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.