When I was much, much younger I worked for a big company and
had two line managers. One I admired very much from a work perspective but, at
times, she could be really difficult to get along with; the other seemed a nice
person but she just wasn’t doing a great job. To make matters worse, they
despised each other. Strangely, none of it bothered me. I found it easy to
separate the personal from the professional. I realised I could like someone but hate working with them,
and that I could work brilliantly with someone even if they threw massive
wobblers.
The Brexit fallout kind of reminds me of that. I’m glad I
can disagree with someone and still like them as a person. If you liked someone
two weeks ago, it’s alright to still like them now, no matter how they voted. Of
course, some Leavers are just nasty pricks – they were before, they still are,
they always will be – but we never liked them anyway, did we?
For anyone who’s interested, this is my favourite discussion
of Brexit, told through the medium of owl photos. Yes, you read that correctly,
owl photos.
Courgettes, anyone?
It’s been hot, hot, hot for a couple of weeks now and the
garden has come on leaps and bounds. We ate our first Latah tomatoes this week
(delicious, definitely worth growing), and we’ve been living off spinach salad
for what seems like forever (really just a couple of weeks but, damn, spinach
salad gets old fast).
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| I think these are the Black Krim tomatoes, but, honestly, it's hard to keep track of our seven million varieties. |
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| They get more attention than me. |
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| Latah bush tomatoes ripening. |
In other salad news, we’ve starting harvesting from the new
kale plants already. (Woo yeah, KALE!) We’ve also been zhuzhing up salads with
nasturtiums and chive flowers. For ages I was a bit weird about eating flowers.
I was a fussy eater as a child and, 30 years later, I still find myself
reverting to ew, no, I won’t like it
when faced with something I’ve never eaten before. Blame my parents – they
raised me to believe tinned kidney beans were deadly. I’ve come a long way. Anyway,
these flowers are awesome in salads – the nasturtiums taste really rockety (and
look gorgeous), and chive petals give a strong oniony hit. As I am, apparently,
incapable of growing rocket and lettuce, the nasturtiums make a useful
substitute.
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| I took a picture of my food. Like a wanker. |
Our courgette plants are hitting their stride. All three
plants look like they’re going to be really productive this year, so we may
start getting overwhelmed pretty soon. To be honest, I feel a little courgetted
out already this summer, thanks to 10 days in Greece eating fried courgettes
and tzatziki every day. Give it another week or two and I’ll be desperately
Googling courgette recipes as the pile sulks on the kitchen worktop. For now,
our favourite recipe is the courgette balls from the Vefa’s Kitchen cookbook.
I also made an Iranian golden beetroot dip this week using
our home-grown beets – so Guardian,
but so delicious. Otherwise, we’ve just been eating beetroot in, you guessed
it, salad. Have I mentioned how much salad we’ve been eating? It helps offset
all the post-holiday/football/Brexit alcohol we’ve consumed lately.
The strawberries are over and done with already, and I still
didn’t have enough to make a batch of jam, despite having a gazillion plants.
At least we managed to enjoy plenty fresh with Greek yoghurt and in smoothies. Also,
the blackberry plants that Svilen gave us last year have quite a few berries on
them, after looking so sickly just a few months ago. Gone are the days of
paying £2.50 for a tiny punnet of Waitrose blackberries – you know, because the
Waitrose is 2,000 miles away, but also because I now have them in the garden. I
win, Waitrose, I win.
The most important
harvest: booze
I don’t care about being self-sufficient in food, but the
ultimate aim is to be self-sufficient in booze. Instead of a smallholding, I
want a boozeholding.
Lucky, then, that the main apple tree is loaded with fruit this
year. It’s so loaded, we’ve had to prop up the branches with sticks. We have a
couple of other apple trees but the big, old one closest to the house is the
bellwether for the year ahead. Rob made some incredible cider last autumn –
really crisp and dry, with a bit of fizz and a serious kick. We didn’t have the kit to test the alcohol level but,
based on our cider-drinking experience (not such a wasted youth, after all), we
reckon it was easily 6%, maybe 7%. After one glass my eyes would glaze over.
Another glass and I’d be pretty squiffy. Three glasses and the whole night’s
sleep was a right-off. You know when it’s the middle of the night and you’re so
jittery and hot and thirsty from too much booze, and you can feel the hangover
kicking in already? Yep, we were like that after three small glasses of Rob’s cider. Anyway, bring on this year’s batch
and some (moderate) cider drinking.
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| So many apples. So many future hangovers. |
Rob also made some excellent white and red wine last autumn,
and it looks like we’re in for another good grape crop – that’s if Barney the
Terrible can stop shimmying up the grape vines and clawing his way along them. (This
morning, I heard Rob shout in anger for the first time in years, as Barney
clung onto the vine above the kitchen window, gradually wrenching it away from
the wall. Rob was so mad he dropped a c-bomb. Earth’s axis shifted. The entire
village fell silent. Somewhere, a butterfly cried. I thought it was fucking
brilliant.)
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| 'Get down you little c**t.' |
Project ‘Grow More
Pretty Shit’
Hmmm, the flower garden. Some bits look alright, others totally
chaotic, but at least there’s plenty to look at. We’ve had sweet peas, roses,
nigella and cosmos in flower for a couple of weeks. And this week the dahlias
and cupid’s dart started to flower. Even our coriander, which has bolted in the
heat, looks gorgeous with its little white flowers.
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| Dahlias (and bee) |
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| Coriander |
It’s so nice to have fresh cut flowers for the house every
week. It makes me feel like a proper grown up. Which, of course, I am,
biologically speaking. Sometimes it takes a vase of home-grown flowers to
remind me I’m not 17 anymore.
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| I can guarantee Barney will destroy these within five minutes. |
