Summer solstice
The office in which I conduct my office job is not a bad one. Fittingly, for someone who has devoted their career to child protection, I sit in the old labour ward for our town. A beautiful but warm townhouse, rambling with wings spreading off in all directions. Go up the stairs and right to the back, and there is my tiny office.
Sitting at my desk, I can see out over next door’s garden and those that sit in the comfy chair next to my desk (a steady stream of social workers and parents) can look across me, through the window, and down to the chickens at the end of next door’s garden. My chair, being a bit more upright and office-ish, looks straight outwards onto a beautiful bay tree and a gloriously scented (in the right month) wisteria. These are a great favourite of the local house sparrow population, and a few choice birds nest in an old vent just next to my window.
The neighbours have let this patch of the garden go a little and, in one of those moments where one has to gaze into the middle distance until inspiration arrives, I noticed that the wall was covered in green fruit. The bramble flowers had dropped and left an abundance of bobbled, unripe blackberries behind.
I wasn’t meant to be writing to you about this, I wanted to mark the summer solstice, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the blackberries. I had fooled myself that we were still on the upslope of the year, that the growing season spread, almost limitlessly, before us. All that time. All that potential. All those sweet peas.
Except I blinked, and we have arrived at the summer solstice. The longest day and the shortest night which, in my world at least, means the earliest and the latest dog walks. We have crested the apex of the roller coaster, and we will be hurtling down the other side from here on in.
The blackberries are just the start of it.
In some years, this would mean sadness, and a rather insistent sense of panic that I haven’t sown enough seeds, got my plants in early enough, or got myself organised enough. Not this year. This year I find myself very content with where we are. How so? A number of reasons.
01.
It’s been so hot, I have found myself saying the words ‘is it too soon to wish it was autumn?’. I have stacked apple logs and booked a chimney sweep (both fabulous tasks to do off season, ditto having a Barbour rewaxed). I have got into the Land Rover in shorts and a vest top and burned myself on the vinyl seats and dreamed of November. I was not built for heatwaves and I have, just a little, been wishing this summer away.
02.
Uncharacteristically, I did get myself sorted this year and so I have sweet peas coming out of my ears. I allowed myself the luxury of cutting one flower from each hazel tepee for photographing and adoring, and the others are being left to set seed. (Keep tying in and feeding if yours are in full bloom.) Not only was I absolutely on it in early January, I managed something I rarely achieve, which is successional sowing. The first flowers to pop were the ones I sowed after Christmas, and then the March sowings, and I have the very last succession still in root trainers, six inches tall. If sweet peas were money, then I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams.
03.
Before I go too far down this self-congratulatory path, I must halt and confess that the flower field’s gain has been the kitchen garden’s loss. My husband is almost entirely fuelled by black kale and rainbow chard and there hasn’t been any in the garden since the slugs mowed down the plug plants I put in in the spring and I have been relying heavily on the Plowright’s veg box delivery and sneaky trips to Waitrose. But the soil is warm and the earth’s forces are strong, and I have spent the last few weeks catching up with myself. I have direct sown beetroot and beans, I have put kale and Florence fennel in pots and plug trays, and chard and kohlrabi in troughs and planters. If it sits still and holds compost, I have sown a seed in it.
A note
– if you are a fan of fennel, now is the time to sow. Any earlier and it bolts in the heat. Any later and it doesn’t have enough growing time to bulk up. I can’t help thinking a fennel salad is a little 80’s, but I am not beyond a little bit of period drama.
I shall therefore, predictably, run out of space in the kitchen garden when they have got beyond the seedling stage. Cottage gardening is an approach in which necessity is the mother of invention, and I shall be weaving the Cavolo nero in between the fading foxgloves in the flower field. Hopefully this will fox the whitefly too; my leafy greens always suffer terribly.
This mixing and matching, this scattering of seed with reckless abandon, is also driven by a desire to start to fill the pantry. In Gather, I gave us six seasons, not four, and we are still firmly in High Summer, but as August appears vaguely on the mental horizon, I am preparing to think about planning the Harvest.
What I imagine my kitchen is going to look like…
The incomparable Elle Kemp of Ridge & Furrow is firmly booked in for the new kitchen build in September (yes, this has been on the cusp of happening for two years, but neighbours…) and I have visions and dreams of shelves and racks of dried, pickled, jarred and stewed fruits, vegetables and general home-grown produce. When I shut my eyes, I can imagine serried ranks of winter squash and pumpkins. Inspired by this autumnal vision from The Newt, of course, but if I want to achieve it in my own little cottage, I need to go and feed my ‘Marina di Chioggia’.
Gardening is so much an exercise of balancing living in the moment (there is a reason why ‘smelling the roses’ is a metaphor for mindful awareness of the present) and always keeping an eye on the next thing. The next sowing, the next harvest, ad infinitum. Today, more beans for pods because I am too late for beans. More kale. More salad. More foxgloves. More honesty and more Hesperis.
Because is there ever any such thing as enough flowers?
Happy summer solstice. May your evenings be long, your garden be abundant, and your pantry full to bursting.