As an optimist, I prefer the anticipation of what’s to come, rather than harvest.
Spring is my favorite season, with its bright buds and brilliant blossom. Second best is summer, with long daylight hours always a source of pleasure.
I can even reconcile myself to September for its often bright, crisp days and occasional spell of Indian summer weather. But the arrival of October, with shortening days and falling leaves, has until this year made my spirits sink.
In this month’s issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News, I’m talking about late summer gluts in the garden. The copy deadline is half way through the previous month to the cover date, and a month after writing this article, we’ve only just finished dealing with our surplus fruit, but still the lanes round here are dotted with baskets of free apples, squash, and other produce for sale or for free at the garden gate.
One of several apple varieties in our garden
Before I moved to Hawkesbury Upton, I couldn’t understand how people could leave windfall fruit to rot. My previous house, in Tring, Hertfordshire, was a tiny two-up, two-down Victorian terrace with a back yard rather than a garden, so growing fruit and vegetables was out of the question. So when a neighbour encouraged us to strip her crab apple tree of all its fruit for our new hobby of winemaking, we were overwhelmed by her generosity. Only now that my kitchen is full of baskets of windfall apples – plus a bucket containing 27 pints of fresh apple juice – can I empathise with her relief at offloading her surplus to a grateful home.
When we moved here from Tring, the garden was one of the biggest attractions of our new house. Its substantial lawn was edged with mature plum trees, and an apple tree divided the lawn from the kitchen garden, where soft fruit bushes flourished. Over the years, we’ve added crab-apple, pear and more apple varieties, and damson and cherry trees have planted themselves. (Thank you, wild birds!)
Our plum trees have also multiplied, due to our habit of picking a ripe plum to eat on the move before chucking the stone on the ground wherever we happen to be. One summer, I anticipated a fairy ring of plum trees springing up where my aunt had sat in the garden, working her way through a dish of plums and leaving a circle of their stones around her chair.
One way of coping with a glut of apples: cider!
This year we’ve had our largest yield of plums yet.
In the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s good to have a reminder that nature can also be benevolent – so much so that it’s been hard work even to give away our surplus.
There’s only so much jam one can use. When I put my latest jars of plum jam in the larder, I discovered we still had four jars from last year.
At least our plums are delicious, unlike the marrows that Nick Cragg throws in with every lot at the Show Day auction. His cry of “And a marrow!” always raises a laugh.
But in the absence of this year’s Village Show, what are we going to do with all our marrows? At the 2021 Show, I predict record entry levels in the spirits category.
Anyone for marrow rum?
Now available as an audiobook as well as in paperback and ebook
If you like the idea of the Village Show, you might enjoy my novel Best Murder in Show, the first in my lighthearted Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries series. Available in paperback, ebook and audiobook, it’s a cheery read to help you eke out the summer for a little longer.
My column from the September 2019 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News
My current stockpile of marrows from my cottage garden
“A glut! How rural!” said a city-dwelling friend when I complained about an excess of vegetable marrows.
The dictionary defines a glut as “an abundant supply – more than one could need or sell”. Some might argue that when it comes to marrows, a glut is any number above zero. At the Hawkesbury Show, auctioneer Nick Cragg always raises a laugh when he adds “and a marrow” to the list of items in a lot – you can’t give marrows away in the country at this time of year.
Country Property auctioneer Nick Cragg this year was aided by BBC Radio 2’s allotment guru Terry Walton
But each spring, knowing they’ll provide a guaranteed crop, untouched
by the caterpillars and slugs that decimate brassicas, it’s hard to resist the
temptation to plant them. This year, in an attempt to make the inevitable glut
more interesting, my husband planted a yellow variety.
What’s more, we’ve now alighted upon a satisfying way of using them up: with the aid of a spiraliser. This hand-cranked mechanical cutting device is a bit like a giant’s equivalent of Grandma’s old-fashioned mincer.
The spiraliser – reminiscent of the traditional mincing machine
Position the marrow on the shaft, turn the handle, and a tangle of long, thin ribbons emerges through the cutting disc. Spiralising yellow marrows, I feel like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold in the Grimms’ fairy tale.
Tada! Spinning marrows into gold.
Simmer or stir fry the spirals briefly to provide the perfect
vehicle for the pasta sauce of your choice. Who’d have thought the
much-maligned marrow could give you three reasons to be cheerful? Courgetti
spaghetti, to use the gourmet’s euphemism, counts as one of your five a day, save
calories and carbs compared to pasta, and reduces your marrow stockpile.
So if you came home from the Hawkesbury Show with a marrow surplus to requirements, now you know what to do with it. And if you didn’t, I’m sure there’ll still be a few going begging in our household by the time you read this…
Seasonal Fiction for October
In Trick or Murder?, Sophie’s adopted village of Wendlebury Barrow must choose between Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ Night – risking the wrath of the strange new vicar, the Reverend Neep, who bans their traditional Halloween festivities. Join Sophie and friends as she tries to get to the bottom of what drives this strange fellow – and to prevent the despatch of more than just a guy on the village bonfire. For more information, and to read the first chapter for free, click here.
Available in paperback and ebook, with a lively story spanning Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ Night
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Deep into seasons of mellow fruitfulness now (and wind and rain!), our summer holiday seems like ancient history , but for sake of keeping a complete record on my blog, here’s my column for the September edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News, which I sent in from the Scottish Highlands on my summer holiday to meet its mid-August deadline.
Taking our summer break during the school holidays, we are used to leaving home when the Cotswold countryside is green and tidy and returning to find it golden brown and unkempt. It’s as predictable a transformation as from pre-holiday hairdo to post-holiday hair; only the colours are different.
But this year we were wrong-footed by the early burnishing of the fields. Thanks to the July heatwave, the local landscape was baked brown before we left. Even that hardy perennial, grass, instead of springing back beneath our bare feet, crunched underfoot like broken biscuits.
The further north we drove, the greener the landscape. Not least because there was rain. Lots of rain. The fields beyond Gretna were as bright and fresh as any you might find in the Emerald Isle.
And the days lengthened. At the time of writing this column, ensconced in Glencoe, we are far enough north for dusk to fall a full forty minutes later than in Hawkesbury. August in the Highlands feels like Hawkesbury’s July.
So when we get home, as we always do, in time for the Hawkesbury Horticultural Show, we’re going to be completely confused. We all know that the Village Show marks the last day of a Hawkesbury summer. But my body clock will still be waiting for August to begin.
(My column for the October 2017 issue of the Tetbury Advertiser)
People often say to me “I don’t know how you do so much”.
But I have plenty of sins of omission, because, as an optimist, I am constantly trying to fit more into the day than can physically be done.
I wish I could bring myself to subscribe to the Fall Off the Desk rule invented by my former boss. She held that if you ignored a task for long enough, there’d no point in doing it.
Harnessing Time’s Chariot
Not being that defeatist, I decided last month to re-embrace the timesheet. Years ago, working as a consultant, I had to keep timesheets to demonstrate I’d spent no more hours on a client’s business than they had contracted to pay for. These days, my chief client is me, but I hoped the practice might help me get more ticks on my action list each day – or at least excuse me from wasting precious time on the ironing.
Cover photo via Amazon
The last time I filled in timesheets was before the invention of smartphone time management apps. We got by with paper lists or commercial systems such as Filofax. Such systems may look smart, but they’re not exactly exciting. My novelist friend Alison Morton‘s husband’s collection of Filofaxes earned him a place in the book Dull Men ofBritain, alongside a drainspotter. No, that’s not a typo.
Squirrelling Time Away
So this time round, I decided to go high-tech, choosing from a wide selection an app called Toggl, because it reminded me of Tog, the red squirrel from the 1960s children’s television series Pogle’s Wood.
Toggl lets you set a timer running as you begin each new task. My first experiments were fun, but flawed, due to pilot error. I kept forgetting to turn it off when I went to lunch, logging five-minute tasks as taking an hour. Usually I turn my computer off before I got to bed, but when I forgot, Toggl recorded a gruelling night shift. I may burn the candle at both ends, but I’m not that bad. With constant mistakes reducing its accuracy, Toggl’s novelty started to wear off, and I wondered whether to send the little squirrel into hibernation.
Tuning into a New Trick
Then by chance over breakfast, I heard an article on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme promoting the importance of idleness to the creative mind.
To be more productive, it suggested, I shouldn’t be managing my working hours but increasing my down-time.
I already knew my best ideas arise when I’m not actually trying. Sure enough, after the programme finished, I got the idea for this column not at my desk but while in the bathroom cleaning my teeth. Well, it could have been worse.
Here’s to a season of mists and mellow idleness for us all. I think we deserve it.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like to read my collected columns from my first six years of writing for the Tetbury Advertiser.
Now available in ebook from all good eretailers, and in paperback online and from your favourite independent local bookshop – just quote ISBN 9781911223030 to order.
***STOP PRESS***
The Tetbury Advertiser has just won another award for parish magazines – best for content and third place overall. Congratulations to the Tetbury Lions, who run it to raise money for charity, to the tireless editor Richard Smith, and to all my fellow contributors. What a team!
