2.9.25

in the soil

Yesterday I tried to make a cyanotype in the late afternoon and was given a clear object lesson that summer is over; however bright it looked, the sun was not strong enough to fix the image on the page. Today is a visit to the plot between bouts of rain, the grass too wet to cut but the soil light enough to turn over, not the sodden clay it will soon become. The elderberries are withering on the branches and the ground beneath the hedges is covered in squashed and fermenting plums, it has been a very good year for plums of all kinds but a bad one for my cultivated blackberries. (Last year was an extremely good one but I don't know if brambles typically follow the pattern of one-year-on-one-year-off of olive and fruit trees). I kneel in the damp grass and excavate what was my broad bean bed as I should probably have done a month ago; for some reason it has two pieces of broken wood and a metal pole and half a brick buried at one end of it, I must have dumped them there when I was doing something else and forgotten them entirely. I harvest my first tomato and my first courgette, finally, and I hope that the fruit on my cucuzze will grow before it gets too cold.

in the kitchen

I don't quite grow enough of anything to have the usual gluts in the sense of what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-all-this and the things I do grow a lot of are mostly intended for preservation anyway, the purpose of the plant rather than a last resort. My stock of gherkins is growing, using the perpetual pickle method I first tried two years ago to add in and take out a few each week, the brine getting funkier and sourer every day; the hedgerow plums and the sparse blackberries go into a ketchup and while I am at it I ferment the last tomatoes from the veg bag, popping them in a brine to make fizzy little pickles. My plans for a turnip kimchi are thwarted by the fact I have only one perfect turnip ready, the rest still swelling in the ground, I might put it in a mixed pickle or shave it in a salad or make a tiny portion of turnip puree for a very small French meal.

on the page

I have struggled to concentrate on reading this week, I have read some of On The Calculation of Volume and some of Open, Heaven and some more of The Green Ages and some of a book I am reviewing and then I forgot I was reading all of those and bought Last Train From Liguria and didn't read that either. Just one of those weeks, I suppose, I am tired and the seasons are changing.