‘Cut back summer fruiting raspberries, tidy up strawberry
plants, hoe winter cabbage, collect parsnip seed, lift autumn sown onions, side
shoot tomatoes, tie back cucumber plants, hoe leeks, sort out the pumpkins
making a bid for freedom across the main path through the allotment, hoe
lettuce, hoe sweetcorn, hoe …, pick gooseberries, pick blackcurrants, make
rhubarb and ginger marmalade, clear bindweed, sort out nettles, pull ragwort.’
The ‘To Do List’ is scary.
After almost two months of long dry, hot days with
temperatures up in the high 20’s, parched chalky soil and sulking plants that
refuse to grow despite lots of watering, the weather broke dramatically last
week with a spectacle storm that filled the night sky with sheet lightening and
rocked the hills with thunder as wind and rain chased each other through the
darkness.
Sitting on the sofa downstairs, petrified collie on my lap
trying to hide under my arm, both watching the light show, and listening to the
low rumbling of the storm outside, it seemed like the answer to a gardener’s
prayer. At last a decent rain that would sink slowly through the soil and reach
roots where it was needed.
Now of course, I want it to stop because everything has
suddenly gone crazy. Plants that languished in the heat have pushed down their
roots and put on inches overnight. I can hear the sweetcorn growing. Which is
great, but the bad guys were lurking in the wings and have now taken centre
stage and are hogging the limelight as they grow and weeds are stronger, more
resilient than anything we are foolish enough to plant to eat.
And where were all those large black slugs hiding from the
heat? Because they have come out in the rain to party under the soft light of
the moon, slipping between cabbage plants, weaving amongst the lettuce, leaving
behind silver trails that glisten with first light.
Suddenly the battle to keep on top of everything in the
garden has turned into a war.
I was fine at the beginning of the season, feeling
confident that I was managing things well until … the strawberries ripened and
then the summer raspberries. Suddenly the red currant bushes were hanging with
fruit and I turned around to find they were rubbing shoulders with their white
namesakes; tiny, opaque, milky berries catching the early morning sunlight as
they ripened. Finally, there are the gooseberries, green and sharp, purple and
sweet, nestling amongst their thorns.
As I laboured to keep up with picking and harvesting I
wondered what had happened to my plan to turn this abundance into sorbets, ice
cream, jellies, and jams for use in the barren months of winter. I did manage
to make gooseberry and elderflower ice cream for the first time this year and I
knocked out some runny redcurrant jelly and some well set, (with a little help
from a bottle of pectin) blackcurrant jam and we have eaten more crumbles,
cobblers, fruit salads and meringues than is good for one person but my freezer
and cupboards are not bulging with bags of fruit or jars of preserves. There
simply wasn’t time and sadly a lot of the ripe fruit has just fallen to the
ground wasted.
One thing I hate is waste which is why I am looking for
recipes involving cucumbers. This is definitely the year of the Cucurbit. I
have cucumbers by the gross. I have never had so many. Maybe it is down to the
long dry, hot spell we have had or it could be all the added chicken manure in
the polytunnel where the birds spent the winter under quarantine from bird flu.
I have given them to everyone I know whether they need one or not, tried to
sell them, tried ignoring them hanging below the leaves and now I am
contemplating freezing cucumber soup. Under the curtain of darkness courgettes
grow into marrows overnight and the squash are climbing up the fruit netting. I
ought to be pickling some of these but I can’t keep on top of the weeds and
spend time indoors cooking. The upside is that I have melons doing nicely in
the greenhouse. These need to be fertilized by hand and maybe I don’t get out
enough, but I find it exciting when I discover the pollination has worked and a
small, slightly oval shaped pale green, grey melon is hiding beneath the
prickly leaves.
At the moment, I
need an eight-day week and then another day to unwind and relax. Gardeners are
not good at sitting and enjoying what they have created; there is always a weed
just at the edge of your vision that needs removing and a sense of guilt if you
just ‘stand and stare’. So, I make moments; sitting in the early morning warmth
of the sun with a bowl of muesli and a cup of tea, pausing to watch the
butterflies dancing in the warmth above the brambles at the top of the bank
when I check the sheep in the morning, the flash of Marbled Whites, Red Admirals with dusky closed wings, bright orangey brown Small Tortoiseshell, Gatekeepers
and then a spectacular Coma with its curved wings, trapped in the heat and then
from the shade of the trees come dark brown Speckled Woods.
Sometimes things just make you stop; the black and orange
striped caterpillars of the cinnabar moth devouring a ragwort plant, a
pyramidal orchid amongst the ox-eyed daisies, a cluster of tiny pink centaury,
a small magpie moth trapped on the glass of the greenhouse. At other times, you
have to make time happen like the evening we pitched our tent in the bottom
field and sat beneath the wood listening to the rooks settling for the night as
the light drained from the western sky and woke to their noisy calls at dawn.
Summer is so short. There is so much to do. There is so
much to see and enjoy. Maybe I need a ‘to be’ list not a ‘to do’ list. Now
there is a thought!
