How many sleeps until Christmas?
Monday 8th June. If you know me, you will know I hate pink. (My field loves it and takes any opportunity to produce it.) There is one dreadful neon pink that I tolerate, that of Rosa glauca. I planted four plants along some wires that had been set there for raspberries and bent the stems down to encourage them to flower. Now, the shocking pink flowers have given way to the most utterly perfect rosehips in reddish mahogany.
Tuesday 9th June. Time with my tomatoes. They are tall and strong and have adored the heat. I pinch the side shoots carefully and keep them watered. I hope there are more flowers to come as they are all green growth and the odd little fruit. The scent is intoxicating. The anticipation is tingling.
Wednesday 10th June. A packet of seeds. One packet of seeds, free with a magazine many years ago, produced fifty plants of Cichorium intybus. Wild chicory. They are gently threading through the matrix planting and they have become an absolute favourite of mine. It is only meant to grow to five feet but mine towers over me at at least eight, and it has developed a bit of a tendency to topple alarmingly across paths and into clumps of dahlias. The first flowers appeared today, a perfect soft blue against a grey sky.
Thursday 11th June. It seems to have taken a little longer than usual for the kitchen garden to get going. Some of the plants are slow growers, such as the squash and the leeks, and I will not reap their harvest until much later in the season. Some of my faster crops have not enjoyed the hot Spring. The kitchen garden is quite dry and hard and needs at least another two top dressings of really good compost to improve the quality of the soil. Even with assiduous watering, lettuces have run to seed, the direct sowings of beetroot have failed, and the chard has sulked. The rain this week has changed all that. Beautiful, fat, drenching drops of life-giving rain. The kale has doubled in size . The chard looks positively relieved. I have sown rows of Fordhook Giant swiss chard and I have high hopes. In the field, the scabious glisten with wet, more like sweets than ever.
Friday 13th June. Showers. One minute it is dry and I venture out with snips and a hoe, the next it is bucketing down. After dashing in and out so many times, I give up and retreat to the kitchen. I roast potatoes and make goats cheese. I watch the sky darken and lighten and darken again from the safety of indoors. A short wet dog walk tonight.
In the picture below, the wiry plant that is taller than the archway is the chicory. I told you it was tall.
Saturday 14th June. I turn the compost heaps. The right hand bay was inoculated with biodynamic preparations and it is the most beautiful, fine, crumbly compost I have ever seen. I spend half the day eating cherries off the tree (they are not fully ripe yet but if I wait until they are, the birds will have had them) and deliberating where to put it. It seems so precious. I decide on the box-edged bed by the foot-gate. It was a white garden last year but the ground seemed quite tired and the compost will improve this no end.
Because I have nowhere else to put them, I layer up another compost bay, and plant it with Hidemi and Blue Ballet winter squash. They are climbers and clingers so they will clamber up through the hedge behind the heaps as well as tumble over the front. I have high hopes. This picture from the Ethicurean last Autumn.
