I forked out trug after trug of white fleshy creeping roots. I last did this two years ago, and try not to dwell that it’s a task that needs repeating again and again and again. As far as the main beds go this is the end of the autumn clearing, as I prefer to mulch with black plastic and allow any remaining foliage from the annuals to die back into the soil over the winter, which adds to the organic layer. Come spring I’ll fork all the beds over ready for planting.

Looks small but it took two lengthy lunchtime sessions to weed this area of grass and creeping buttercup

Homework this week from gardening school (I am studying for the RHS Level 2 Certificate in Horticulture at Winterborne House) is, essentially, to dig a massive hole and take a look at the soil. The proper name for this is site-based assessment via a profile pit. Obviously I can not possibly be bothered to dig a one metre deep pit by myself, so I enlisted manual labour from the boys.

I enlisted freelance support to dig the profile pit

Here is our site analysis for the allotment site. The first 25cm or so of topsoil is light, crumbly and loamy, full of worms, a few stones but not many, and just a few roots from the hops and weedy grass. In short, lovely stuff.

The topsoil layer, dark, crumbly and full of worms

At 25cm down we hit the sub soil, which has several layers to it. At first we meet a layer of reddish-brown earth, clearly with a higher percentage of sand, with larger round pebbles. The texture is dry, fine and crumbly, even after the recent weeks of wet weather. I’d call this sandy loam. No worms here. This layer is about 45-50 cm deep.

At 25cm we’re into sandy loam, which is drier, finely crumbed and with larger pebbles

At 65cm down it gets very wet indeed – imagine digging into a Cornish beach and you’re about there. There’s still some earth but the sand content is high, and it’s so wet that it holds the shape of the spade. There’s gravel here too. This goes on until about 90cm down, where there’s a very hard compacted layer of earth – this is the reason for the wet of course, because the water is getting stuck at this level. Break through that, about 95cm-1m deep, and suddenly it’s very very dry, almost pure sand and gravel, and orange in colour.

At 65cm we’re into beach-type wet sand and gravel, which takes us to a dense layer of compacted soil at 90cm
After the soil pan, about 95cm, the earth is very dry, full of sand and gravel – essentially a gravel pit

Chatting to allotment-neighbour Martin, it turns out that on Ordnance Survey maps from about 100 years ago, the area next to the high school at the edge of the allotment site is marked as a gravel pit. We’re cultivating land that is essentially a river bed – right next to the Chad brook – so very free draining and sandy.

What can I learn from this? The topsoil is lovely stuff, augmented with years of manure and compost through years of cultivation. Underneath will be (I suspect) much lower in nutrients, because of the high percentage of sand, which is inert and doesn’t hold nutrients or minerals well. It’s free-draining down to about 95cm. In a dry year, plants that need moisture will suffer, particularly because my time for watering is limited in the summer months. On the other hand, those Mediterranean plants adapted for free draining soil should do well – no wonder the lavender and rosemary love it here so much.

So with that fun job done, and the main plots covered, I look around to see what else needs attention. Next up for attention is the dahlia bed, which has become carpeted with the encroaching grass and buttercup, but also (happily) has become home to some self-sown rudbeckia. Clearing that bed will be another job to do before the ice falls.

Soil analysis completed, I’ve covered over the main beds with black plastic – just a few chrysanthemums, next year’s sweet williams and a solitary PSB plan are poking through
Attention now turns to the dahlia bed, which is (surprise surprise) over-run with grass but is also, happily, now home to these self-sown rudbeckia.

Finally, a mention that underneath the paving slabs that I keep for weighing down the plastic sheets, I find clutches of tiny white eggs (slugs?), woodlice the size of a grain of sand, and a small ball of dried golden grass, with a little tunnel hollowed out. Surely the home of a mouse? I put the slab back and left them all in peace, obviously. A reminder that I share this plot with about a billion other creatures. AND that reminds me that when I cleared a plot yesterday at gardening school, I uncovered the home of five newts, each grey-brown body huddled into the next for warmth. For a second, the world stopped as I felt wonder and glory, in creatures the size of my little finger.

Also this month:

Harvesting: Last squash and gourds, rosemary, last raspberries (they are actually still going but I can take no more), last dahlias, still waiting on the chrysanthemums though.

Jobs: Clearing, covering, weeding – generally preparing for next year

Cooking and eating: All hail cauliflower cheese. Butternut squash and sweet potato soup. Cranberry and marmalade cake. Blackberry and apple crumble. Successfully knocked £100 off my monthly food bill by eating up the freezer and batch-cooking with veg and beans.

Also: Pumpkin carving. Cheltenham Literature Festival. Reading The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn, This is not a diet book by Bee Wilson, Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo, The Hollow by Agatha Christie, and loved Sort your life out with Stacey Solomon.

The year turns

I wrote a draft of this post two weeks ago but due to very dull technical issues it was never posted. Better late than never, and there’s an update at the end about today’s harvest.
—-
September 18 2023:
Summer’s end marks the return to school, breathing space (for me, anyway), and the small matter of a birthday. The cake remains the same every year, but the boys get bigger and the table-top dinosaur collection that much noisier!

Harry’s birthday cake, the 6th year in a row it’s come out. Hopefully I can keep this up forever and he’ll never request a dinosaur/Minecraft/Lego technical challenge.
Evening pasta had to take second place to the more important Lego build

September is the month for courgettes and cosmos, on our plot anyway, which as I’ve noted before is several weeks behind those of you in Worcestershire. The strange scorching week at the start of September sent a few plants over the edge, followed by a storm that literally sent the sunflowers flying; a shame as they had only just come into flower on the first week of the month.

Cosmos, courgette, squash and a sea of nasturtiums
Sunflower got felled by the storm

The dahlias have merged into a solid mass of colour, reds, oranges, whites, yellows, purple. It is not artistic, for the colours clash and the sizes of each plant differ, but I don’t mind and the effort of lifting and moving them makes we want to weep. Just to the left are a few self-seeded rudbeckia, a few weeks from flowering yet, and a welcome surprise. They’re not the only self-seeders that have popped up in recent weeks; there’s also spears of amaranth, snapdragon and cerinthe, all of which are healthier plants than the ones I started from scratch back in the spring.

The dahlia block with a few surprise rudbeckia beneath
September is the colour of reds, oranges and corals

Update, 2 October 2023

The year has started to turn. The nights draw in that much earlier, the days lighten that much later. The shock isn’t great – yet – and there’s still warmth in the air, but I can sense everything starting to let go, starting to fall. I don’t find it sad. On the contrary, it’s as if the veg patch is breathing a sigh of relief (as do I) that the intense activity of spring and summer is coming to an end.

There’s still harvesting of course – cosmos, sunflowers, amaranth and now the first chrysanthemums, with that evocative old-fashioned fragrance that takes me back to days flower arranging with my mum in the 1980s.

Sunflowers now at their best, and the ammi seedheads look wonderful with them in the vase

Annoyingly my technical issues continue and I can’t upload the images I took today of the gourd/squash harvest – 17 green and orange specimens, some gnarly, some smooth, are left out to cure before I’ll bring them inside – or of the box of brown leathery runner beans that I allowed to dry out on their sticks before cutting them down. I read somewhere that you can treat runner beans as you do borlotti, that is, allow their deep purple seeds to ripen and dry, then store them for winter bean cookery. Given that runner beans quickly become overwhelming and glut-like, I like this approach to extending their harvest potential.

The other big news is that I have realised this past fortnight that all recipes for chips/roast potatoes are incorrect, in that they usually tell you to take your maris piper potato then chop it up blah blah blah. All recipes should actually begin, “First, grow your own potatoes”. Because the maris pipers that we harvested two weeks ago are SO BRILLIANT that I might consider chucking everything else in and just growing spuds from here-on-in. I don’t know why our ground produces good potatoes, if it’s the climate or the sharp drainage or what, but these are crispiest, fluffiest roasties I have ever produced. I’ve never really understood the point of growing things that are inexpensive and easy to come by in the shops, but with the quality of these spuds – now I understand.

Also this month:
Harvesting: Squash, gourds, last courgettes, last raspberries, chard, rosemary, marjoram, dried runner beans, maris piper potatoes, chrysanthemum, cosmos, sunflower, amaranth, dahlias.

Cooking & eating: Salt marsh lamb from the Cartmel peninsula, slow-roasted gigot style, with dauphinoise potatoes; tons of chips/roasties from our potatoes; carrot cake, nectarine ice cream; first Christmas stollen in Aldi which I find simultaneously terrible (so early!) and brilliant (it’s stollen!). Raspberry compote for the freezer. The freezer is full, and I mean stuffed, with soft fruit, mainly raspberries which have been brilliantly productive this year.

Jobs: Planted out biennials to allotment and a few in pots (sweet william and wallflower). Squirrels have had the ones in pots but the allotment ones should be OK. The seedlings were tiny tiny, too small to go out really, due to my ongoing issue trying to propagate in peat-free compost. Planted chard in the veg trug and mustard leaves in the oak planter.

Also: Lots of weekend walks now that Harry’s able, to Kinver and the Lickey Hills. Gardening School has started again, year two.

August, Perch Hill & Sissinghurst

Summer is already closing down. The hedgerows are ripe with berries and haws, autumn cyclamen have nudged their heads through, and I’ve just spent a fortune on new school uniform. August has been intensely busy; not always enjoyably so. There’s been a lot of (too much) work, which makes school holidays a challenge. Living in the moment is difficult when there are too many calls on your time and energy, and this is particularly hard at this time of year, knowing that the light, the heat, the colour, will soon fade away into winter. So I’m looking forward to September, in the hope of a quieter few weeks, getting some essential tasks finished in the garden and allotment, and hopefully an Indian summer after the endless rain of July and changeability of August.

This post is a visual scrapbook of my August, including notes from the veg patch, my biannual pilgrimage to Perch Hill and Sissinghurst for creative inspiration, and other bits of messing about.

Allotment life

In short, after a lousy start, we’ve done OK on the allotment this summer. July rain helped enormously, creating an abundance of French and runner beans, excellent soft fruit (in particular the raspberries) and a good number of courgette. No kale this year, due to all the slugs and that rubbish compost, though there’s still chance of a winter harvest.

Perennial cut flowers now a riot of colour
Climbing beans (runner, French, borlotti) have thrived in the wet summer

The dahlias, snap dragon and gladioli are particularly happy this year, meaning I’m getting regular car boot-fulls of cut flowers. The colour way is definitely on the pink/white spectrum, and next year I’d like more orangey-red-peachy shades plus some light, airy stems. Special note to the sweet peas, which have thrived in pots in the gloom, and are still flowering now even as we near September.

A regular boot full of blooms and berries
Dahlias nudging up against sweet peas
Hot magentas with whites

It should be noted that any modest success I have is put into proportion by my Mum and Dad, who could be market gardeners really. Every trip home I am given a veg box heaving with tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, aubergine, lettuce, sweetcorn…

Every visit home leaves me with a veg box

Perch Hill, East Sussex

To Sussex, for the dahlia open day at Perch Hill (Sarah Raven’s cutting garden). It’s my fourth visit here, for this place is SO brilliant, so abundant, so creative in its planting combinations and colour, that it’s a joy to visit. Happily since learning that they have several full time gardeners (and pots of cash of course) I feel less bad about the comparison to my humble efforts.

Take aways for me this year are the coral/peach spectrum dahlias, which I would like more of, and the sheer number of pots with hot, vibrant shades of really quite common plants such as French marigold, achillea and fuchsia, which feels very achievable at home. The persicaria orientalis is amazing, towering over me with magenta colour.

The sensational dahlias beds
Ammi visnaga is as tall as me, crammed in with scabious and more dahlias in the cutting garden
Love the persicaria orientalis, a good eight feet tall and hot pink
Helpful plant ID stands are dotted around the garden
Enjoyed the clashing achillea crammed together into one bucket
The Oast garden is a jungle of hot-coloured abundance
Rich oranges and corals in the Dutch Garden

My stand out plant was actually not a flower at all, but this humble kale, called ‘dazzling blue’ – I presume it’s a cross between a cavolo nero and a blue kale, and planted next to orange marigolds looked amazing.

My star plant was actually this kale called Dazzling Blue – a beauty

Sissinghurst, Kent

On to Sissinghurst, the pinnacle of garden design – a place of romance, bohemia, artistry and of course serious hard graft for the people who keep it going. I wanted to soak up the beauty of the rose garden and see the newly planted dry garden (Delos) for the first time, but mainly my visit was to see what this place does at the end of summer, for Sissinghurst is famously a garden for June.

The answer is that the cottage garden is vibrant with jungle colour – oranges, reds, yellows, from more French marigolds, sunflowers, cannas and rudbeckias. Simply wonderful.

View to the rose garden from the tower
Looking over Delos, the newly recreated dry garden
Yellows and oranges in the cottage garden
Love this clash of red and orange

The other thing Sissinghurst does at this time of year is grow serious (I mean serious) amounts of fruit and veg. The kitchen garden is so vast and so productive that it’s kind of unreal; this isn’t your usual pretty-pretty National Trust veg patch, but a serious working market garden. That, and they coppice of course, a tradition that is rich in this part of Southern England but harder to find further north. As a family we are, naturally enough, extremely drawn to this sustainable method of wood production.

Sissinghurst hosts the veg patch of dreams! Beans, squash and lettuce in abundance.
Sissinghurst has acres of coppiced hazel
The tradition of coppicing is rich in Kent and Sussex

August living

Work, harvesting and gardens aside, there has been a bit of messing about. A weekend in the Peaks, a visit to London, a few days in a yurt…

On top of Thorpe Cloud in the Peaks
Yurt life! It’s our second visit to the yurt at Dogwood Camping near Rye. This time we got wise and brought the mini oven, meaning that baked pancakes and fish-finger curry were on the menu (not on the same plate obviously).
Spotting fish in the Sissinghurst lake. The wider woodland at Sissinghurst is a revelation, well worth an explore, and completely free of visitors.
Playing soldiers in Kent parkland (you can just see Harry’s legs)
Messing about on the beach at Bexhill
Picnic at Dungeness

Also not pictured: rain storms, tantrums (from both child and parents), mud, over-priced ice cream, emergency trip to Morrisons for aforementioned fish fingers, big fat CLOSED sign at Knole (ffs), traffic jams, horrendous numbers of work WhatsApp messages at evenings/weekends, guilt at not being more available for work, guilt over not being more available for family, slugs, weeds, washing piles, YouTube videos.

Also this month:

Harvesting: French beans (purple ones particularly productive this year), courgettes, raspberries, blueberries. Runner beans I am leaving to pod up, then harvest as we would borlotti. No greens/kales this year. Dahlias, cosmos, snapdragon, glads, self-seeded cornflowers, last sweet peas. Every trip home I am gifted tomatoes, excellent cucumbers, beans, aubergine, peppers, blueberries…the list goes on.

Allotment: Put down three green manures to compare their efficacy. Squash doing well. Hops and crysanthemums have both succumbed to some kind of insect/virus attached. Sunflowers nearly out, though one has died after having its stem stripped by enterprising wasps. Could do with more perennials…dahlias, oranges/red/coral shades, plus rudbeckia, helianthus, that kind of thing.

Cooking and eating: Camp food – fish-finger curry, chicken goujon tacos, baked plum pancakes, thermos of tea. Lots of plums. Prepping bags and bags of soft fruit, apples from Clives, roast tomatoes and beans, and sweet corn for the freezer. It takes hours but I’ll be grateful for it come February.

Also: Reading Sarah Raven’s book about the making of Sissinghurst. Went back to the Agatha Christie’s but after four Poirots in a row I need a break from all the murders. No time for telly. Wondering what happened to my creative brain, for it is now full of tasks, emails and deadlines.

Oaty cookies

June sunshine gave way to July rain, which I am not complaining about at all; better to be soggy than trying to survive temperatures of 40c+ like last year. It also makes allotmenting life that much easier if we’re not having to water several times a week.

I’m heads down on a complicated project up in Liverpool at the moment, but due to the vagaries of modern life it’s all conducted on Zoom, phone and email, and I’ve therefore never met most of the people I am working with. In some ways this is a wonder, but project management by proxy can be a challenge. What better way to de-frazzle than an escape to the hidden garden at Wilde Goose, up near Ludlow. A gorgeous and under-stated walled garden, at this time of year it is packed with late summer perennial colour, like a true Secret Garden. Even on a rainy afternoon the air was humming with bees, hoverflies and butterflies.

The restored glasshouse at Wilde Goose nursery
As we tip into late summer, reds, yellows and oranges take to the fore

There’s colour on the allotment too, albeit in a more scruffy and haphazard way. The dahlias are coming into their own now and this week I had the first gladioli stem of the year, a sparkling magenta-red. The amaranth is flowering too, shocking in its vibrancy; for me this is one for drying as in the vase it’s just a little too much.

Dahlias, lupins, cosmos and amaranth
Hiding at the back – red gooseberries and cerinthe

Fruit and veg are offering a slow and steady harvest, which is just as it should be. We’ve had a good picking from the red dessert gooseberries, and there’s several pickings a week of beans (broad, runner and French). All this makes for a full fridge and vases dotted around the house. There could be so much more, if I had the time to preen and prune and harvest to the plot’s full potential, but as we all know, enough is as good as a feast.

Getting a few colanders of beans and chard a week now
Froth in the vase

This recipe is a really useful bake to have up one’s sleeve for days when the cake tin is empty, time and inclination is poor, but the kids need something vaguely-not-terrible for lunchboxes or after-school snacks. It’s a cookie that uses oats and (if you want to) wholemeal flour, and can be stirred together in five minutes, baked in ten. I like to add dried cranberries or raisins to mine but if making it for Harry then chunks of chocolate get mixed in. Actually it’s that versatile a base recipe that you could add any kind of dried fruit, nut, seed or, if you wanted to, spice.

This isn’t my recipe at all of course, but comes from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s endlessly useful book, Good Comfort.

Oaty cookies, a very handy five minute bake to have up your sleeve

Oaty cookies
Adapted from Good Comfort by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall

125g butter
50g soft light brown sugar
125g flour – You can use either all wholemeal, or a mixture of equal parts plain white and wholemeal or spelt
75g porridge oats
1/2 tsp baking powder
A handful of chopped dark chocolate chunks or dried raisins/sultanas/cranberries

Preheat the oven to 180c and line a baking sheet with non-stick parchment. In a saucepan, gently melt the butter and sugar, stirring often. Leave to cool slightly. Add in the flour, porridge and baking powder and mix to a smooth dough. If you’re using them, stir in the chocolate chunks or fruit.

Place dessertspoon-fulls of the mixture onto the baking tray, patting them down slightly so they are smooth on top. Bake for 12 minutes or so, until they are turning golden. They will still be soft at this stage, but leave them to cool and they will harden up.

This recipe makes about 6-8 cookies, depending on how big your spoons are!

Also this week:

Harvesting: Runner beans, French beans, last broad beans, chard, new potatoes, kale, first courgette, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, gooseberries, first dahlias, first gladioli, amaranth, cosmos, lupins, echinops, snapdragons.

Also: Last of the midsummer blooms in the garden, tidied up the debris ready for Act 2 (late summer): Pots of perennial foxgloves, sanguisorba, helenium are waiting in the wings ready to go in. Rain has brought a chaos of weeds to the plot but I have not had time to deal with them, as was ever true.

Cooking and eating: Enormous pizza at Rudy’s to celebrate end of term. Roasting carrots and beets with cumin (Mum’s garden). Notable steak and ale pie from Ludlow Farm Shop.

Reading: Wilding by Isabella Tree, the story of the rewilding project at the Knepp Estate.

The tale of the stunted seedlings

During my RHS course, which has finished for now, we spent a lot of time hearing about horticulture is good for one’s mental and physical health. And everytime I heard this, I thought “well that may be true for some people, some of the time, but what about July on the allotment?” Because it’s now that the time, labour, sweat, blood and cash is meant to come together to one glorious harvest – and the heartache when it doesn’t is palpable.

Every year at this time, I bring to mind an anecdote about Vita Sackville West’s column in The Observer, in correspondence with a reader who opined that she was “an armchair, library fireside gardener”, to which she replied “May I assure him that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger-nails and sometimes my heart in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation?”.

Heartbreak is something not often discussed with allotments, but it’s there and it is real. A heartbreak fuelled by hopes and dreams born of a thousand seed catalogues, Instagram reels, glossy magazines and TV programmes. Our expectations are set high and so when reality doesn’t match up, disappointment lurks. I should remember the teachings of the Buddhists and the Stoics: desire is the root of all suffering.

To explain, let’s head back a few weeks.

Remember the seedlings, started off as usual in early April in plugs and pots, in virtuous peat-free compost (a coir and woodchip mix), in the sun room? Well they germinated OK but then just sat there, with baby seed leaves, not really doing anything. By the start of June I thought enough is enough and so out they came to be potted up and get some proper weather…well proper weather they got, with what we now now to be the hottest June on record. What they also got was a devouring from the world’s biggest population of slugs and snails. (What is it about Bearwood and our crazy slug/snail population?!. Every evening I’d head out to pick off the gastropods and there would easily be 20-30 in one tiny area).

Reader, my baby cut-flower and veg plants did not stand a chance.

The tale of the stunted seedlings: compost, cold, heat, slugs, drought, light levels….everything has been against them

I did my best to help the babies, moving them away from the main slug area, getting them out of the coir and into a different compost mix, and whilst some did perk up (scabious and redbor kale), others stayed weak and without much hope (cornflower, cosmos and cavolo nero). Others failed completely: there won’t be any phlox, cleome or strawflower this year. At least three trays worth of seedlings have completely vanished, done for by the slugs/snails and the weather.

Finally, this last fortnight, I have planted out what was salvageable – a good 4 to 6 weeks after I might normally expect to. A few lessons here:

  1. I left the seedlings in the coir for way too long, and they weren’t getting the nutrition they needed. If using coir, four weeks nutrition maximum is all it can offer. Peat-free is absolutely the way forward, but it isn’t easy.
  2. Really I attempt to grow way too much from seed without a greenhouse. I do this partly for pride and partly for interest, but it actually is a waste of money if all the plants are getting eaten by snails or whither from exposure. Better to buy a few plugs and attempt to pot them on.
  3. I haven’t used any slug pellets this year because of what they do to the ecosystem. That’s all well and good, but to have no slug protection on young plants is untenable; they simply can’t stand the nightly assaults. Next year I’ll need to try either raising plants up onto trestles, using wool pellets or gravel or something.
  4. June and July on the allotment is always stressful. Always has been, probably always will be.

So that’s the Tale of the Stunted Seedlings. There are other tales to tell to, of the brambles, grass, buttercup and fat hen that are endemic. I am tolerant of quite a lot of weeds now, as I understand them to be important habitat for insects, but there is a balancing act to be found and currently the weeds have the upper hand. Then there’s the Tale of the Soil That Could be Sand, so free-draining and so dry that many hungry veg will always struggle (peas, I’m looking at you). A few lorryloads of manure a year would sort it out, but of course that is far easier said than done. Let’s not even talk about the black bean aphid that got to the broad beans before I did.

At this time of year I simply do not have the hours in my day to keep on top of it all, what with work, family, RHS exams, house and garden to keep up as well.

Having said all that, it’s not all doom and gloom. The cornflowers that I put in in March have been magnificent, and the calendula and sweet William did OK too.

After my doubts, autumn-sown cornflower and calendula are romping away
A harvest for drying – allium, calendula, cornflower
Cut flowers are still thin on the ground but we do have sweet peas and cornflower, and a few sweet william

The climbing beans are actually growing for once (pigeon protection worked!) and I’ve had a little poke around the potatoes and am hopeful of a decent harvest in a fortnight or so.

First dig of Charlotte potatoes plus chard and some tiny peas
Beans on 8 June…
…and again on 1 July. Ignore the weeds. This image has pixelated for no obvious reason.

It’s the shrubs and perennials that earn their keep on the allotment. Dahlias and gladioli just get on with it; after removing some plastic sheeting that I’d put down for weed control that was inadvertently a perfect slug habitat, they are now thriving. The red and blackcurrants have not been productive this year, but they are probably 20+ years old now so I’ll let them off. Blueberries and raspberries are looking promising.

Dahlias and glads were in a battle against the slugs at the start of June
…but they perked up nicely once I removed the slug hiding places

As ever, it’s the nasturtium that are threatening to take over. I planted these once, about eight years ago, and now they seed themselves and have to be ripped out before they engulf what’s left of the cut flowers.

As ever it’s the nasturtiums that romp away

My notebook from last year reminds me that the bulk of our harvest comes later in the year, and that’s just how it is. A reminder of the Stoical approach.

Also this month:

Harvesting: First chard, first stick beans, first potatoes, broad beans (though black bean aphid got most of them before I did), a few strawberries, redcurrants (v poor harvest), red russian kale (veg trug). Last sweet William, last foxgloves, lots of sweetpeas, quaking grass, cornflower, calendula, roses (garden).

Sowing and planting: Trying again with fresh sowing of cavolo nero and chard for autumn/winter. Planted out the final lot of spring-sown cut flower and veg seedlings: scabious, cosmos, bunny tail grass, kohl rabi, cavolo nero, redbor kale, squash and courgette. Many seedlings went straight into the green bin. Moved a few slug-ravaged dahlias inside to see if they recover.

Also in the garden: The roses and summer drummer alliums are out and brilliant. My thoughts turn to late summer and what has perennality in our conditions whilst being slug proof. Sanguisorba, fennel, that kind of thing. We cut back the spring flowering shrubs but due to ongoing bin strikes have no way of getting rid of the massive pile of cuttings, so they sit at the back of the lawn, a new habitat for invertebrates.

Cooking and eating: It’s fruit season. Strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, apricots, plums, raspberries, all eaten fresh but I’m growing bored and want crumbles, cakes, patisserie. Creamy broad beans. Moussaka. Meringues. Oatmeal raisin cookies. Thomasina Miers’ vanilla milk ice.

Also: RHS exam ate up time and energy. Massive IT meltdown caused weeks of disruption and a very expensive new laptop. Visit to Highgrove for my birthday, and David Austin roses with Emma. So much to think about and manage for school holidays/clubs and work. Reading Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer, wonderful, and Mountains by Steve Backshall. Not had any telly in weeks.

Yoghurt pot cake

We are back from a week on the Cornish riviera, with improbably good weather, cliffs of wild flowers, endless sands and clear blue sea. It’s the first time we’ve managed a whole week away as a trio for about three years; I barely looked at my phone (joy!) and soaked in the sunshine. It’s the first time that we’ve attempted a proper holiday during half-term week and the crowds were a shock; I’ve realised that the answer to this is to head where people are not, whether it’s our favourite beach at 8pm, a hidden creek on the Camel estuary, or a prehistoric quoit on Bodmin moor.

Sunlit day on the Camel estuary
Sunset at Mawgan Porth
Bedruthan Steps but water so clear it could be the Aegean
Trethevy quoit

The days on unbroken sunshine set off the wildflowers beautifully. The colours are richer than at home – pinks, yellows, purples – with banks of grasses, spikes and umbellifers drawing in the insects. The tree echiums are particularly magnificent in June with their 10 foot spikes; a sight that will never become old to me.

The glorious midsummer wildflowers
Wild gladioli
Tree echiums, which I will never tire of

In Cornwall, the wild flowers are so magnificent, it’s almost as if there is no need to garden – you simply need to head outside and be instantly surrounded by life and wildness and beauty. Here in Birmingham it’s a slightly different matter of course, and effort is required. Given the hot dry spell, I was concerned that the allotment beans, peas and greens would be all but dead through a week with no watering. Well, they’re not exactly thriving, but there is definite signs of growth and a few promising pods on the broad beans.

Came home to a grassy, weedy allotment but potatoes and broad beans doing OK

Veg is still thin on the ground at this time of year, but the cut flowers work to a different calendar. Tulips are over now, replaced by foxgloves and allium who take their crown as the showiest of blooms for the vase. The purple globes and pink and white spires are joined by the ‘pretties’: early sweet Williams, sweet rocket and a solitary lupin. The autumn-sown cornflowers and calendula have finally come into their own, and any doubt I had about the wisdom of growing on a windowsill over the winter have been cast away. The cornflowers in particular are magnificent, with long, straight stems and an abundance of buds.

The autumn-sown cornflowers and calendula are now coming into their prime
Favourite vase of foxgloves, allium, sweet william, cornflower and sweet rocket, plus calendula

Having said all that, the April-sown annuals are still really struggling to get going. Cosmos, scabious, more cornflower and calendula, plus other cut flowers, were all sown into peat-free compost, and whilst gemination was fine, the seedlings are still teeny-tiny. I’ve now moved them out of the sun room and onto the paving in the side-garden, where they will get more light but are at risk of slug attack. I am not 100% sure what the problem is but my instinct is the compost, which is a coir and bark-based mix (other seeds planted earlier did OK, using the Birmingham City Council compost that Matt was given last year). Perhaps I should stop all this seed-sowing angst and just buy everything as a plug plant next year; it’s more expensive, but lots more reliable.

Onto a recipe perfect for June, yoghurt pot cake. This cake is perfect foil for the abundance of strawberries and raspberries that are about to head into full production. A slice, with fruit and a dollop of cream, makes for a fine pudding, though you could do as the Italians do and eat it for breakfast. It’s a simple plain cake, scented with lemon and vanilla, and a shortness to the crumb that you find in Italian and French baking (that’s due to the cornflour). The name comes from the fact that everything can be measured using a small yoghurt pot. I am sure that I read somewhere that this is the first cake that French children are taught to make, a fact I find amusing, because although the measuring is easy, it is slightly involved to actually make – there’s egg whites to whisk and folding to be done. Either bake into a small round cake or ring, or it works well as small palm-sized fairy cakes.

Palm-size yoghurt pot cake
Or dust with icing sugar and go large

Yoghurt pot cake
adapted from Nigella.com

150g plain yoghurt
150ml vegetable oil
3 large eggs
250g caster sugar
Dash vanilla extract
zest of half a lemon
175g plain flour
75g cornflour
icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180c. Prep your cake tin – this mixture makes a 9inch round tin, a 9 inch mould or a 6inch tin with 4 fairy cakes on the side. You could also just make 12 fairy cakes.

First separate the eggs, yolks into one bowl and whites into the other. With an electric whisk, beat the whites into submission, until firm. Set them aside.

Add the yoghurt, vanilla, lemon and sugar to the egg yolks and use the electric whisk to combine them together – they will be light but not thick. With the whisk still going, trickle in the oil until thoroughly combined. Sieve in the flour and cornflour, and whisk to combine. Finally, fold the egg whites in gently but firmly, until the mixture is completely mixed and surprisingly voluminous.

Transfer gently to your tin and/or fairy cake cases, and bake until done. A large cake takes about 35 minutes, fairy cakes about 20 minutes. When done, the cake will pull in around the edges and look cracked on the top; a skewer inserted in the middle will come out clean.

Leave the cake(s) to cool and dust with icing sugar to serve. I have not tried it, but I suspect that a handful of chocolate chips and maybe orange zest would both make fine additions.

Also this week:
Harvesting: Foxgloves, alliums, first sweet williams, sweet rocket, first cornflower, first calendula, last PSB, last winter-sown rocket and spinach. One singular, magnificent strawberry.
Jobs: Took out last of last year’s kale and PSB. Strimmed, not that it makes much difference, the grass is so virile. Planted out snapdragons, cerinthe, quaking grass and amaranth. Slugs have been nibbling both allotment and house dahlias but still I am not using pellets. Moved everything out of the sun room to see if added light will make the seedlings finally grow. In the garden, the allium, roses and foxgloves are coming into their crescendo.
Cooking and eating: Porthilly mussels, crab sandwiches, Cornish yeast cake, fudge, strawberry and blackcurrant compoty-jam, English sparkling wine, nuts-and-seeds as apparently it’s good for my hormone health.
Also: Reading A Year at the Chateau by the Strawbridges, pure escapist fun.

Finally, the warm months

My last entry included a snowscape of cold and daffodils shivering in the breeze. Not so any longer. The chill has finally lifted and with it, life has returned to business (should that say busy-ness?).

This last month we’ve had what feels like a thousand bank holidays, which on the one hand is opportunity for fun, but on the other means not enough time to get the work that needs to be done, done. But putting that to one side – the Coronation saw my husband invent the Coronation Scone (picture below) but more importantly for me, the first proper flower harvest of the year, with appropriately regal purple alium, lilac, the deepest dark tulips and frothy cow parsley. It is a fleeting vase, but a good one.

The Coronation Scone – jam, cream, chocolate mini roll
Picked on coronation day – cow parsley, lilac, allium, tulip

And then we had a birthday, where aforementioned husband finally turned 40 (I am older and therefore always waiting for him to catch up). We headed down to Dorset for a glamping weekend, which was lovely, but was also way too busy. In the rush to crack on and see/do it all, I think I’ve forgotten how important it is to slow down.

Matt turned 40!
Luxury camping in Dorset
The return of golden sunsets
Stonehenge

The great thing about camping/glamping is that you are so immersed in nature, it is like breathing in life-force energy. I could admire this oak, just outside our tent door, for hours. The woodland was richly carpeted in wild garlic, its scent carrying for miles, and mornings were dotted with the sound of newborn lambs pestering their mothers.

A particularly magnificent oak, just coming into leaf
The woodland still abounds with wild garlic

But let’s get down to business. It’s a mixed start to the year. The propogation area in my loftily-titled sun room is very, very slow to get going. Many of these veg and flower seeds were sown well over a month ago now, and germination has been slow, and then growth miniscule. March and April have been chilly, which didn’t help, but I do wonder if the peat-free compost is yet to deliver the goods?

The propagation room – slow to get started this year

Outside, I had to move some tender seedlings outside to the cold frame WAY too early in order to make space, and have paid the price. Slugs have been at the courgettes (I’ve since made a repeat sow) and the sunflowers are far from thriving. Dahlias and Iris in posts are very, very slow to get going; I hope this current warm spell with encourage them into life. I’ve not used any slug pellets this year, which is a bold move for Bearwood (we are heavily slug-prone), but I can no longer justify the amount of death I was causing. So instead I am keeping the most munchable seedlings away from where the slugs hide, and doing twice-daily slug hunts.

On the plus side, the January-sown sweet peas are now romping away in their pots. I had a brilliant veg-trug harvest of winter-sown rocket, mustard and spinach, and have now replaced them with more baby spinach and ‘red russian’ kale. Beetroot has gone into the oak planter. The two pots of Sarah Raven tulips were magnificent but their time has now gone; if the dahlias ever grow, I’ll swap them into the big ceramic tulip posts for a late summer display.

Sweet peas are starting to romp away in the pots. The plugs in front are on hard standing to keep them away from the slugs.

And the back garden is booming with allium and foxgloves, and wonderfully healthy roses. The whitebells that introduced themselves are happily echoed by the white of the self-sown Orlaya grandiflora, plus there are quite a few unknowns; I’m leaving most of the self-sowers in to see what happens.

The garden coming into late May fullness
This rose – its name forgotten but it’s a David Austen – is now taller than me

On the allotment, the soil has been uncovered but is mostly still unplanted, waiting until the bulk of the annual cut flowers, dwarf beans, courgettes and squash are ready to go out. The broad beans are coming along slowly, and the stick beans are out and so far have avoided a complete decimation by slugs and pigeons. I always keep a few plants back now for the inevitable re-planting that happens every year.

Broad beans were all planted out at the start of May
Stick beans are also out, with extravagant pigeon-defence netting

These peas were planted out this week, with the most elaborate pigeon-defence system I have ever made – pea sticks, fleece, dried brambles. So far, so good.

Peas are hidden in a shroud of fleece
I also sneaked dried brambles in amongst the pea sticks to deter winged visitors

As for the allotment harvest, it has been a slow start to the year. I didn’t put in any new tulip bulbs last autumn, and the wild rocket didn’t take too well (I only now have one plant coming into flower). None of the Honesty made it, and the Sweet Williams are sort-of-maybe thinking about flowering. So thank goodness for the purple sprouting, which finally came good a good three weeks after I had completely given up on it. So far I’ve had three massive colander-fulls; it may even have replaced asparagus as my favourite May veg (and that is saying something).

The harvest I had given up on – purple sprouting broccoli is delivering at last

For the most delicious, easy and economical pasta, the Italian classic Oriechette with PSB is as good as any. Traditionally, the Italians would use Cime di rapa for this, but that’s hard to come by in the UK, and PSB makes a fine substitute. Cook a good portion of purple sprouting with oriechette in heavily salted water until the pasta is al dente – the greens will collapse a little, which is all to the good. Meanwhile, sizzle sliced garlic, red chilli and a few anchovies in good olive oil until the anchovy has collapsed and the garlic is aromatic. It is essential that it does not burn. Drain the pasta and greens, add to the garlicky oil, and toss the lot together – add a little of the pasta cooking water to make a smooth emulsion, though this isn’t really a ‘saucy’ dish. Season with pepper but probably no salt, due to the anchovies. Serve at once, with grated pecorino or, even better, crisply fried pangrattato (bread crumbs). I like a little squeeze of lemon as well.

Also this month:
Harvesting: PSB, spinach, rocket, oregano, thyme, rosemary, alliums, lilac, last of the tulips, cow parsley, sweet rocket
Sowing: Everything has been sown or repeat sown by now. Maincrop potatoes went in at the start of May, as did a direct sowing of parsnips and carrots (more in hope rather than expectation).
Cooking and eating: First barbecue of the year with steak, sausages and lamb kebabs. Bulghar wheat salad with rocket and peppers. Foccacia. Many, many dishes pulled from the freezer because life is busy now.
Also: Reading Cracking the Menopause by Mariella Frostrup, for it is good to be prepared, and Sophie Grigson’s fab memoir of moving to Puglia, A Curious Absence of Chickens? Too much work to do in too little time, life is a bit stressful again.