No more seals since my last post, and though I ventured into the sea at the weekend, I think my swimming days may be over for this year. The dogs and I are enjoying long morning walks in the last-gasp sunshine of this glorious Indian summer.
I’ve loved seeing the leaves begin to turn colour, and have started to collect sloes for gin and rosehips for syrup….
Actually, most of the above came from a massive garden tidy-up I’m engaged in. The hedge along the roadside boundary had become congested, with a lot of dead wood in amongst the roses, hawthorn, guelder rose and hazel I’d planted four or five years ago. Over the years we’d been immersed in planning and building work, the ground at the base of the hedge had become so covered with brambles, nettles and remains of cow parsley that it was difficult to get in there to prune, so a major operation has taken place which means we are temporarily a lot less private, but a lot more tidy. There’s also room for me to plant lots of daffodils along the boundary (I love the white ones like old-fashioned ‘Pheasant’s Eye’ with its small orange corona) and put in a few more bare-rooted native hedging plants to fill up the gaps. And the more tangible fruits of my activity were several kilos of rosehips to crush, boil up with sugar and strain into bottles.
Even after that, there were still plenty left for the birds. The starlings are gathering in long long lines on the telegraph wires, and the air is filled with their chattering. Meanwhile, in the rest of the garden, it’s time to take stock, tidy up and embark on plans for a path between the two long borders beneath the pergola – and the large pond I envisage at the end. It’s an ambitious plan, but I’m looking forward to putting it into action. Here’s the view at present, so you can see there’s a lot to do (in fact, the borders have already been cleared and dug over, but I didn’t have the camera with me…)
I feel a bit embarrassed sharing that messy photograph with you, but it’s important to have the starting point in mind! And here are some lovely ones of the rest of the garden, including our little ornamental veg patch in it’s unruly late-summer splendour.
It’s been a good first year, with huge crops of salad leaves, spring onions, radishes, carrots, spinach, french and runner beans and more courgettes than I knew what do do with – the larder shelves are groaning with courgette, onion and dill pickle (fab recipe in my Weekend Book). The main mistake, apart from not quite getting the successional sowing right, was to put out the purple sprouting broccoli plants without protection. Inspired by a local friend who had some gorgeous plants interspersed among his front garden borders last winter, I popped in a seedling at the centre of each of the raised beds early in the summer. All went well until I noticed the pretty white buttlerflies flitting about the garden. It has been a good summer for butterflies in general, and cabbage whites are no exception. In a week or two the plants were so covered in caterpillars that, despite our best efforts out picking every morning, Mary and I were unable to keep up with their disposal. The result is leaves so riddled with holes they look like green paper doilies. Ugly though they look, I’m reluctant to lose the plants, as I love purple sprouting broccoli so much – it perks me up through those January and February months when there is precious little else to pick. So I’m leaving it in the hope that once the butterflies are gone it will recover. I think there’s just enough leaf left… And next year I shall have to resort to nets.
The other notable harvests have been the pumpkins: three large ones like the above, and one small, which will soon be gracing the front steps of the house, and the grapes…
Not enough for wine-making yet, but next year, when I’ve been able to train them properly over the new pergola – who knows? As we gathered up some fruits of the garden for Mary’s harvest festival at school (note how I am fobbing off courgettes on the needy), I reflected that it has been a good harvest this year – of all sorts of intangible things, too.
Though my mother’s death in the summer is still the source of inestimable sadness, it has been a fruitful year in other ways. The house is in order, the puppies are grown and happy with their new owners, Mary is thriving at school, and we have begun to put down roots – both physical and emotional – in our new surroundings. So my heart is full of gratitude this autumn.
For background on our project to turn two Victorian railway carriages into an eco-home, more photographs, garden writing, other journalism and information on my past and current books, please visit my website.
