Tag: sweetcorn

Three kinds of silence

We’ve been watching the beards on these sweetcorn for a week now and this morning we harvested the first three cobs. They’re a supersweet variety and bred to succeed in the polytunnel and like so many home grown vegetables their flavour is so intense they quite different from the shop bought ones. Any allotmenteer will tell you that they are the badger’s favourite snack and we all go to great lengths to keep them out. Badgers have poor eyesight but a very fine sense of smell and if they find them they batter them to the ground and feast on the cobs. Of course sweetcorn and fodder maize grown by dairy farmers to feed their cattle are different varieties of exactly the same species, Zea mays, so just as badgers love our half a dozen plants they’ll relish a whole field of sweet treats and I’ve always suspected that the association between bovine tuberculosis and the badger is one of those home brewed problems in which you place the suspected disease vector (the badger) right next to fields of their favourite food and right next also to the cattle and then wonder how they got infected.

Whether it’s maize or sweet corn it’s a kind of grass which, like wheat and barley, has been bred over centuries into a plant that’s very unlike its original ancestor. In fact almost any cereal plant goes under the generic name “corn” which is an umbrella term that tells us nothing much about which species we’re thinking of. Like all cereal crops its greatest gift is its quality as a food and the fact that it can be stored for long periods. The maize silks are still used in herbal medicine – and it’s become a food staple of many human communities. Wheat, barley rye. rice and oats are still fundamental even to our western diets. We had our first taste today and they were as delicious as ever, smothered with butter and black pepper.

Meanwhile, on heatwave number five, we were watering the allotment yesterday morning when there was an almighty crashing sound on the building site opposite. There was a single cry of alarm and then that special silence which falls like snow as we all – allotmenteers and builders alike stood and waited fearfully . Next a car alarm was triggered and all we could see were the chains swinging gently beneath a tall tower crane. It seemed as if all work was stopped. But was anyone injured or even killed? we waited for ambulances or police to arrive but there was nothing and we turned back to watering after an unspoken prayer. Enquiring this morning it seems likely that no-one was hurt when the load, whatever it was, fell from the crane and that the site followed legal protocols in stopping all work until an inspection had taken place. It was the eerie silence that followed the crash which marked the moment more eloquently than any subsequent commentary.

And it was commentary that marked the second silence of the day and – in my view – absolutely ruined it. A near total eclipse is a big deal – I’ve seen two of them; the first as a child peering through an overexposed negative from our old Brownie 127 camera, and the second on a beach in Marloes, Pembrokeshire where a large group of us with our children were camping. I’ve no real memories of the first eclipse but the second was magnificent and very moving because although during the build-up we’d been picnicking on the beach and drinking wine from paper cups; as the darkness fell so we fell silent; each of us absorbed in the inexplicably powerful moment. Eclipse isn’t at all a spectacle to be consumed like a new episode of Star Wars; it’s a moment in which we can contemplate the universe and our place within it and yet, as we watched yesterday’s television news and the subsequent live coverage, the event was trivialised and buried alive by torrents of commentary by highly paid “personalities” who seemed to think we are so stupid we need to have the event explained to us. Nobody shut up long enough for the eclipse to speak for itself. It was mostly what Martin Heidegger (philosopher) characterised as “gerede” – idle gossip – and while we’re on a philosophical streak I may as well mention Ludwig Wittgenstein who also said famously “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”. Sadly, idle gossip is the lingua franca both of the media and the internet, whose commentators can never shut up for fear of losing clicks and I don’t exempt religious leaders from that criticism. We’d probably learn much more from these great natural events by taking ourselves apart from the crowds and contemplating them in silence.

And so to the type three silence this week. On Tuesday I was invited (as a founder member) to take part in a 50th anniversary podcast celebrating Spike Island – nowadays a much bigger creative community than the one that we, and a bunch of friends, founded in the old MacArthur warehouse on Bristol Docks. Originally three of us – the survivors – were all going to travel to record the piece in a Bristol studio but real life got in the way and we eventually decided on a zoom meeting uniting the Forest of Dean, Bath, the Quantock Hills and Bristol. I was surprisingly nervous about the whole thing – although I self opped on local radio and often used remote studios on network radio back in the day. But in spite of all the previous I’d never done a zoom call, and anxiously prepared my laptop for the occasion. Luckily I discovered before the event that my laptop camera wasn’t (may never have) worked and so I swapped over to Madame’s tablet but unfamiliar with the operating system couldn’t turn on the video. Eventually as the start time passed and went, I received an anguished call from one of the participants who said “we’re all waiting, where are you?”. So I propped up my phone in front of the impregnable tablet and the broken laptop and after a bit of even more anguished button pressing managed to connect to communion in both kinds. I have to say that once we’d got going it all went reasonably well and the producer even said thank you afterwards – perhaps she was just being kind. That signal failure completes my trilogy of silences this week. Reflecting on it; for all too many of us the world won’t end with a giant skip falling on our head, or the moon crashing into the sun but with the internet going down. Isn’t that a bit disappointing?

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

Black Gold

Well, after a two long sessions at the compost bin we finally achieved somewhere around 350 litres (ten largish tree containers) full of pure, screened compost and, with the bay empty, I could then turn the newest heap into the vacant space and start a fresh batch. Composting can be pretty slow – especially in the winter months – but (like narrow boats) as long as you can keep the loads moving through the system, they can emerge ready for use in surprisingly large quantities. If there’s a trick to it it’s no more complicated than watching the mixture of green and brown elements, turning regularly, keeping an eye on the temperature and paying attention to the moisture levels. Dry heaps stand still; wet heaps stink and the best compost just smells earthy – as if you’d scooped up a handful of woodland soil.

Of course it’s not necessarily a good idea to use the best compost neat. At the end of the row of four bins is one that’s just filled with leaves each autumn (fall). During the following summer we cap the leaves with a bit of fertile soil and grow cucumbers and squashes on the top of the leaves, and they do very well indeed. When the plants come out in September we have a bin full of leaf mould that can be partnered with the compost – plus some sand, grit and/or vermiculite to make a perfect seed compost (hardly any compost) potting on medium (a bit more fertility from the black gold) or use the home grown compost as a top dressing for the beds – possibly mixed with some leaf mould which, even on its own, is a marvellous soil treatment.

What we’ve discovered (everyone gets there in the end!) is that too much nitrogen can make the plants somewhat sappy, leafy and vulnerable to aphids. A little bit of hardship does most plants no harm and, according to James Wong is positively good for chillies.

The addition of the polytunnel this year has meant that we are doing work now that we would normally do in September and October. The tomatoes, for instance, are loving the warm environment and are several weeks ahead. We need to get all the plants in the tunnel harvested in the next few weeks to re-sow and plant up for the protected winter crops. That’s why the compost is being stored inside the tunnel where a good deal of it will be used to top dress the beds.

Turning compost is hard work, but today’s work revealed at least half a bin – possibly another ten containers of compost that will be ready to screen in a few weeks time. Good news all round, then.

Today we ate the first of the sweetcorn – rescued from the resident badgers with a double fence of netting. One of our neighbours is protecting her cobs with sleeves cut from bottled water bottles – but since we don’t buy bottled water (I think I read that it’s about 1300(!) times more polluting than tap water) – the double fence will have to do. Anyway the corn was absolutely delicious – far better than anything you could ever buy in a store. I’m tired of hearing myself say that it’s been a strange season but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and planning for next year feels more like a lottery than ever before. Madame provided us with a meal largely comprising our own home grown food tonight and it was lovely. But tonight we’re going to sit down and veg out – pun intentional! A bunch of books just arrived with translations of Basho’s haiku. The plum chutney can wait. The beetroot relish is bottled up, along with the piccalilli all of them placed under wraps until Christmas. It’s nice to have stores of preserves but January can’t come quick enough in the marmalade department as we’re down to our last half a dozen jars. Life is good – but then even in a cold and wet August we’d expect nothing less.

Gotcha!

Some of this season’s garlic harvest hanging inside the shed to dry

At last we’ve captured a video of the badger on our plot. It’s a very poor but unmistakable image, just from the shuffling gait alone, but it was almost touching the camera so it was rather out of focus – I’ve put it at the end of this post. The existence of the badgers is well known because there’s a sett at the top of the site. They have a reputation for sniffing out the ripe sweetcorn on the very day we plan to cut it and so over the years we’ve had to devise ways of keeping them out.

I once used to watch badgers at night when I was working as a groundsman and they were plaguing the boss’s kitchen garden. One day we put a strong chicken wire fence around the plot and to our amazement the same evening a big boar badger threw himself at it until it collapsed and then sauntered into his domain. There’s no doubt that badgers love sweetcorn, and the constant growing of fodder maize on dairy farms has led to an increase in the badger population just at the time the farmers are trying to blame them for the rise in bovine TB. It’s not that I doubt TB is a constant problem for dairy farmers; but I’d love to see some research done on whether there’s a connection between the occurrence of the disease and the intensity of the farming method being used. I’d be interested in discovering if low intensity grass fed herds are less susceptible to the disease. In human populations TB is associated with poverty and stress and although it may seem strange we’re becoming more and more familiar with the idea that among humans, poverty and stress diseases are greatly increased by cramped and substandard living conditions coupled with a calorie rich junk food diet. Intensive farming is based on the premise that we know better than the cattle what’s good for them.

Anyway, we also know that badgers love our sweetcorn and we were amused that the one we filmed last night is out researching the local corn already. Ours is in full flower and just touching the flowers releases clouds of pollen. There are three principal poachers – not counting the two legged ones – it’s not just the badgers. Rats are great climbers – and so are the squirrels – and they generally attack the cobs by gnawing through the sheaths without breaking the main stalks. Badgers blunder over the whole plant and smash it down to eat the cobs and all we can do to stop them is to protect the beds. It’s said that they don’t like soft netting because they get their claws caught in it and generally we use both hard and soft barriers to deter them. There is another ghostly thief but I’m not sure whether the rumour is true. Apparently deer have occasionally been spotted on the site and maybe one day they’ll show up on the trail cam. We also know that rats and squirrels also love the broad (fava) beans but again it’s fairly easy to sort out the offenders. Rats seem to gnaw at the lower, easy to reach pods; eating a small part of both the seed and the pod; but squirrels really go for them and we have often found little piles of empty pods next to the beds, left very tidy and bereft of their beans which may well have gone off for storage. We’ve got video of both a rat and a squirrel jumping up on to a bed of broad beans that had been cleared the previous day – they must have been disappointed.

So that’s foxes, badgers, domestic cats, squirrels, field mice and rats we’ve now videoed with deer as kind of ghostly reserves. Sadly there are no hedgehogs but that may be down to the badgers which are their big-time predators. The closer we look, the more we see the sheer complexity of the natural history of our urban allotment. At best we’re just (hopefully) considerate participants in the great cycle.

We’re not allowed to connect hoses to the mains supply on our allotments, but today we rigged up our 240V generator with an electric pump and gave the whole plot a good soaking from our own stored water – we’ve got 1500 litres, around 300 gallons of water stored around the place and with a promise of heavy storms on Sunday we thought we’d give the plants a good soak in anticipation of refilling the butts over the weekend. It’s still oppressively hot here but the plots are bursting with life.

The polytunnel tomatoes are ripening thick and fast now so today I’m making the first panzanella of the summer. I got the recipe from Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy” and it was love at first taste. She writes that recipes for panzanella are as numerous as the people the Nonnas – who pass them on down through the family – I guess that’s exactly what a food culture is all about. Patience Gray’s “Honey from a Weed”; Marcella Hazan’s “The Essentials of Classical Italian Cooking” and Anna Del Conte’s “Gastronomy of Italy” are some of my favourite and most indispensable cookery books because they turn the cooking and eating of vegetables into an adventure. In high summer we luxuriate in the sheer variety of food on the allotment. The best of Italian cooking completely sidesteps the endless debates between carnivores, vegetarians and vegans because absolutely everybody deserves the best of vegetables, cooked or prepared in such lovely ways that meat becomes a minor side issue in the midst of a feast. Sustainable living is so much easier to promote when it’s couched in terms of taking up rather than giving up. Our cultural obsession with rarity and expense has blinded us to the beauty of simple and slow; and if you want to know when to eat your sweetcorn at its absolute peak of perfection, just follow a badger – he’ll know!

Whadda you mean – what am I doing!

Three sisters, free strawberries and a bit about sourdough

Finally all the elements of the the experimental three sisters planting are in place. In the centre there’s a winter squash called Crown Prince which is a great keeper and big enough to feed the whole family. Around the squash are Painted Mountain corn, and growing up through the greenery are the borlotti beans. How it will grow is anyone’s guess. Breaking with tradition slightly, the elements were all sown and brought on separately and then planted up together as soon as they looked strong enough to cope with the competition. Being a bit belt and braces about it we’re using a patch of ground we’ve never grown anything in before and we’ve got more of each of the elements growing separately around the garden, so whatever happens we can rely on some sort of harvest. I really hope that the three sisters planting will work out well because it’s such an efficient use of space, but we’ll see and I promise I’ll report back as the season goes on.

The polytunnel strawberries are finished now and have started to throw runners, and so we’ll be pegging the runners into small pots tomorrow and increasing the stock for free. I’ve done it many times before and it’s an amazingly easy and profitable way to go for a bigger crop. The six plants of Malling Centenary were a very cheap, end of season offer and with the usual TLC we’ll have had a small crop this season and as many as a couple of dozen plants to share between the tunnel and an outdoor bed next year; and that makes competition for space greater than ever.

I had built a raised strawberry bed during the winter but the plants I ordered never materialised and the bed has been commandeered for a crop of leeks and onions because it’s so easy to cover with hoops and insect mesh. The allotment is a picture at the moment – our little outpost of paradise – and for the first time we’ve got a small supply of cut flowers to bring back to the flat. We’ve even got three varieties of lavender growing – I’m not sure how that happened – like most addicts we can’t pass a plant sale.

As for sourdough, I wanted to write a little bit about the relationship between the starter and the dough. When I first made a sourdough starter more than ten years ago I experimented with a number of different flours and followed a number of different routines. It quickly emerged that the leader in every respect was no more complicated than a batter of water and dark rye flour – no added apples or anything like that – left on the windowsill and neglected until it started to froth up. My only concession to faffery was to use bottled water rather than the heavily chlorinated tap water we had at the time, but since the first few months I’ve just used tap water which has made no difference at all.

So my starter was born and raised on dark rye flour and since then I’ve tried many different mixtures of wholemeal and white organic flour to make the loaves. My everyday bread recipe changes a little almost every time I bake it.

However, during the lockdown the rye flour was unobtainable because so many people started making their own bread. The millers simply couldn’t scale up their operation fast enough. So I used wholemeal wheat flour to feed the starter for some months until the dark rye became available again and it worked reasonably well – if rather slowly. When I finally started feeding with dark rye once again, the starter almost shouted “thanks mate” – bubbling away on a new lease of life. So I wondered what would happen to proving times if I added just about 100g of dark rye to the loaf recipe. What happened is that the proving time in the banneton is reduced by as four or five hours; the bread lasts longer and is altogether livelier with good structure. Unlike most bakers I don’t go for the open textured loaves full of holes because Madame doesn’t like the way the butter on her toast runs down her sleeve when the bread is properly French! The French texture is easy enough to achieve if you add a proportion of softer (lower protein) flour to the mix, but it doesn’t keep as well.

So that’s it for today

There be Dragons

From the top, clockwise.

  • Emperor – Anax imperator
  • Large Red Damselfly – Pyrrhosoma nymphula
  • Broad Bodied Chaser – Libellula depressa
  • Golden Ringed Dragonfly – Cordulegaster boltonii (n.b. damage to left hindwing)

I wish I could claim that our most recent visitor – the Emperor dragonfly at the top – was encouraged to visit the allotment by the presence of the pond but it wasn’t; because we’ve been visited by these magnificent creatures every year since we took over the plots. What we can certainly take credit for is the threesome of Large Red damselflies, presumably two males and a female, who sorted their dispute out, allowing the female to mate with one of the males and lay her eggs in the pond while they were still joined. This morning there was another one resting on a conveniently placed cane over the water. As I’ve mentioned before, we now have dozens of ponds from baby baths to a proper 25 footer next door, not to mention the river barely 100 yards away, and several ponds around the Botanical Gardens which are fed by the same streams that dip underground and flow across the allotments – one of them under our plot. It must be dragonfly heaven. How could you not love these fabulous beasties? They’re voracious predators of smaller insects and probably constitute a decent meal for a hungry bird.

Ladybird eggs on the broad beans

On the Potwell Inn allotment, the broad beans have finally leapt into bloom and, being spring replants after most of the overwintering plants were killed off by the dreadful weather in March, they’re nice and soft and an easy target for blackfly. Mercifully the blackfly and the ladybirds have arrived at the same time and whilst pinching out the tops, Madame found a bunch of ladybird eggs – good news because the larvae are by far the more greedy predators. The white butterflies lay similar looking eggs, but they’re much larger and more elongated from memory.

Of course – (minus the blackfly) – the tops make a delicious meal long before the pods have filled. You can stir fry or steam them and they’re lovely. You could almost certainly eat them raw too, but we haven’t enjoyed them that way ourselves.

We’ve been full-on planting out, and we’re nearly at the end, but it’s been very warm and sunny so the transplants have needed mollycoddling to keep them going. One interesting discovery came with setting out the three sisters planting. We’re using the “Painted Mountain” variety for the sweetcorn, but we’re also growing an F1 hybrid for our ‘ordinary’ crop. We’ll take care to keep them as far apart as possible, but seed saving would never be a good idea on an allotment site because everyone is so close and growing every variety under the sun . What was very obvious that the trad. Painted Mountain are far more vigorous than the F1 hybrid – neatly denting one of their claims of superiority. Sadly the seeds cost about the same because here in the UK Painted Mountain is a bit harder to source. I’ve read one writer suggesting that she sows all three seeds (corn, squash and bean) at the same time but we haven’t tried that yet. We’ve started all three in root trainers; sowing the corn first to allow it to get away and avoid being choked out by the others. One day we’ll try simultaneous sowing but it’s a lot of ground to dedicate to an experiment.

Once everything is planted out we’ll be able to concentrate on weeding and watering (assuming this warm weather continues). The temperature variations in the polytunnel are enormous, but the plants seem to love it so long as they’ve got water. Finding time to combine writing, repairing the leaky skylight on the the campervan and gardening is quite challenging but the rewards are huge. It’s impossible to walk on to the allotment without wondering at the sheer energy of the earth and the plants in spring. Gardening can be a very time consuming activity and I feel sad that many of our first timers are getting overwhelmed by weeds. We always found it very difficult to manage a family and a large garden, when we were both working full time.

Something hot?

Habanero – the hottest one we grow!

Well, in the midst of this strangest of seasons we have managed to grow enough chillies to keep us going through the winter, although taking the extraordinary weather into account it looks as if ripening the last few stragglers is going to be a problem. For the first year since we’ve been on the plot, we managed to eat all our sweetcorn before the badgers/rats/squirrels and possibly deer got to them. We only managed this by planting them in the most inaccessible place and surrounding them with sheep netting barriers – it was, however, worth the hassle because home grown corn (like most veg) is so much better than the shop version. You wonder if they’ve been 3D printing them from cardboard.

The chillies seem to be a bit of a blokey enthusiasm, with fierce competition to grow a chilli hot enough to heat a small town for a week – a sort of vegetable willie waving, if that’s not too lively a metaphor for a Tuesday morning. We don’t even eat anything much hotter than a Jalapeño, so my Apache chillies are dutifully frozen, and the Habaneros respectfully avoided. The pleasure it seems is in the achievement of getting them to bear fruit and ripen – which in a season that’s swerved between the biblical extremes of flood, fire and storm is a bit of a problem. *Even the frogs have done exceptionally well this year but the boils have mercifully stayed away.

However the cherry tomatoes have suffered terribly from brown rot, and that’s down to the erratic rain and sunshine and exacerbated by water splash on the leaves. But we’ve gathered enough from the rather sad looking bushes to make a couple of litres of oven dried tomatoes in oil. It’s a skill to balance dryness with sheer toughness because once they’ve gone to far, no amount of olive oil will bring them back to life. I like to give these tomatoes twenty minutes in their oil at around 110C in the oven after drying them overnight at 65C because low acidity bottled fruits can, in exceptional circumstances, develop botulinus contamination.

The same problem happens with figs if you dry them in their skins. To be fair, nearly everything is better eaten fresh, straight out of the ground or off the tree. I’d make some fig compôte except we’re cutting out sugar at the moment and all of my favourite preserves are close to pure carbohydrate. As Oscar Wilde said – “I can withstand anything except temptation”, and DH Lawrence got positively aroused by them, but I think they’d both be quite safe with this year’s efforts in the Potwell Inn kitchen.

So this year has been pretty good. I love the fact that the old, unglamorous plants like savoy cabbages, brussels sprouts, and especially leeks are all loving it. The autumn leeks are stout and sweet and the succession ones are coming along far better than they have for the past four years, which – I guess – is what allotmenteering is all about. You have to embrace and enjoy success when it comes, but never get blown off course by failure. Once you’ve renounced the chemicals and given up the extractive attitude then you’re in a one on one relationship with the earth which has its own ways and is a far better teacher than any book. In many ways, ‘though I can’t claim any deep knowledge of the subject, the earth teaches a form of Tai Chi, or Taoist spirituality. I don’t mean all that stuff about being ‘closer to God in a garden’ which completely misunderstands what happens when merely looking at something miraculously becomes beholding. Forgive me, I’m digging deep here but it’s a crucial distinction.

There really is a huge difference between hard gardening that wants to bully and harry the earth into submission, and contemplative gardening that opens intangible channels through which we can ‘hear’ and even ‘understand’ what response is asked of us.

Don’t cling! Don’t strive! Abandon yourself! Look beneath your feet!

Ryōkan

* Biblical joke, sorry. Old habits die hard.