TENDING ONE'S GARDEN

 

Voltaire’s Candide, one of my favourite books, ends with Candide, after a life of tribulations, just happily tending the garden. Having written about most interesting events of my past 100 years, I feel rather the same.  But then, I have always been, throughout life, happily getting my hands dirty with garden soil.

Gardening takes time and patience both of which enhance one’s latter years.  I write this in the spring, taking my time.

Always a success, I see that from the pots on my kitchen window sill have sprung runner bean plants that I have grown in homemade compost from beans harvested and dried from last year’s crop. 

They will be hardened off outside and then put into three plastic woven sacks to climb up a framework of bamboos to produce yet another crop of beans that we will gather at the four inch stage for five minutes boiling and then eaten with garlic, butter and sea salt. 

In my childhood, runners were allowed to grow large, then stringed, chopped, and eaten as a boiled vegetable or preserved in Kilner jars for winter use. For us now, when the beans are beyond the four inch stage, we allow them to grow as large as they like. We then harvest them as the bean pods begin to turn yellow, and then allow them to dry out, pod them, and use them for next year’s seed, for chilli con carne, stews and with vinaigrette as hors d’ oeuvre, or with drinks.  What versatile beans they are - so accommodating and so delicious.

Tomato blight has been in the past an unpleasant nuisance in the garden. But I persevere, even though the cost of plants, or seed, and the time spent (we don’t have a greenhouse) makes it easier and more economical, I expect, to just buy them in the market. But straight from the vine is something special. 

In a past year I liked a bought tomato so much that I extracted some seed from it in a 

springtime vinaigrette, planted the seed, and ate the crop that very same year.

I am doing the same with three test varieties this year as well.

Harvesting the seed, for this or next year’s growth, is easy. Extract the seeds from a ripe tomato with a teaspoon and spread the wet seeds over some absorbent kitchen paper. When wet or dry, cut the seeds out individually with scissors and plant them into pots of compost  with their bit of kitchen paper attached. Plant the resulting seedlings with delicacy into soil compost to harden off, then into good earth outside or in a greenhouse. 

I see a container of old runner bean seeds in the kitchen. I will use them in a kind of Tagine, first soaking them for 24 hours or so, then either boiling or pressure cooking them until soft. 

For the dish, I’ll cut up quite a lot of onion and put the pieces at the bottom of a casserole. Then on them with go a chicken or cockerel, surrounding this with the cooked beans (or chick peas) and some dried apricots. Now it is the time to pour over a generous amount of chicken stock made of dissolved chicken stock cubes and salt, mixed with many dried and powdered herbs and spices that happen to lie around the kitchen. Topped off with a layer of sliced tomatoes, and cooked in a 130 degree oven for three hours, the result will be meltingly delicious. Getting the bird out to dismantle it for the table is a delicate job. 

I plan to cook with other lesser cuts of meat this way, possibly with red wine, perhaps with some orange juice and lots of milled pepper and peeled garlic. 

Sounds good. 

A EUREKA MOMENT IN THE GARDEN

(continued)

Mistletoe, an evergreen parasite, is steeped in the history of folklore, magic, superstition, ritual, religion, myth, the seasons, regeneration, growth, and much else. 

With me, it was, since childhood, an evergreen branch or two, often bearing white berries, and something that was hung in a doorway to encourage kissing at Christmas time. We bought ours, but I wanted to grow it myself. So I tried on apple trees (its favourite host) and I failed. And I have continued in life to try, try, and try again - failing each time. 

In 2008, son Peter gave us an apple tree in a pot, which we placed, still in its pot, in front of the northern-facing brick wall of our London garden. Now, here was my chance once more to grow mistletoe. 

So, in the winter of 2008, I tried my luck by pressing some sticky white mistletoe berries into the junctures of spur and trunk, employing several methods of attachment and protection. No luck. So I tried the same the next year (2009). Still no luck, and gave up. Then in March 2010, I found a bunch of dried mistletoe that someone had thrown onto a rubbish skip. Among its branches were plenty of now brown and shrivelled berry/seeds. So I tried these, tying them in with string, coating this with rubber solution and covering the “sowings” with earth. You could then hardly see my surgical efforts with their protective dressing. Still no luck. I gave up again. But now came my eureka moment. In 2013 (5 years after my first attempt with fresh seeds) a small mistletoe sprout pushed out from beneath the bark. I had done it - at long last. 

A year later another sprout from another planted seed appeared. And the next year even another - all creating their own nourishment through photosynthesis and using only sap from beneath the bark of their parent host for survival. 

Even now, when a new mistletoe sprout pushes out from the swelling of apple tree bark, 17 years since I embarked on this mistletoe saga, I hardly bother about it. 

Well, l was still rather pleased that I had grown mistletoe in the end. 

In the spring of 2025 (12 years after establishing mistletoe) more sproutings have appeared from the apple tree’s bark, well away from the original “plants”.

These sites are not to the detriment of the host apple tree in its pot as the tree has also created new growth - though no apples.