In the vegetable relay race of early spring, last year’s crops are now starting to flower on their mission to set seed. The leeks have sent up their flower spikes and the radicchios and chicories are finally coming to the end of their season and are about to follow suit.  The kales and purple sprouting broccolis have handed the baton to the spring greens, while the autumn sown chard is having its last gasp before being replaced by the plugs that I planted out last weekend. In the polytunnel, the autumn sown salads, spinach, herbs and spring onions are still producing but, with the lengthening days and higher temperatures, they too are starting to flower and are beginning to flag. So the aim has been to eat as much as we can, before everything bolts and is cleared out in advance of the tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.

This means we’ve been eating a lot of meals where greens are the primary ingredient. Pasta with a sauce of blanched and liquidised ‘Hungry Gap’ kale. Creamed kale. Kale in a cheese sauce. Kale risotto. Kale curry. Chargrilled and roasted spring cabbage with a dressing of tahini, garlic, lemon juice and mint or smothered in chopped olives, preserved lemon and parsley. Every lunch features a salad of spinach, mustard greens and the last of the winter lettuces. While we’ve had wild rocket for days. In salads, pestos, sandwiches, risotto. We can’t eat it fast enough, as it lives up to its name in exponential growth. It’s the first year I’ve grown it in the polytunnel and it has been so successful it will now be a regular feature.

For our Japanese visitors last week, foraging for spring greens is a very natural part of the reawakening that takes place after the long Hokkaido winter. The gathering of sansai (mountain vegetables) is an ancient tradition and one that, unlike here, is seemingly unbroken from its hunter gatherer origins. Indeed, sansai provided an important means of survival even up to the 19^th century as the large population struggled in the face of wars, famines and earthquakes without well-developed agricultural systems. Wild foods are still a fundamental part of the Japanese diet with cultural importance.

Midori told us how one must be very careful foraging for sansai in the forest in early spring, which there comes in late April. When the brown bears awake they are hungry and grumpy after their long hibernation, leading to the dangerous combination of them being both confused and aggressive for food. Foragers wear bear bells to alert the animals to their presence and must keep one eye and ear on the surrounding undergrowth in case they should need to run. Not quite the relaxed and bucolic scene we might experience when gathering wild garlic in the woods here on a spring morning.

This is the time of year when mum comes to mind. It is six years since her health took a turn for the worse and, after a rapid decline, she left us in late February as the Beast from the East swept across the country. February, the cruellest month, is now associated with this time. Those weeks spent back at my childhood home, taking turns with my brother to look after her. Sitting by her bedside, as the first stirrings of spring were held in check by the freeze, time seemed to stop. To stop and yet also to cast me back into my childhood and family memories, even as I now had to parent her.

­­Memories of mum, a seamstress’s daughter, sitting at the dining table running up a new outfit on the sewing machine and teaching me how to do the same. Of dad reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ aloud on Christmas Eve. Of the home-decorating and DIY projects that filled weekends and holidays; wallpapering, painting and tiling, stripping and re-upholstering furniture, clearing out and organising the attic and garden shed. And of our yearly holidays on the Gower in South Wales, where we would stay with our grandparents.

The season of rich food is upon us once again and, much as I love comforting winter dishes sometimes a contrast is called for. Required even. It is for this reason that I have come to grow a wider and wider range of chicories and radicchios in the winter vegetable garden. Both raw and cooked the bitterness of chicory offsets the heaviness of winter food, stimulating the tastebuds and refreshing the appetite.

‘Belgian Witloof’, the roots of which I lifted a couple of weeks ago, have been replanted in covered pots in the toolshed to force them. I’m hoping they’ll produce pale chicons in time for Christmas Day. ‘Variegata di Castelfranco’, the pale green, red-speckled chicory, makes the prettiest winter salad. Sharply pointed radicchio ‘Rossa di Treviso’ and ball-shaped ‘Palla Rossa’ with their blood-red leaves set off by pristine white ribs both lend themselves particularly well to grilling or roasting.

Winter is coming, but I am still eking out the last of the summer vegetables in the kitchen. The approaching months of pumpkin, swede, turnip, celeriac, potato, cabbage and kale will last long enough, without extending the season further by embracing them too quickly. Although they seem like summer vegetables the reality is that peppers reach peak ripeness in the polytunnel in mid-October, as do the summer sown fennels in the vegetable beds. Together with aubergines and the beans I grew for drying this year, these made up the bulk of my harvest on return from holiday three weeks ago.

The aubergines we ate quickly, as they are not good keepers, but the fennel and peppers store so well in the salad drawer of the fridge that, although this recipe uses the very last of the fennel, I will be looking for more ways to use the peppers in the coming week, as this year’s crop was outstanding, with nine plants each producing at least six fruits. A romesco sauce is on the cards, though not made with our own walnuts as intended, since the squirrels got them all before me. A tomato and red pepper soup with a generous addition of our homegrown paprika will provide a warming lunch. And, if all else fails, nothing beats Elizabeth David’s Piedmont peppers, halved and filled with anchovies, oil and garlic before a blast in a hot oven.

And so, once again, the courgettes are on the march. No matter how quickly we think we are eating them – and with house guests for the past three weekends we have got through a fair few – there are always more than we can manage. Every week the largest are liberated and put in a crate on the verge by the front gate for passersby to take. More often than not they are gone within the day. 

A couple of years ago, during the height of the pandemic, we witnessed the entertaining sight of a cyclist removing the water bottle attached to his bike frame and offering up each courgette in the crate to the bottle clamp to see if it would fit, like Prince Charming trying slippers on Cinderella. With the match finally made he tucked the water bottle into the back of his Lycra shorts and off he went, unaware of our spying. We were delighted to think we had provided a free supper for someone who had just gone out for an evening ride.

It’s been a great year for the gooseberries. Our two bushes – one ‘Hinnonmaki Green’, the other ‘Hinnonmaki Red’ – have produced the largest crops we have ever had from them. Over 6kg from each. These dual purpose culinary and dessert types can be used when immature for cooking in pies, jams, sauces and chutneys, while the fully ripe fruit is sweet enough to be eaten straight from the bush. Originally bred in Finland these cultivars are reliably hardy and resistant to powdery mildew and have cropped reliably for us since we planted them seven years ago. In the case of the red, being thornless they also make for easy picking, unlike the green which bears the familiar needle-like thorns that lacerate your hands, however carefully you go.

Although the first to bear fruit in the vegetable garden, gooseberries have not always been our first fruit of choice for eating. Too many childhood memories of the pale green, seedy pulp floating in a bowl of curdled custard or evaporated milk and the disappointment of Nana’s buttery, sugary, shortcrust giving way to undersweetened (to my child’s palate, at least), sour and watery fruit. Gooseberry fool (gooseberries, Bird’s Custard and cream) was one of the first desserts I was taught to make in ‘O’ Level Home Economics but, by the time it had been carried home in Tupperware on a hot summer bus, it was not the most appetising of puddings and, with fears of an upset stomach, neither I nor the family could bring ourselves to eat it.

The beds in the vegetable garden are bare. Although the garlic and onions are making their presence felt, after the long, cold spring our winter sown broad beans have only just started flowering and the first spring crops of beetroots, carrots and peas have a long way to go before we get to taste them. We still have a good supply of winter lettuce, sown last September and planted out on our return from holiday in October, and a somewhat meagre asparagus harvest has provided for a couple of meals so far, but otherwise – and as usual in the hungry gap – home grown produce is pretty thin on the ground.

Until, that is, you enter the polytunnel, where a green tidal wave of kale threatens to engulf all around it. These too were sown in September in plugs and planted out in early October once the tomatoes and peppers were cleared. The variety – ‘Hungry Gap’ – is extremely well named, as they bided their time over the winter, slowly gathering energy to provide for us right now, when most needed. Due to the failure of some other brassicas intended for the polytunnel I ended up planting out twelve plants of this kale, and they have been producing an almost endless supply of leaves since early March. 

Down by the stream at the bottom of the hill the wild garlic has appeared. It has been visible for a couple of weeks, but more ground than leaf, so that it took some time and judgement to find enough to pick for a meal. This week, after the equinox and in common with the first trees that are breaking bud and the sheets of daffodils and primroses which have suddenly eclipsed the snowdrops, the leafmouldy woodland floor has disappeared under a green, allium blanket.

This first spring flush is magical. A resurrection and clarion call for the coming wave of growth. A signifier of ancient woodland the wild garlic also connects us to the past inhabitants of this site. Imagining the people who have lived here before us, seeking sustenance from the woods and hedgerows, you feel reconnected to their longstanding and hard-earned accrued knowledge. What is good, what can heal and even what can kill. 

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.