I'm a little heartbroken at the moment as all my lovely outdoor toms have gone down with blight. You'd have thought I'd be hardened to such things by this point, but I'm not. I spent a good deal of last week madly bottling things, including creating vats of green tom chutney from the thousands of 'Millefleur' that I picked in a great hurry before burning the plants in hope that it might just be those to go down. But today I literally watched the 'Golden Queen' go brown. Clearly I'd have bottled them but I've cleared the local tip out of every suitable receptacle (and some clearly not) for bottling and canning.
But you always learn things from such hardship (and yes, hardship is a little dramatic, but it feels that way). I am not prepared to stop growing outdoor toms. I've thought about it. My mum tried to persuade me to stick to cabbages and other suitable fair for our climate-to which all I have to say is cabbage white mum, cabbage white! No I want outdoor toms and the dozen or so I did get to eat (Odessa, Kenilworth, Golden Queen and Millefleur) were nectar enough to tempt me into another year.
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Berryfields is a very odd place to work. The most obvious reason being that it is seen by millions, but visited by very few. Other times it's odd just because you could never predict the day would turn out so.
Last Friday we threw a party for Geoff and Clare (Clare's 30th, Geoff's goodbye). We built a barbecue, picked the aubergines (marbled violet and white and tasting divine), pickled, diced and grated as many other vegetables as possible, made Pimms in a tub trug, created a place to play boules, hung bunting in the apple trees and generally declared Berryfields a place of merriment. When I found myself hiding in the big old conifer at the bottom of the garden, waiting for the other sardines to find me, listening to peels of laughter, stifling giggles, I had to pinch myself and say is this is where I work!
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I'm beat today. I caught a nasty cold last week and although I no longer feel like my head is covered in egg yolk, it has left me slow and sluggish. I seem to have floated through this rather odd week. On Monday I came in to find the female swallow dead in the machinery shed. I have no idea how it happened. She was still warm, her feathers shiny, all glassy-eyed, but the ghost had flown. I picked some sweetpeas as she looked so fine sitting on top of their tripods surveying her lair, lined the bottom of the grave with them and then buried her. I haven't done such a thing since I was a child. I know it's terribly sentimental, but she's been my summer.
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