After a Spring of planting and a Summer of nurturing the vegetables are now ripe, and ready for the table.
Each evening after work I take a wander down the path and begin my garden ritual to unwind. Trimming back a few leaves and pinching out shoots on the tomato plants is a chance to switch off from the work day and ease into home-mode. I look forward to breathing deep lungfuls of the scent of the tomato plants and the pungent green after rubbing a sprig of rosemary between my fingers.
As the broad beans finished, the runners and French beans replaced them. And as the last lettuce leaf was picked, the chicory grew and grew in its place. Now we have a glut of tomatoes, raspberries and nasturtiums, in a spectrum of technicolour reds, pinks and oranges. It’s beautiful as well as delicious.
It has been a good year in the garden for most of our fruit and vegetables, but not all. The elderberries have mostly been eaten by pigeons. And the brassica leaves are now part-skeleton, part Swiss-cheese after hundreds of hungry caterpillars found a home there and ate their way through most of the sprouts. We planted out twelve, and there are five remaining—just about. In my failure to outwit them, I know I am probably fighting a losing battle, but I am determined to save one Brussels plant, working on the theory that some photosynthesis on perforated leaves is better than none. This involves manually removing caterpillars twice a day, relocating them to a part of the garden too far away to inch their way back. Deep down I know it’s futile, the cabbage white butterflies are prolific and outnumber me ten to one, but I can see the first sprouts forming and so on I go.
The medicinal herbs are flourishing though and they’re providing leaves for teas and tinctures. I’ve started drying bunches of them, ready to store and use in the winter months.
Soon it will be time to harvest all the seeds, so that the cycle can begin again.
If you’d like a little glimpse of what’s been growing, I’ve made a short film. I hope you enjoy it.
Music by Charlie White.
Harvest