Dodgy plumming

Don’t for one minute think that living on a smallholding is like a Good Housekeeping gingham and roses article with a delicious homemade Victoria sponge always on the table. It’s not. It’s the aim, but the reality is that there is always something needing tending, mending, cleaning, picking and processing from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year.

We took a little holiday to Crete this year. We left the vegetables peacefully growing in the field, the tomatoes ripening in the greenhouse, the plums swelling in the orchard. It was the beginning of August.

Crete was beautiful, arid and hot. Only the hardiest plants showed any signs of life – silver leafed olive trees clinging to the red rocky mountain slopes, cacti, fragrant wild sage and splashes of magenta bougainvillea against white-washed walls. Nothing seemed to be actually growing, just waiting. The cicadas, hidden from sight, scritched loudly day and night, the Meltemi wind bowled down the mountains bending the eucalyptus and olive trees under its invisible wave. We lay in the sun reading books, we swam, we drank cold beer in cafes. It was delightful. I thought, ‘Could I live like this?’

When we landed back in England the sun was shining and the greenness was startling. We drove at 6am past grazing sheep and cattle, gardens garish with summer blooms in their prime. We wheeled our suitcases up the lavender lined path to the front door and thought it might be a nice idea to have a little snooze after 24 hours without sleep.  But then we thought we might just take a peep at the field and the greenhouse first with a cup of English tea in hand.

We had been warned about the blight while we were away by  friends who had come for a little family holiday in the country and had ended up tirelessly digging up and burning all our tomato plants (as well as coping with a spot of cat terrorism!). The warm damp weather had been perfect for the blight and it had taken out all our carefully nurtured tomatoes and potatoes.

In the field there was a riot. I wondered whether to sit down with my cup of tea and look at a thistle for five minutes to see if I could actually watch it growing. Forget time-release photography. The weeds swayed in the light morning breeze, robust and triumphant. Every species of weed under the sun seemed to have moved into our little plot. Where had they all come from? All around is pure pasture that wouldn’t even accept my gift of lovely wild flower seeds in the spring and yet on our veg plot the variety was astounding  and they had taken over every inch of ground completely hiding my carefully sown rows of spring onions, carrots and beetroot.

Of course, we started to pull out the odd weed, tea in hand, and one weed leads to the next and finally after about an hour of toiling we found a carrot top. So they were there, bless them…my babies! Meanwhile, just behind me, I was sure I could hear a faint creaking and rushing of sap as  the weeds gathered pace  - growing, growing - faster than I could pull their brethren out.

The Weeds fall into my tending category – an on-going job, but I’m delighted to say that my baby vegetables are soldiering bravely on with their growth and now stand like rows of well behaved children in orderly lines ignoring the mayhem around them.

Nature is fantastic. Living in the countryside, I am constantly amazed by the abundance all around us. Well, to be more honest, right now I’m overwhelmed by it. Nature’s abundance comes all at once. Everywhere you look are delicious edibles, perfect for just such a short time. In our orchard the plums were weighing down the branches and the wasps were licking their lips. It felt like a national emergency to get them all picked. Children were deployed up the trees and plums rained down. Marvellous! We breathed a sigh of relief at a job well done and hefted the brimming trugs inside. There they were, picked - all our plums, all needing processing or they would all end up on the compost heap!

Processing sounds very clinical, but  preserving  is a clinical procedure. You have to have just the right amount of sugar or vinegar or alcohol to keep the bugs away; specific temperatures have to be reached and maintained for a certain time and then of course there’s the sterilization of all the receptacles that are used in the process. It may be a sweet smelling process but it has been like a laboratory in the farm kitchen for a week or so now. I have de-stoned hundreds of plums, I have de-stringed hundreds of runner beans; courgettes and beetroot are piling up awaiting my attention and all around glossy blackberries and elderberries twinkle at me as I peg out the washing, just crying out to be picked and turned into jellies and chutneys and wine.

The jam jars and kilner jars are stacking up colourfully on every surface. We have eaten jam with everything…jam on lamb – not bad! But jam is sticky stuff and a lot of washing up needs to be done, which is fine if you have a tap. But there lies a problem: somehow our kitchen tap came off in my hand the other day. Water sprayed everywhere, soaking me and entertaining the children. I rammed it back into the hole where it remains wonkily emitting  just the faintest trickle when full on. So now I have to boil pans and kettles for the washing up, which, as you can imagine, just adds to the fun.

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.