1.7.26
in the soil
Between heatwave and thunderstorm everything has grown an almost unbelievable amount since last week so that for a minute I doubted myself, had to check my calendar to make sure I had in fact been here, cut the grass, picked this and that. I realise that parts of my plot which are supposed to be paths between beds have become impassable, either covered in weeds or grown up into dense tuffets that resist cutting. So before I do anything else I go around with the strimmer, cutting swathes through grass and plantain and nettle, even as I tell myself that each of these little patches must be an ideal habitat for something or other; our allotment committee are more lenient than many, I think, but they must have their limit, and I suspect that grass taller than I am blowing its seed across everyone else’s plots might be approaching it. So down everything goes, and might make good hay if we had the space to dry and store it, and if the rain wasn’t coming and going in smattering bursts. That done it is time to pull up the broad beans, regretting once again that the last few have rotted in the rain or been eaten by slugs or birds or mice before I had a chance to save and dry them, marvelling once again at the strange white nodules on the roots which perform the plants’ role as nitrogen fixers, intermediaries between the mineral and organic, the air and the earth. I turn the soil over the way a pig or a chicken might, smooth it into a fine-ish tilth, make a line for a row of chard seeds, a series of holes for cucuzza, the climbing Sicilian squash. With no tomatoes or cucumbers or courgettes growing (a mix of failed seeds and my own disorganisation) I am placing my hopes on these later-summer harvests, gambling that the season will not collapse entirely into rain before its heat is over.
in the kitchen
While I do love arrangements of cold meat and salads, light dinners of this and that, and plates of simply dressed pasta eaten as close to the window as possible to catch at least a little breeze, it is something of a relief to be able to cook again - last night I even turned the oven on to grill / roast some skewers of fat prawns marinated in lemon, garlic, chilli and oregano and a splash of ouzo (a nice cold cucumber salad and a tepid stew of the first allotment potatoes and the last allotment artichokes on the side) while the day before we’d had a fully braised dinner, my wife’s family recipe of tegoline in tecia (green beans cooked to the point of total collapse with rosemary, garlic and meat broth) alongside a couple of chunks of lamb on the bone cooked with spring onion, olives and a splash of cider - sticky and delicious.
on the page
After getting a bit stuck with my reading (I still haven’t finished Adam Bede) I picked up two very different books both of which I read quickly and greedily. First Eli Davies’ The Spinster Cookbook, a series of memoir-essay-recipe pieces which position spinsterhood as a rejection not of romantic life but rather of conventional domesticity, muddying the idea of cooking for one as wholesome self-care with an insistence on hedonism and appetite and building to a utopian exploration of different, more solitary and yet more communal ways of living than are allowed by our current insistence on the couple and the nuclear family as our basic unit of existence. Explicitly in dialogue with writers like Rebecca May Johnson and her dream of canteens, it also made me think of the book The Green Ages and its chapters on communal living, reminders that the way our society is currently organised is by no means inevitable or natural. I also read Riddley Walker, after literally decades of my brothers and probably other people telling me I should read it, and am sorry to have to report that they were right all along, which is all I have to say about that incredibly rich and strange book for the time being.
Looking up Riddley Walker after this. Thanks for sharing