Staring into the bottomless void, reasons to stay cheerful, and late season fruit
Hello to you all and welcome – I hope you and your garden are surviving November more or less intact. This is never a good time of year for me. I start playing mind games just to get through it - you know, the ones you scoff at in the heady optimism of summer - think of three things to be grateful for, count your blessings, turn that frown upside down, try not to scream at the hopelessness of it all….
Yes, well, now now, enough of that. There is no denying we are in the dog days of the year. There is little to look forward to but more rain, more cold, more darkness, and only the all-too-brief distraction of Christmas to take our minds off it all. I prefer even January to this: at least it doesn’t feel quite so long till spring.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. How about Yorkshire? That was nice. Especially my visit to RHS Garden Harlow Carr. I will overlook the fact that it was chucking it down with rain on my visit: even an umbrella wasn’t enough to prevent me getting soaked through to the skin, so we retreated to Betty’s Tea Room (there is a branch at the garden with shorter queues than the more famous one in Harrogate) for some soup and a warm-through. With a wonderfully piquant irony we got to see the major works they’re doing at Harlow Carr right now, installing flood prevention measures and using nature-based solutions to manage the water flow from all this rain: I will be reporting soon on what they’ve come up with, once I’ve dried out a bit.
And there is a little (eco-friendly, non-plastic) glitter to sprinkle: I am at the Garden Media Guild Awards today, in a frock, under the chandeliers of the ballroom at the Savoy Hotel in London. My most recent book for the RHS, Can I Grow Potatoes in Pots (as far as I’m aware, the first general book on vegetable growing to be based on sustainable growing methods from start to finish) is a finalist for Practical Book of the Year. I am up against some stiff competition, so not expecting to win, but to be honest I feel like I’ve won already: although I have won an award for my article writing (the Beth Chatto Environment Award in 2019, for my series of articles on going plastic-free in the garden), this is the first of my books to be shortlisted.
And I have a new job! See - there are lots of reasons to be cheerful. I have just taken on a new role for a charity I have admired for years: Plantlife, the wildflower conservation group behind No Mow May, has taken me on as their Peat-Free Advocate. So I get to talk peat-free with basically anyone who’ll listen, and work with lots of committed and passionate people towards ending the use of peat in horticulture. It feels like this is my chance to really make a difference.
So what’s happening in the garden?
I think it’s safe to say this season’s harvest is now officially over: I’ve gathered in the very last of the fruits to squirrel away. In my case this means cooking apples – I grow a particularly fine variety called Warner’s King, which I first came across as a spectacularly productive tree in my mum’s old garden near Salisbury. It produces big, Bramley-like apples but with a crisper, slightly sweeter flavour.
And then there are the medlars. I was hoping they would ‘blet’ (rot, essentially – they need to do this to become edible) on the tree but I went up to see them a week ago and they were still hard, so I’ve decided not to risk it any further given the weather and bring them all in to blet indoors on the windowsill. I will talk you through this slightly weird process in detail in a later post – with, if all goes well, my recipe for medlar jelly.
As the summer harvest ends, attention switches to winter crops: and here the rain has really helped. The chard has gone a bit bonkers: this is my go-to store cupboard staple, a crop you can have in the garden 12 months of the year so you’re never without some lovely nutritious fresh-tasting greens. You can cut the whole head and leave the stump in the ground to resprout; or pick leaf-by-leaf, leaving the central growing point to produce more leaves. I like them wilted in the frying pan with a knob of butter, garlic and pepper. This stand should last me the rest of the winter and well into spring – not bad, since they’re self-sown and have required zero resources or care from me.
There – I’m feeling better already! Let me know how you’re getting on and how your nearly-winter garden is doing. I hope you have plenty to pick out in the winter veg beds and enough crisp, sunny winter days to get outside and keep those November blues at bay. Happy gardening!