10.6.25
in the soil
The beans and the cucumbers are coming up nicely together, yes, although it seems the weekend's rain has brought the slugs out again, one seedling stripped entirely of its seed leaves, tiny true-leaf in the middle just holding on – anyway, I think, I didn't want more than two cucumber plants in that bed, hungry things that they are. The jobs today are structural, I have to build a frame for the beans to grow up (the cucumbers will sprawl across the ground however they like, however I try to encourage them) out of bamboo canes and lengths of hazel (I recommend a hazel tree as a constant source of twigs and switches and poles, even if you never beat the squirrels to the nuts) and tie it up with string; I should put up more poles to tie and contain the surge of bramble but I haven't got the right things to do so, I use a thick cord designed for something on boats to keep the bramble in place and I need to buy some more. At the other end of the plot behind the compost bin there is a hole in the fence patched with a palette cable-tied on into which a couple of weeks ago I trained another length of bramble and I am pleased to see it has grown around and through the planks, an almost-natural fence.
in the kitchen
I am (arguably) getting carried away with the summer and all its fruit and the ferments I am making more of because of my monthly workshops and my lessened hours at work, I was only going to pick a few broad beans and artichokes yesterday to make another little dinner of them but then I saw a handful of redcurrants were ripe and while investigating the fence and its bramble was overwhelmed by the sticky Muscat scent of elderflower and so now I have a jar of redcurrant cheong on top of the cupboard, just enough to make one or two things with, and I have a five-litre demijohn of sugar and water and elderflower fermenting (hopefully) with the latter's wild yeasts into (hopefully) elderflower champagne or if not then at least into something sweet and fizzy and floral and fun! It is fun, having these little projects, not enough to really do anything with but just to add a little sweetness or a little salt or a little funk to something, somewhere down the line.
on the page
This week I finished reading Richard Mabey's The Accidental Garden which I have mentioned before as well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Little Boy, a strange sort of transcendental memoir by the then-pushing 100 poet and painter and publisher and godfather to the Beat movement. This I read the first third of three or more years ago (?) and then for some reason put it back on my bookshelf and left it there and then for some reason picked it up again this week just gone. Mostly punctuation-free it sometimes has all the fire and verve of his younger days, of Ginsberg and Kerouac and friends and sometimes has the energy of an old man well in his anecdotage, waving an eternal stick at the eternal problems of earth, war, sex, empire, the burning mess of Turtle Island. Honestly and not to be patronising there is something quite impressive in the sustained mental energy of a book like this written by a man not far from dying, if not raging against the dying of the light then at least giving forth a last desperate bloom.