The after work gardener, Tuesday 5 July
It dawned on me yesterday, as I happily picked, washed and cooked my dinner, that I haven't had to buy any fresh green veg or salad from the shops for almost a week now.
Last night it was a stir-fry medley of French beans - pictured languishing left, mange tout, spinach, and my first few carrots (compared to last year's non-starting carrots, this year's harvest is proving positively gigantic - well thicker and longer than my index finger which is a startling success in my book).
It's a shame to add any spices to cooking at the moment, as I'm keen to taste the individual flavours of each item I've grown. I've now a real comprehension of each vegetable's flavour, which I've discovered with home grown food is very tasty: French beans are peppery; mange tout is slightly sweet; and carrots have an almost coriander type tang that is delicious. Crisp and crunchy green side salads with lettuce, spinach, parsley and radishes have become somewhat of a norm, and yet not a discarded pre-packed plastic salad bag in site - I love it, and feel so very smug.
In fact, I was so dizzy with the excitement of all my harvesting that I nearly put pay to both myself and my forest of tiny tomato plants. My cunning cobbled brick 10 inch walk-way along my plot, dividing the beans against the fence and the rest of the patch, proved somewhat unstable and precarious when I swivelled around to pick yet more and more French Beans yesterday.
I was so focused on picking the beans that were touching the soil - and right in the path of the clearly famished snails - that I lost balance and started falling towards my patch of courgettes, pumpkins, aubergines and tomatoes. This part of the plot is like a bed of twiggy nails with 2ft high spiky sticks filling the patch to prevent next door's cat scratching them to kingdom come. As I fell, the short lives of my plants flashed before my eyes and I weighed-up saving them or impaling myself on spiky sticks.
I've no idea how, but I managed to fling one arm onto the patio to break my fall, and halted only millimetres above my nervous looking tomato plants, accompanied by only the slight crunch of twigs against my chest - all the while next door's cat sniggering from its warm vantage point on the roof of next door's shed. Until now, I hadn't known the true precariousness of harvesting. So, nothing damaged or broken - apart from my pride, and no plants ruined, I promptly did exactly the same seconds later.
My good fortune at actually having produced some part of my meals for the past week has clearly left me slightly unbalanced, so who knows how I will react if the pumpkin plant - which is currently threatening to take over the runner beans - becomes pumpkin soup and a haunting Halloween lantern, or if the cucumbers - which despite the packet saying grow in a greenhouse - survive against the sunny, sheltered, south facing fence where I've positioned them, and produce an accompaniment to a cream cheese sandwich?
No comments:
Post a Comment