Seedy Thoughts

I am eating onion soup fresh as can be made from onions we picked from the field first thing this morning. It is delicious and particularly special as we did not actually plant any onions. What I thought I had planted so laboriously back in February were shallots...but hey! I was wrong. Ah, the joy of catapulting oneselves into a completely new way of life with little research other than watching a couple of episodes of the Good Life.

Back in the gloom of last winter I went online to the Garden Organic website and whiled away a morning choosing my seeds. Click...lettuce - Marvel of Four Seasons; click...lettuce - Bughatti and so on. A few days on, and, surprise, surprise, Postman Pat arrived bearing a box containing 103 packets of seeds and lots of shallot sets. So many packets to hide around the house whilst I worked out how to justify such a seedy frenzy. But there were just too many varieties to choose from - what was a girl supposed to do? I based my choices on nothing more scientific than their fancy names: my beans are regal -Purple Queens and Great Windsors, and the Marquess d'Auvigny peas have delusions of grandeur. I shopped by colour too...beetroot Golden Detroit, Rhubarb chard and Canary leaf beet; Rainbow and Yellowstone carrots; kohl rabi Azur Star. Oh, I could go on, but you get my gist.

There was a time when I might have just chucked the seeds all at once onto the ground and waited in vain for a bountiful harvest. But over the last few months we have been through The Learning Curve (more like a Learning Spike in our case). Books are helpful and magazines such as Grow Your Own and the Garden Organic magazine are useful too, but there is nothing that compares to being shown. Dave's Dad, John, was a market gardener for years and still has an allotment at the age of ninety. He has shown us how to set up irrigation using our own well-water, how to pinch out tomatoes and train them up strings in the greenhouse, how to plant each and every vegetable that we now grow in the field. He has told us when to worry about the state of a plant and get rid of it to make way for something else and when to just leave a young plant be and let it recover from a nippy breeze. We now know how to tweek off the tops of broad beans to prevent black-fly, when to cover the brassicas with fleece to keep off the cabbage white butterflies. We have dug by spade and fork and quickly learnt that we can't do this thing without a tractor. We know that it never stops out in the field and if you are not weeding you are sowing, and that if you sow everything at the same time, it ripens at the same time...yes, I know it seems obvious.

There have been moments over the year when we have thought that we'd never do it -that we had overstretched ourselves this time. But then you go out onto the field on a morning like this, sun just up, mugs of tea in hand - and there it is...abundance glinting beneath dew-spangled leaves. The children sat on the tractor, eating their toast and marmite, while we washed fat bulbs of purple French garlic, the 'shallots' that grew into onions, bunches of beetroot, violet kohl rabi, carrots - long, short, yellow, orange and purple, courgettes of all shapes and colours, tomatoes from the greenhouse. We packed boxes of produce and hefted them into the back of the landrover to be dropped off at the Tin Drums after the school run. And there it was - a good morning; the way it was meant to be.

From Field to Fork

10.00am: A gorgeous blustery day...the sort that makes you catch your breath with joy at being out in it. And better still, it is not obligatory (as it has been during the heatwave)...there is just enough of a chill in the air to be mildly off-putting and what clouds there are in the blue sky look heavy as if at any moment they would drop their load right over me. So, a perfect excuse to stay inside and turn on the computer. The rarest of treats.

Suddenly it seems there is going to be a storm; the wind has whipped up outside now but inside it is quiet except for the scamper of kittens. They are everywhere...five of them...all over my lap, my lap-top, in and out of guitars, wellies, the wood-burning stove. Dixy, their mother - not much more than a kitten herself - grew up fast and now sits on the window cill, watching them with a baleful eye, her tail flicking slowly. She spends hours berating them with her strange purring mother-meiow, hours suckling them, hours cleaning each and every one of them and hours shopping for them out in the field, coming home every day with a selection of baby animals for them to share under the kitchen table as we have our breakfast. Unpleasant, indeed, but if we take them away, the carnage is worse - she plunders the fields anew. She's a very diligent mother.

Outside in the bread oven is another maternity ward. Our hens went broody weeks ago and I had to start buying eggs from the supermarket again. There were dozens of eggs being sat on for weeks by all these grumpy hens. I didn't know what to do! I asked the Ladies of the Dicker for their pearls of wisdom because we went way over the twenty one days alloted to a fertile egg for hatching and yet when i inadvertently cracked the odd one, they were quite definately 'with chick'. So we bobbed the eggs up and down in bowls of warm water, discarded those that sank and popped floaters back under Black Betty (uber-mum). Ousted, all the other hens flounced off to take mud baths after so many weeks of pointless brooding. Then one day last week during my morning egg-fret I noticed a titchy beak tapping through the shell. Naturally, I nearly dropped the egg with excitement, but regained composure and ran all eggs and fast as I could to the safety of a disused bread oven we have outside and then rushed Black Betty to her new safe haven too in case Dixy decided to make a few menu changes. When the children got home from school, there it was - one tiny fluffy black chick - gorgeous! And eleven eggs still to hatch. So for the next few days we lifted Black Betty up-down, up-down, to perform chick check. But no chicks. We did the warm water test again and clearly some no longer had living chicks in them so we removed those eggs. Then Black Betty trod on one of the fertile eggs, and upon inspection it was definately not fertile, just very old with a rather antique pong. And so it was with the other eggs - all duffs and profoundly smelly. So we have just one chick. Louis announced our new arrival in the playground to one of the mothers who breeds chicks. She asked how many we had; 'Just the one,' he said, 'How many have you got?'

'Eighty thousand,' she replied.

2.00pm: Here is the storm; thunder cracking over the flat fields; rain like I have not seen for a long time, a waterfall cascading down the side of the house. Rain, then flashes of sunlight - the vegetables will love it. But our soil is dense clay out here - waterlogged at one end of the field in weather like this, rock hard after a few days of sun. The vegetable plot was pasture before this year but over winter the pigs dug it up neatly and fertilized it for us - wonderful creatures! We are planning how to improve the soil for next year and chatting up the local horsey folk in search of heaps of unwanted manure - we're going to need a lot.

This morning Dave was up early to take the Landrover round to the field for a lamb delivery from Tottingworth Farm; then out to see what could be harvested for the Tin Drums before getting Martha into school in Brighton on time. He took in herbs and garlic, beetroot (my favourite, especially the amazing golden ones which I am planting more of tomorrow), first ripening tomatoes, spring onions, kohl rabi (which have lovely blueish leaves and are interplanted with blue borage flowers - I didn't expect the vegetable plot to look so pretty), tender yellow French beans, and at this time of year, plenty of courgettes.

I must think about feeding the family now and like the cat go out into the field to see what I can find to put on our forks. All I can hear is distant thunder, the rain, a ticking clock, the cats purring...no tv, no cars, no sirens - time to log off.