I expect some of the Fordwich allotment gardeners put their own produce on the table over Christmas and New Year, but there was no-one around when we peered through the hazel hedge on 8 January – except for the dancing scarecrow at the back. And there’s a good patch of brassicas to the left, I’m not sure whether it’s kale or cauliflower. Note the leaf broken over the head of the plant; gardeners do this to keep the florets white and deter pigeons.
I hope my chard recovers from the December frosts! Nothing to see there for the pigeons right now.
The Turnstone festive table has always included plenty of home cooking, but this year there were two special ingredients: freshly harvested kale and parsnips, thanks to NAIB and her raised beds.
The King could have eaten nothing fresher or tastier, but allotment holders across the land will have tucked into their homegrown veg from spuds to sprouts. Hello to cousin Jo in Bradford!
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.
‘They are French apricots today, and very good and juicy, so much better than the Spanish,’ said the stallholder in Canterbury market. I bought a pound – half a kilo – and she wrapped them in a brown paper bag.
As I said, ‘Thank you,’ the confluence of the warm sunshine, the brightly coloured fruit, the French text printed on the cardboard trays, the brown paper bag and the swing with which the lady sealed it with a twist, all together transported me back half a century. Almost without thinking I went on: ‘I remember when I was young, walking and hitch-hiking across France to visit a friend. I bought a kilo of apricots and a bottle of water, they kept me going through the mountains.’
‘You would remember that!’ she smiled: I did indeed.
Clement was about to be ordained a missionary priest, I was travelling to share the joy of his ordination. I was coming to the Massif Central from Switzerland, going cross-country, a challenge then in France.
I hitched a lift to the border on a quiet road, and it was getting dark when I came upon a railway station that offered a slow train to the South Coast. En marche! as they say. I sat in a pull-down seat in the corridor, wrapped in a blanket, and slept fitfully as the kilometres went by. At Nîmes I slept on a bench until morning. The first bus in my direction was going as far as Alès, a market town, where I bought my kilo of apricots and walked on.
Lifts were few and far between but soon I was in the mountains under the blazing sun, eating my way through the apricots and replenishing the water bottle from wayside springs.
I met a cart drawn by two oxen, going the wrong way for me.
I kept on walking, accepting lifts of one or two kilometres until the bus from the morning overtook me, stopped and took me into Marvejols. The driver’s return journey began from there, but his drive from Alès was off timetable so I had a good ride for free. We shared the last apricots.
The driver showed me the famous statue of the Beast of Gevaudan, a man-eating monster from the time of Louis XV; he also showed me the road to my friend’s village where my arrival in a passing car was greeted with congratulations and a warm welcome. A day later, two friends of his offered a lift to Paris which I gladly accepted.
This month Clement is celebrating his 50 years as a missionary priest. Let’s give thanks for his faithful service in all that time.
Today, I’ve been picking apricots from our tree and Mrs T is preparing damaged fruit to make jam to share at Christmas time. The BEST apricot jam. EVER.
There they were, not beech nuts but nuts on the beach. The beach is on Morecambe Bay, at the foot of a low limestone cliff; the nuts were hazels. We had seen the grey squirrels picking clusters of two or three nuts, taking one to eat on the spot while letting the rest fall to the ground, where the fearless forager could harvest them. I never expected to harvest nuts on the beach!
But what are you going to do with them? asks Mrs Turnstone. Christmas is coming …
Today Saint Thomas’s and Saint Dunstan’s churches celebrated Harvest. Here’s a display we did for the Glebe, L’Arche’s garden project, a couple of weeks ago. The tomatoes have been especially tasty this year.
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’.
Yes, the power tools are out in force, forcing Mrs M and me to retreat indoors; there a more homely modern technology could be heard: click, click, click at irregular intervals. Jar lids closing on a vacuum as they cool down.
Not, sadly, apricot jam; this year’s crop was appreciated for its scarcity. The glut was of cucumbers and runner beans, so I dug out my favourite piccalilli recipe and adjusted quantities accordingly.
This lacks the day-glow of commercial varieties, but just needs to be introduced to a couple of rashers of bacon to feel fulfilled in life!
This year we made more like 200 jars of apricot jam than 20; never was there such a fruiting in all the years the tree has been with us.
I wondered about the stones: was there a quick and easy way of cracking them open to get at the kernels, used in Italy to make amaretto. Events got in the way of that, but when Mrs T cleared out the shed she found that the wood mouse had carried a great heap of stones into a dark corner and feasted on the amaretti. No biscuits or liquor for us, but who could begrudge the mice their treat?
Six-thirty felt early to Will Turnstone. Not to Abel, whose sleepover had ended half an hour previously. He grabbed grandad by the finger and took him outside to look for frogs in the pond. But the water was a few degrees too cold for them. Instead the humans picked beans and a gherkin and went back indoors.
The gherkin was a present for Abel’s dad, who sang a thank you song – ‘Ogòrek, Ogòrek!’ It’s there on Youtube…
Will Turnstone 