The season of sunshine and sweet peas
[Sweet peas pictured above are Indigo King]
Monday 25 July
-
After a weekend away, the ground feels dusty and hot beneath my feet. The evening walk is pushed later and later to escape the muggy heat and I take a glass of gin and tonic to drink on the sloping field whilst the dogs splash in the stream. This is, of course, a terrible plan because if I sit on the ground, all of the dogs want to stand on me and put their noses in my pockets for biscuits. I cannot overstate the unpleasantness of a wet dog splashing stream water on bare skin and upturning a drink.
Maud is not sorry.
Tuesday 26 July
-
Anticipation. Waiting. Harvest. A single red cabbage from last year has been growing its seed for months and they are finally dry. The test for almost all seeds is that they are still on the plant, but they come loose with a touch. The long, finger-like seed pods shatter easily and so I catch them in a bowl. I have yet to invest in a seed processing machine because I find doing it by hand so incredibly addictive.
I have had a few questions about seed saving this week as some of the abundant seed producers (poppies, grasses, ammi and daucus) are shedding seed with wild abandon. The general principles are to get them as dry as possible if you aren’t going to sow straight away, and store in the cool and out of direct light.
Wednesday 27 July
-
Big sheets of hemp are pulled out of a vat of onion skins. I have achieved a shade more orange than tan, but I was ambitious about the ratio of material to onion skins. It takes a very very long time to save up enough onion skins to dye anything meaningfully large and we have been collecting them for about eighteen months now. The advice for collecting enough material to dye anything out of either onion skins or avocado pits is to befriend a vegan café. It is advice I wish I had heeded.
Thursday 28 July
-
The focus on building up the fertility in the beds, and developing plant communities within the cutting areas have meant that the paths and edges had been a little neglected. Kate gets to work with pulling out brambles and thistles from around the dahlia patch, a path lined with landscape fabric and bark chippings. There is no surface, short of concrete, that isn’t going to need hoeing from time to time and I had let it go. I pay my penance with multiple trips to the tip. I do generally adhere to the principle of a closed system at Malus Farm, but our chipper is broken and, whatever Charles Dowding says, I am fearful of putting bindweed on my compost heap.
Friday 29 July
-
Sometimes it is better not to fight the weather, and I cut more for drying than I do for the vase today. The rack in the studio is filling up with honesty and sanguisorba, parchment coloured ammi and the first dahlias. The first labyrinth is out and I cannot bear to dry that, and so it comes indoors and sits in pride of place on the kitchen table.
Saturday 30 July
-
Talking of dry, the kitchen garden has been something of a disaster this year. Despite top dressing and no dig, the soil is painfully dusty and hard as rock. I have adjusted my expectations accordingly and have thanked my lucky stars I used the most fertile and lovely parts of the flower field to grow squash and beetroot. In an effort to sink good money after bad, I have ordered a top up of organic plug plants to fill in the gaps. Monty was sowing dwarf French beans on Gardener’s World last night so maybe I am not entirely unrealistic, but if I get a Sunday lunch out of them, I will be surprised.
I also bought in some red cabbage plugs for Christmas dinner. Can you even imagine being cold? I feel like I can’t remember what it was like.
