EATING FROM THE GARDEN

Trips to the supermarket are less frequent these days with the vegetable plot starting to feed me well. The first row of potatoes dug with both surprise and disappointment, firstly to find them so monstrously large and secondly that the chitted potatoes I discovered in a sack under the sink were obviously main-crop and no good as early new potatoes, lesson learnt. Mange tout peas now in full swing as is Swiss chard, Rocket, beetroot, carrots, courgettes and salad. In the fruit garden that had been abandoned for years the crop of black currents was remarkable and what the French call groseille was even better. Gooseberries or maquereau-groseille were limited having suffered in their neglect as well as being swamped by moss and lichen. The raspberries went wild but are producing a small bowel full each evening while the rhubarb is thriving with the dressing of manure, (15lbs picked today). A borrowed chest freezer is filling fast and the preserves cupboard has already a healthy store of strawberry jam. The pollination was disappointing on the pears but a couple of the apple trees are seriously laden.  

If as I suspected the bees were late to work this spring, now I certainly see them hard at work and none more so than in the lime tree. The scent of the blossom is heady in the garden and as I pluck bags-full of flowers for tilleul I’m accompanied by the buzzing din of bees. Somewhere there is some beautiful lime scented honey being made.

I am reminded that nobody need go hungry around here, but even though in other years during my absence I’ve told friends to help themselves it would seem that few made the effort. The supermarket is so convenient and everything is beautifully presented ready wrapped in plastic so why would anyone choose to spend hours picking it from the bushes or even worse getting grubby when digging it from the ground. Similarly I remember hearing a woman having been promised a braise of pheasants from the local farmer’s shoot being shocked to be presented with them still with feathers and not oven ready.