These are store cupboard and pantry days in the kitchen. Meals assembled from the toughest veg standing out in the garden, combined with those brought in to dry storage last autumn together with our own preserves and frozen supplies put away during the last growing season. With soft herbs, oriental greens and winter lettuce in the polytunnel, a variety of lentils, beans and grains in the pantry, a well-stocked spice cupboard and those ingredients that add depth and savour – think anchovies, capers, parmesan, olives, tahini, miso – there is little need to venture to the shops. And so, over the past couple of chilly weeks, we have hunkered down and eaten simply and mostly our own.

In the vegetable garden a continuation of last year’s blighted season saw all our early purple sprouting broccoli, many of the kales and even the red cabbages succumbing to the brutal freeze in early December. On one night it got down to minus 10ºC and many of the potatoes stored in paper sacks in the uninsulated barn were also frosted beyond use. ‘blue Danube’ was. the exception, retaining it’s firm, pure white flesh, so I’ve just placed an order for tubers to grow again this year. Adding insult to injury, after I had carefully nursed them through the heatwaves last summer, all but five of the sixteen celeriac were reduced to balls of slime. And the chard, usually our most dependable, productive and frostproof winter crop, have been eaten repeatedly by deer. So, although we are eating mostly our own, this year it has been a more limited diet than usual of beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and potatoes.  

At some point this winter the old ash pollard leaned into the next phase of its life as a refuge for all the things that have contributed to its end. A seedling elder in the crown deposited by birds, brambles between its knuckled roots and, of several mycological inhabitants, a matt black fungus exuding from its cracks and fissures.  

Pollarding the ash was one of the things that the farmer here did in his last and seventy fourth year. It was the year before we moved to Hillside and took over the custodianship of the land and in our first year here the ash put out hesitant regrowth that indicated that the tree was in retreat. It stood quietly alone and monumental on the flank of The Tump to mark the handover. A figure, an enormous timber torso we named Venus, which surveyed the open grounds in each direction. 

The new year has brought deluge. One day after another of rains. Some gentle and constant, but the most persistent lashing against the windows and driving their way into every corner of our ramshackle barns. The soil, which just weeks ago was still cracked and fissured by summer drought, is now at saturation point. Springs are breaking through on the slopes and travelling over the surface because they have nowhere else to go and the stream that runs in the crease in the bottom of the valley has been boiling over and throwing itself at the twists and turns to redefine its contours.  

The alders that I planted to stabilise the banks ten years ago were placed at a sensible distance to give them time to get their fibrous roots established, but this much water is outstripping even their fast growth, so that several are already teetering on the edge where the banks have been eroded.

we wish you all a very happy Christmas and a peaceful new year

we’ll see you in 2023

Leave the house during daylight hours at the moment and everywhere there is a hectic flurry of birds. The air filled with the flapping of wings and the chattering of warning calls. The robins and wrens that are slowly pecking their way through the stacked trays of apples we keep under cover in the outside kitchen. The hordes of blackbirds and mistle thrushes combing the turf beneath the crab apples. The jackdaws, crows, pigeons and jays feasting on the remaining cooking apples rotting where they fell in the orchard. While, at the entrance to the garden, dunnocks, tits, wrens and finches compete with mice and voles for the last of the medlars that are still falling to ground. The medlars don’t start start dropping until the leaves have all fallen, which this year was in mid-November. Then the race is on to harvest what we need before the critters get them, although we always leave enough that they can eat their fill. 

Similar to quince, both in the timing of their harvest and in the fact that they are also too hard and astringent to be eaten raw, while quince can be cooked straight off the tree, medlars must be bletted to become edible. Bletting is the process of allowing the fruit to start the process of decomposition, so that the hard white flesh becomes a soft, cinnamon brown paste. This happens naturally when there is a frost or prolonged cold weather, and we are lucky to have the space to leave ours outside under cover in perforated plastic trays. However, this process can be replicated and hastened by putting the medlars in bags in the freezer.

Finally, the winter is here. A cleansing frost that rose from the hollows and enveloped the garden in a unifying stillness. Colour held at bay where the freeze touched down, a red sky thrown from a late sunrise and then shadows elongating and revealing the humps, the bumps and the winter tussocks on the Tump. 

It is a relief that the tender salvias and their persistence into December is at last curtailed. The dahlias are finally blackened and the place that the nasturtiums made for themselves so swiftly made absent. The inevitable snap is later than ever this year, and things had begun to feel uncomfortably out of kilter, but the sudden shift feels right and the letting go cathartic. Time for the garden to rest.

The leaves are finally torn from the poplars to reveal their grey, wintry outlines. The last of the autumn colour hangs in the hazel understorey. The Molinia ‘Transparent’* wait until now to do their very best and, as the wood becomes bare, the grasses in the garden begin their blaze.

I first saw Molinia ‘Transparent’ in the mid ‘90’s, growing in the garden of the late Mien Ruys in the Netherlands. I’d gone with my friends Izzy and Gabriela to meet this great designer and to look at her garden, which was ground-breaking for its juxtaposition of loose, naturalistic planting to the geometries of the layout. It was several weeks earlier in the autumn and the molinia were planted alone and in gravel so that you could appreciate their reach and the fullness of filamentous flower. They were spaced so that you could walk between the plants, which arched up and out and towards each other. Planted just as they should be to reveal their form and to make a place of their own. The flowers, which were yet to go to seed, were plum-red forming a dark halo at their extremities. Everything moved as we walked amongst them, swayed by the slightest breeze and our caresses.

Earlier in October I posted an image of my first autumn snowdrop. Reactions ran high for this apparently out of season anomaly. Surely the snowdrop is an emblem of deep midwinter, a welcome sign of life in a grim February, but out of place for showing its head in the wrong season? Being thoroughly under their spell and wanting the spell to last for as long as it can, I was surprised that people were not as delighted as I am by the first of the season.  

I never meant to fall so hook, line and sinker and for years stood by a self-imposed rule that I had to be able to spot the difference between one snowdrop and another from a sensible distance in order to justify acquiring them. To a point this is still true, but the more you go deeper, the more you understand that galanthus are as varied as a room full of people. Some rise early, others with the crowd or fashionably late and their differences in character are as nuanced as anyone on the spectrum of galanthophilia could possibly need them to be. 

Finally there is a chill in the air after weeks of warmth, with grass still growing and meals eaten outside when it really should be time to be in. I have been keeping a close eye on the forecast, but a frost has eluded us so far and the garden has continued on. The nasturtiums, which are the litmus test to freeze, are sprawled further than ever across the paths in the vegetable garden, their growth unchecked and now unseasonally green in contrast to the pull of dark nights and dormancy.  

Watching closely, I have been gently preparing for the winter. To be ready for it when it finally comes. Some of the tasks have felt premature and preparing the gunnera to tent their crowns with their own leaves is usually a task that happens immediately after a frost in early November. By then they are wilted enough to have lost their presence, but this year I waded in to dismember them whilst they were still entire. Working amongst their vast canopies, cutting through stems heavy with sap and the rasp of leaves not yet diminished in power by a freeze. It was a good day, but one that felt out of kilter with what we expect of November. 

We’ve been clearing the beds in the vegetable garden over the past few weekends, with the aim of getting as many of them manured this side of Christmas as possible. The withered climbing beans have been slipped from their hazel supports, the last dried beans in their parchment pods saved for sowing next year. The spiny skeletons of courgettes pulled from the ground with gloved hands, their almost non-existent root systems making me wonder how on earth they get so huge and produce such an endless succession of water-swollen fruits. And the ghostly grove of rustling sweetcorn, which was left standing for as long as possible, because its coarse whisper brought such a strong Halloween atmosphere to the fading kitchen garden, was finally felled. All were thrown onto the compost heap to complete their life cycles. No longer providing food for us, but now offering shelter and sustenance to a slew of other creatures, both visible and invisible. In the coming year the resulting compost will be spread on the beds to improve and feed the soil producing next season’s harvest and so it will feed us once more in another chain of the cycle. 

Along with the spent crops there have also been roots to lift and store. Primarily beetroots and carrots, although most years we also have turnips. We lift these now and store them in the barn in paper sacks alongside the potatoes. If left in the ground we have found that the beets are damaged by slugs which then invites rot, while the carrots are prey to wireworm, which renders them inedible.