25.3.25
in the soil
About half of my plot is perennials – wild garlic, black and red and whitecurrants, artichokes, asparagus, a bed of herbs (lovage, oregano, sorrel, mallow), blackberries and raspberries, a hazelnut tree and a little dwarf fig – which means that while it apparently less productive than a plot which constantly swaps annual plants in and out it has more than food to offer, plants having much more to give than just their one fruiting. The fennel produces bushy fronds and flowers to put in pickles and seeds to let dry before collecting and then with the hollow stalks you can make a frame to barbecue a fish on. A coppiced hazel gives nuts if I can get them before the squirrels but maybe more useful are the prunings, good flexible twigs to grow peas up, divining rods, a staff to ward off evil spirits; it is also a lot less work as I do not have to pull out plants and dig over so much earth as the seasons change into each other. It is harder to keep weeds out of beds that are not constantly disturbed, though; in autumn I covered the asparagus with layers of card and wool thinking to starve them of light and so keep them down, today I lift it up to find that the creeping buttercup has simply grown without light, spreading webs of bleached stalk throughout the soil.
in the kitchen
The other week I made a leek and potato soup with just leeks and potatoes from the veg bag and a bit of butter and water to cover (salt and black pepper) that I was absurdly pleased with, tasting powerfully and sweetly of leeks and with a beautiful texture from the potatoes, lip-sticking, potatoes that in themselves are perhaps a little old and gluey but ideal for a blitzed soup – today I make the same soup but with a bagful of nettles from the edges of my plot because there is nothing else to pick there and because I love their great hit of chlorophyll and the way they smell almost of mint and almost of pain and I might poach an egg to sit on top of it, buoyed by potato.
on the page
I really enjoyed reading Irene Solá's When I Sing, Mountains Dance, an exuberantly polyphonic tale in which everything is connected by history and by mycelia and we hear the stories of the mountains, the witches and the mushrooms and so I was excited to see a proof of the same author's I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Towards Darkness translated by Mara Faye Lethem which, it quickly becomes apparent, is narrated by an angry and vindictive ghost. I haven't finished it yet so I don't have anything else to say about it but I will add that it features a dish of turnips in walnut sauce detailed enough that I will have a go at making it with the turnips from the veg bag.