Festive treats

The calm of the veg plot is the perfect antidote to frantic festivities - and the bounty it provides is the highlight of every meal, says Monty

- Monty

The winter-vegetable garden may not have the colour or freshness of June or even October, but there is a rich reassurance in the kale, sprouts, turnips and beetroot that rides the worst of the weather with a kind of insouciance. Even if the snow has to be scraped aside to ease out a parsnip or the cabbages are brought in rimed with frost, the taste is rich, good and warming.

The garden helps make Christmas, more than any amount of frantic commercial consumption. So, amid the orgy of Christmas shopping, I try to carve a garden-shaped space where there is plenty of consumption but no money changes hands. At the heart of this is Christmas dinner - and the sequence of meals that flow from and after it - which is so much the better for having as much as possible gathered from the garden or allotment.

Planning is obviously needed to make this happen, starting right back in the previous spring. But for all of us who have failed to some degree in this department, and are gazing upon empty vegetable beds - believe me, I do, every year the time for ordering seeds for next year is fast upon us.