First fruits and no fruits

In a previous post I wrote about how rather than the standard winter, spring, summer and autumn a kitchen gardener enjoys a lengthy series of seasons, their starts marked by picking and eating the first of a particular fruit or vegetable. Last week we had the first of our delicious Discovery apples, eaten straight off the tree they are somehow far more appley than shop bought, and the reddy-pink blush brighter and more alive. That's the good side of growing your own.


There is, then, a bad side too. We dashed off for a few days away recently, having inspected the produce close to readiness. A tiny greengage tree had seven or eight fruits just on the verge of ripeness, so we left them, anticipating a mini-feast on our return. The squirrels had other ideas - all bar one sorry specimen left broken on the ground had gone when we returned. We shared our strawberries with the little grey monsters too, the netting meant to protect the plants no barrier to these furry thieves, and a few well-bitten apples can be seen littering the ground in the orchard bit of the garden - we leave them in the hope that, easier to get at, they'll keep them off the rest for a time. Some hope.


I googled 'legality of shooting grey squirrels' and learned that you probably need a licenced shooter, and the preferred RSPCA method is catching them and getting a vet to put them down at £30 a pop. Only if you can guarantee a clean kill can you shoot them yourself (I have an old air-rifle that could possibly be of value, if they'd hold still until I was within three feet), so they will continue to enjoy the fruits of our labours undisturbed. No need I guess to go into detail of what happens to the bulk of the walnuts we grow.


Our interaction with the resident fauna is not all negative. We feed the birds partly because they put on a fine show, but also because in a largely organic set-up they are very helpful, for example eating loads of caterpillars. And we have a lot of flowers that attract hover-flies, which do a fine job on white fly and other pests. Thinking along those lines, what we really need is a resident raptor capable of taking squirrels. We don't have that, but hear owls aplenty, and The Dear Leader was buzzed a few weeks back by a Nightjar while she was on a dusk inspection tour of the crops. I now have to google 'how to attract Golden Eagles to your garden.'

End of the Allotment

Now, where was I? The answer to that is in a rather more (but by no means strictly) vegetarian place than before.

For health reasons more than economy (though I love a bargain), and because we produce a lot of our own fruit and veg, I have over the last two or three years cooked far fewer meat-based dishes than used to be the case. I have a new hero too, the cookery writer Ursula Ferrigno, who appears to be of a similar mindset given I have two books of hers that are solely vegetarian, and a third on trattoria cooking that has plenty of meaty stuff in it.

As the Dear Leader (may her enemies perish in despair) and I near our second 30th birthdays anno domini looms far larger in the imagination, so we pick up more readily on the health-page articles than previously, and getting five-, seven-, ten-a-day is a fixation there, and thus now with us. We have also both made successful efforts to lose weight, part and parcel of the new view of our diet.

The big thing, however, as ever as far as I am concerned, is taste and pleasure. The two big things. Amongst our weaponry. It is now mid-July, our soon-to-be abandoned allotment (fed up with people nicking stuff, have lost strawbs, broad beans and blackcurrants this year already) is producing loads of wonderful and next-to-free produce, and our garden likewise. The broad beans (we have still had the majority of what we grew, but I hate being abused by thieves) are picked small and some eaten raw they are that good. Our fennel, likewise picked when tiny, is packed with more flavour and of a texture that is silk to supermarket worsted.

There are gastronomic possibilities too in growing your own that are pretty near impossible in this country otherwise. We have for example had lots of artichokes already, again taken small and sweet. And for the first time ever we have beaten those far more relentless produce-thieves, the squirrels, to our walnut crop, still only perhaps a dozen picked green, but now macerating in a Kilner jar with spices and a bottle of unwanted clear spirit, nocino for Christmas 2019.

The Dear Leader (may those who fail to bow before her suffer endless agonies) is expanding our kitchen garden, already quite a size, we spent a happy Sunday last week building a second small greenhouse (my how they laughed at the instruction book, apparently a surrealist statement of merely possible realities) and we have plans for more trees - this morning's smoothie contained three of our homegrown plums - to add yet more unbuyable varieties to our basket. We seem to be looking forward to the best ever quince harvest too.

I will miss the allotment, and wish the two users who will inherit our ground (and trees, and artichokes, and fruit bushes, and...) well of it. But I fear that as we head into uncertain political times, and very probably poorer economic conditions thanks to a generation of politicians of all stripes who couldn't organise a fart from a can of beans, we will see more and more desperate people reduced to raiding allotments to keep from hunger. I'd prefer it if they had an allotment of their own though.

In case anybody thinks I'm a heartless sod begrudging food to the desperate, I regularly donate a bag of tins and packets to the Sally Army. I do wonder if those stealing things are desperate, or just greedy idle bastards - a while back the plot next door lost a giant pumpkin just before Halloween; and another guy had an entire row of spuds dug up.