When I was in the queue for the till at Aldi just over a week ago, there was a handsome man ahead of me, necking a litre bottle of orange juice while waiting his turn. In between urgent gulps of juice, he spent a happy time coughing repeatedly. I might have wondered if it was juice with bits and they were annoying: I might have idly wondered about whether the new strain of Covid was anything more than tabloid click bait. I did not expect to spend most of the week trying to breathe without sounding like a pig with its snout in a trough of tasty sludge. Silly me! Half the week seems to have been blurry, seen through eyes partly obscured by mucus, interspersed with periods of great clarity and purpose.
Much of that purpose has been driven by greed. For the first time in over 5 years, we have access to a crop of cherries! There are two trees with tasty red ones, and I found one today that has lovely ripe yellow cherries too - or what we used to call white cherries back in the orchards of Kent of my youth. Shortly I must go and stuff a kilner jar with as many ripe red cherries as I can, then top it up with (home produced) kirsch to be useful in the autumn and winter.
As far as I remember, the cherry season is short and intense. It is a battle with birds who feel the need to eat some and damage as many as they can before I can get to them, and with the weather, which even in a record dry spell, will produce a downpour of rain to split the best, biggest and ripest of fruit. That is without the, for us, new threat of people just wandering into the field and helping themselves, and the more familiar threat of deer, boar, pine martins, and badgers scoffing what they can, depending on craftiness and height. The branch of cherries below shows the range of challenges, including a bit of mildew also making its presence felt. Commercial cherry farmers should be feted for getting any to your table at all!
Fruit gluttony aside, the vegetable plots are starting to provide the odd side dish, and indeed meal. Yesterday we had a small portion each of the tiniest petit pois to encourage the plants to keep producing. I actually grew the peas as something to graze on while at the plot, as I love fresh peas, raw, direct from the pod. The summer cold from hell has made raw peas about as appealing as eating pebbles, but lightly cooked and served with a bit of farm butter, they were close to heaven last night. Tonight we have new potatoes and broad beans to accompany our extra fatty and skin on pork chops (fat is most appealing at the moment), and while the product of one plant isn't vast, we didn't eat all the potatoes from the 56 we planted last year, so eating some early this year is not going to deprive us during the winter I reckon!
The pumpkins that we set off from seeds from one that we bought during the winter for soup have suddenly decided that they like being planted in soil that is 50% kiln ready clay and 50% top grade compost and are sending tendrils everywhere. Encouragingly, they are also sending out lots of female flowers, although if I am right, these three have not been fertilised and will come to nothing. The hint being that the stems are yellow rather than green. But it is still early days, and I would hope to have some set and growing nicely by the end of June.
The courgette plants in the ratatouille bed look as though they are getting ready for world domination. Given that they were tiny when planted out, and some with very poor root balls, they have taken to the bed really well. Rather better indeed than the expensive and posh pepper plants, which have yet to put on a new leaf in four weeks, and are now being cossetted with a protective cover! The aubergines are also looking sulky, but I find they do that until late June and then become ravenous triffids.
Talking of triffids, it put on 20 centimetres in a week...
Anyway, cherries don't put themselves in jars of alcohol, so I'd better go and help them out. Have a good week!
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