Look what’s been ripening away beautifully on my bedroom window sill while I was away in Prague. This house is now self-sufficient in habaneros. You want some wicked fresh chili peppers, this is the place to come.
As August winds down each year there are some regular events, firstly, I get a year older and so the title of this blog becomes one more year out of date — that’s coming on Friday. To ease the pain of this, however, the garden finally begins to pay off. Blackberries, blueberries and rhubarb in this shot, with apples and plums gathered but unseen here (we have realised fruit is much less hassle than vegetables). There must be a photo like this every year around this time, and hopefully that isn’t going to change however far I take this blog.
Clare says she here sees ‘only the dead one’ but the rest were good to go… and the apples in the background are also coming along nicely. Thing about raspberries though, they’re really just weeds; they seem to grow everywhere except where was actually intended.
I went back to work today after 10 days off, not that this gave me any particularly new horizons photography-wise. Into the garden it is, then. All the plants that were deposited in the soil after being acquired from Barton Grange (and its urinals) two weeks ago seem to have sprouted, so that’s worth recording, if unexciting.
After the beauty and interest and light of yesterday, today was a very dull day in all respects. Lucky this bush has bloomed in the garden to give the otherwise drab day some colour. If I was gardener enough, I would say I planted it deliberately in order to play this role every March, but nothing in the garden has been done with that much forethought, I can assure you.
Always a pleasing event of the year. Not many blackberries around yet, but they will come. Plums… for us will, I hope, be just as much in glut as they were two years ago. Believe me, if you live in Hebden Bridge and want cheap plums, give us a couple of weeks, we will be overflowing.
Every year around this time there will be some new shoots on one south-facing window sill or other, getting ready for the moment when, like good parents, we decide they can be let out into the outside world. Usually, they survive.
As growing on our window sill at home, getting itself established before we introduce it into the big, wide, adolescent world that lies outside.
In our garden, this evening. It had friends. All contributed to a very nice, 100% foraged mint & wild strawberry source which I made to go with the lamb. I wish I was better at making food grow, to be honest.
Being 42 