As I left the garden I noticed the fresh green nettles; March is the time to harvest them and I had rubber gloves in my pocket! I did have a couple of those sycamore seedlings to deal with, but plenty of fresh nettles where the tree fell over a year ago churning up long-buried seed.
The soup awaits attention tomorrow lunchtime. Full of vitamins but the stings have boiled away.
The journalist and chef had written about moving out of London and starting a vegetable garden. Well done to her! She clearly enjoyed getting her hands dirty and eating her first crops:
“The feeling of satisfaction and fulfilment was addictive. But it wasn’t just the eating: it was the fact that I had created my own food from a tiny seed.”
But no, no, no. You did not create your own food. Even if you are an atheist, you must recognise all the forces of nature that nourish the seed, once you’ve sown it and gone away, leaving it to grow, you hardly know how.
Have some humility; remember you are human, that is humus – earth – and to earth you will return. You can, perhaps, claim to create or design a garden. You can create a recipe for the produce of your garden but you cannot create a carrot. Rather you should watch over it, harvest it, admire it and enjoy eating it as fresh as possible, giving thanks to its creator.
My friend Thomas sent an email to say, ‘We are not failures’ if our New Year Resolutions have not borne the fruit we’d hoped for. So be good to yourself: ‘if only for a moment, let yourself be at home with yourself’.’
One place I am at home with myself is the kitchen. The school Thomas and I attended expected us to master basic cooking, but many of the lads can do better than basic. My January therapeutic special activity is making marmalade. Not much foraging to this one but come Autumn we can make October marmalade using citrus peel, sugar and windfall or crab apples, which supply the pectin that helps the preserve to set.
January the set depends on long boiling and added pectin, using most of the stored jars from under the stairs. That’s our label up above. Friends and relations look out!
A book I return to is Come into the Garden, Cook, by Constance Spry who had connections with the village of Barefrestone, where L’Arche Kent began. I missed New Year’s Day, when I’d meant to post this, so here it is now, rather than waiting 360 days. Spry was writing in wartime to encourage creativity in cooking. She was also an artist in floristry, which shows through in this post. Enjoy your garden, and happy new year!
On this first day of January (1942) I will tell you what, in even an indifferent vegetable plot, gives pleasure. There is a splash of bright green like a rug thrown onto the brown earth lying next to rows of grey flags, just common or garden parsley and leeks. There’s a breadth of what might be grey-green tropical fern, but is, in fact, chou de Russie. (Russian kale) There’s grandeur and colour in rows of red cabbage and the purple decorative kale.
From Constance Spry, Come into the Garden, Cook, London, Dent, 1942, p11.
Photograph by Marc Ryckaert
Suddenly, my summer in the garden was coming to an end: strenuous exercise and bending forward are to be curtailed for me due to a forthcoming cataract op. Time to harvest the toms, ripe or not.
I’ve made the chutney, NAIB is on salsa duty, since she discovered an out of date pack of wraps, and reserved the remains of the joint for tonight’s meal. It feels like autumn.
This was going to be about how we managed some relatively novel (for us) foraging on holiday in Wales, including wild spinach, sorrel and samphire. NAIB made a tasty risotto with the spinach.
But days after arriving home, expecting to find a few windfall apples, we were walking along a road we’ve travelled hundreds of times, when NAIB and I stood and stared, and said, ‘Wow!’ A giant puffball where we’d never seen one before.
It came home with us and she is busy preparing it right now. Here below is the samphire, growing in the crevices of the rock. You’ll appreciate that we only took enough for a garnish.
To gather blackberries you must be prepared for scratches and nettle stings. Lime flowers are usually within reach, though wild cherries are not. Sweet little hedgerow plums also come with nettles and sloes grow on the blackthorn.
Walnuts, once you’ve found them, are often in easy reach of the upright human, but the trouble comes later. To prepare them for pickling, the unripe nuts in their green shells – as seen in our last post – must be pricked all over with a fork before steeping in brine for five days. Pricking the nuts releases the juice, which is a very effective fake tan, or rather a fake 50 a day smoker’s tan, such as is rarely seen today. I could wear gloves, if I could find XXXXL size that would not split as I pulled them on. So I’ll go with the deeply unfashionable nicotine addict look.
And I shall join Mrs Turnstone, who gathered walnuts with me, and others who did not, in enjoying the nuts in due season. (Happy Christmas in advance!)
Life has been too busy to harvest these container grown spuds until today, in time for Hallowe’en supper, baked in the oven with either ratatouille or pumpkin soup. But the rather fussy grandson will have to be told they are ‘jacket potatoes’, not ‘baked’.
You can’t make cole slaw without cabbage, so to the local supermarket or the local farmers’ market at the Goods Shed? Almost equidistant, and on this occasion I had to pass the shed first, and before it got too busy with out-of-towners.
This cabbage’s stalk had not dried out, it was not wrapped to death in plastic, and had most of its rosette of outer leaves. Beautiful. Worth buying, worth a snap, and worth sharing.
Dessert apple and grated ginger lift the cole slaw, but the best start is a good cabbage!
A second consecutive evening meal in the garden; at least two frogs calling, and the bats flitting across the table. The fat hawk moth on the ivy stayed low and safe.
Ratatouille with added French beans, since you enquired!
Will Turnstone 