THE last overgrown courgette waiting in vain for a recipe to spring to mind has, mercifully, been consigned to the compost heap, together with the steadfastly green tomatoes sojourning on the windowsill. The summer, the harvest, is over and, apart from the obvious winter brassicas and root vegetables, there’s little to look forward to until late spring. Yet what if we could fill that gap, particularly from the ides of March to those of May, the ‘hungry gap’? What if we could eat food that we’ve grown ourselves all year round?
My serious gardening days—I ran an allotment for 12 years—ended when my stay-at-home-father plan of having our baby daughter gurgle peacefully in her pram as I tended my plot came face to face with reality.
However, I still grow rhubarb, the occasional runner bean, apples, figs and herbs in my small garden, with my status as an ‘expert’ bolstered by being the once-a-year chairman of a local village ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ team. Frankly, I’m seriously outgunned by my panellists and my only helpful advice was to a gentleman whose wife permitted him to use only a tiny patch in which to grow vegetables and was worried about crop rotation. I suggested he consider ‘wife rotation’. Memory fades and new methods and philosophies develop, so, in attempting to make my advice useful, I’ve gathered the current wisdom of people who grow things all year. Chief among these are those who supply veg boxes and for whom ‘all year round’ is a necessity.
Denne historien er fra October 30, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra October 30, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
