From Field to Fork: Notes from the Tin Drum Kitchen Garden

Labour of Months

2010-12-04T10:01:00.001-08:00

I haven’t written a blog entry for ages. Too long. In fact it’s becoming a bit of a thing with me – I’m rather shy of starting again. What on earth have I got to write about, I thought as I went to stoke the Aga for my morning cuppa? Nothing more than anyone else, that’s for sure, but then that is the joy (for me) of reading diaries…peering into the hum-drumness of other people’s lives and picking out what I find interesting or reassuring.

Firstly the snow; it has to be mentioned. Who remembers snow like this so early in the year? No one I know. I love it! Last night I emptied the hot Aga riddlings into the tin bucket outside our back door and the snow was crisp and deep in the back yard. There was no moon or stars but still there was an opalescent snow light. Back in the warmth of the kitchen, huddled in a box of straw in the fireplace, was a young black hen recovering from a night out in the cold. I gave her a stroke and a drop of water from a jam jar and decided that she was definitely on the mend. A couple of intrepid Ladies of the Dicker battled their way through the snow to come and practice Christmas songs but we got no further than mulling some wine and drinking it and suddenly it was bedtime and their van was stuck in the field so Dave had to come out of his hiding place to ferry them home in the land rover.

This morning I opened the curtains and the winter wonderland had turned to brown sludge. Not a sign that we had ever had snow this week except for the children’s carefully constructed igloo which was just a sad spot of a molten memory in the field, and my friend’s abandoned van sinking deeper into the mud as I watch the torrential rain turn the field into an earthy soup.

With the weather this week I am glad that our three pigs went to slaughter last Monday. Imagine how dire it would have been for them. Freezing temperatures and then hauling themselves through an icy bog all for the sake of a pig nut or two. I’m sure I’m on dodgy ground here - because of course one can reason that death is probably not a better option than a muddy life - but we do eat meat in our family and to me it’s about the quality of the life of the meat that we eat that is important. Ours have been reared outdoors according to what the French used to call the Labour of Months. This quite simply means that you work with the changing seasons to rear, preserve and eat your pigs.

In the past if you had enough room to keep a pig and a few chickens then you could feed the family throughout the year. Pigs are omnivorous and will eat quite simply anything which they will obligingly turn into top quality meat. These days we don’t feed pigs household slops but you can feed them fruit, vegetables and nuts that come straight from the field or orchard to supplement their rusk diet. This means that they can be fed throughout the year on excess from the kitchen garden; overgrown courgettes, beetroot leaves and the like and come the autumn they are fattened on acorns and apples from the orchard including the apple cake (a.k.a. ‘cheese’) from the cider press. By the time the excess apples and acorns have run out, the pigs should be well grown enough to be sent off to slaughter at the end of November just before the really unpleasant weather sets in.

December is traditionally the time when the pig would be transformed into the preserved meats that would provide a Christmas ham and keep the family fed for the rest of the year if supplies were rationed. These days, even those who keep pigs tend not to use traditional preserving methods because it is easiest to just apportion up the meat and store it in the freezer as oversized chops, a couple of roasting joints and some breakfast sausages made with a proprietary seasoning mix.

There is not much of a tradition of charcuterie making over here but to me it seems that the most honourable thing to do with your lovingly reared pig is to use every scrap of meat from nose to tail and trotter and the best way to do that is to preserve the meat in the myriad of ways that the traditional French Charcutier would. It has taken trial and error, quite a bit of research and some helpful courses over the last couple of years to learn the finer points of charcuterie but I’m really looking forward to working on these pigs as I think that this meat will be particularly sweet and succulent.

The pigs have been hanging in our walk-in fridge to tenderize this week. On Monday Dave will butcher them (while I go Christmas shopping) and then for the rest of the week he and I will turn the meat into saucisson, salami, chorizo, air-dried hams, fromage de tete and other delicacies that you would normally find in a French Charcuterie.

Back to today. I have just braved the gloom and downpour to go and check the hens. They are bedraggled things huddled under their hen house (which is raised off the ground on stilts). I suggestively nudged them inside but they were not ready, preferring to huddle close to Bentley, the cockerel, until he gives the go-ahead and leads his ladies to their perches. But his head count will be short of one: the little black hen did not make it and despite our best efforts she died this morning and will be buried next to a robin that Louis found frozen in the snow.

The heat of the midday sun…

2010-07-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

Last night we sat outside and as the sun went down a mist settled upon the field like a shroud bringing a drop of dew to the gasping plants. Bats darted beneath a mauve, star speckled sky and the silhouettes of familiar trees took on eerie profiles.

This morning, up early and another cloudless, baby blue sky. The sun was already hot and harsh, the mown meadow parched and brown, dust from the cracked earth billowing underfoot. It feels like another country that we live in; the wild flowers that thrive this year are poppies, mallows, cornflowers and ox-eye daisies – their lives brief and stunning under the glare of this Mediterranean spell of summer. Marigolds and nasturtiums from last summer have self seeded everywhere and the garden is blasted with shots of hot colour.

But there is no time to stop and smell the roses because in the kitchen garden there is a race going on to see how fast every single vegetable can mature and run to seed in order to reproduce in these life threatening drought conditions. And the only thing that will stop this is water…

A heady combination of water and long hot sunny days should produce some bumper crops but in order to achieve this I feel like a nurse in a very busy ward running from plant to plant to administer just the right dose at the right time. Watering can’t be done at a leisurely pace throughout the day, it has to be done early in the morning or late in the evening, because there is a fine line between quenching a plant’s thirst or boiling it alive with an ill-timed lunchtime tipple in the heat of the midday sun.

Last summer, Dave and I – virgin smallholders – reared some pigs to help us dig a vegetable plot, then we threw some seeds in the ground and waited to see what would happen. Vegetables grew and so did the weeds, in abundance. We hunted for the vegetables we had planted, harvested a surprising amount and brought them in for use in the Tin Drums.

This year we’re a bit more in control even though it doesn’t feel like it most of the time. We have our small Land Army for a start. Charlotte and I are in charge of the kitchen garden, racing as fast as we can to get the last of the hundreds of leeks in for the winter, nurturing the tomatoes and peppers in the scorching heat of the greenhouse, checking beneath the horticultural fleece that protects the magnificent brassicas from the dreaded cabbage white butterfly which decimated our entire crop last year, and harvesting whatever has ripened overnight.

Dave and Matt the Chef are in charge of charcuterie. We now have a small field kitchen out at the smallholding and facilities for smoking and hanging our cured meats. We are making everything from air dried ham, chorizo and bacon through to the pork pies and pates – all now on the Tin Drum menu. The herbs and fresh ingredients used come straight from the herb bed or the kitchen garden the minute they are needed; nothing hangs around getting past its best.

Since I last posted a blog entry, Rose, our oldest daughter has finished her degree and started work full time at Seven Dials Tin Drum and it is now, more than ever, a family business. Rose was just nine years old when we opened the first Tin Drum at the Dials. That was way back in 1998 when bars were smoky, food was Fusion and from far flung shores and climate change was still only registering with those who knitted their own sandals. Things have changed so much over little more than a decade and climate change and the credit crunch have affected all of our lives. We are looking closer to home for enjoyment now and that includes learning the delights of food that we can grow ourselves. Eleven years ago I hadn’t even grown cress on blotting paper and if anybody had told me I’d be growing and rearing food for the restaurants I’d have thought them quite insane. But things can change in the most unexpected of ways.

Spring

2010-04-25T02:33:00.001-07:00

The other night I reclined in a Barcelona chair sipping a dry martini (shaken, not stirred) in the penthouse suite of a gentleman dressed in pyjamas. He sipped his martini and read a little From Russia With Love out loud. Ian Fleming drank a bottle of gin a day, he told us, as my three friends and I marvelled at the potency of the meagre liquid in our glasses. And while Fleming snoozed and awoke sporadically to try out the drinks from agent 007’s repertoire, his wife got on with writing the Bond novels. I love Brighton – the things that go on in hidden away places, the things you learn - especially when Spring is in the air and the May Festival is just around the corner.

So, it is here, at last…Spring…all blowsy and frilled with blossom, tossing its lush good looks this way and that in the April breezes, demanding attention. And we scurry about squeezing in a last minute pruning, planting out fragile seedlings because those killer frosts that still sneak over the fields on an April morning just don’t seem possible when the midday sun warms your back.

We’ve been here in the country almost two years now. I was gazing out of the window the morning after my night as a Bond Girl (albeit of the Moneypenny type), taking stock of how our lives have changed over this time. Everything was quite still in the field, the sky was clear blue, the hawthorn blossom that edges our field crisply white against it. The kettle began to boil. I was just about to turn away from the window and make coffee for the land workers when Peggy and Bluebell – Charlotte’s long haired dachshund - bounded onto centre stage in the field and tumbled about in a raucous display of affection. I arranged some tin cups on a tray as I watched the dogs and then, in the distance, I spotted two figures walking slowly up the long drive towards the house. The woman was clutching a book to her breast. Her pale frizzy hair and green pleated skirt betrayed no hint of vanity. Beside her, a man in beige with a black briefcase. Jehovah’s Witnesses! They proceeded slowly as if time was of no issue to them, seemingly also oblivious to the dogs that hurtled about them in circles. Quickly I loaded the tray with the coffee pot, milk and sugar and I was just about to scarper out of the back door to take refuge in the greenhouse when I noticed something else out of the window. A shed was moving serenely across the field, complete with air drying hams swinging inside it. From where I was standing this was all I could see…the shed moving at a funereal pace, the dogs darting in and out of view and the purposeful progress of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I grabbed the tray and ran.

Outside, peering over the garden wall, it became clear that the shed was being pulled along by our little blue tractor with Dave at the helm, an aim clearly in mind. I mouthed the word ‘Coffee?’ at him, but I had been spotted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and they were heading straight for me.

Well, I can’t be rude, so I stood my ground and waited. I listened to birdsong while they preached – and then I very politely told them that I had to get out into the field and assist creation by planting some more seeds!

Winter

2010-01-24T05:05:00.001-08:00

As December seeped in, wet and warm, we booked our three sows into Tottingworth abattoir. Meanwhile, as we awaited the day, we had decided to buy a couple of legs of pork from Tottingworth for hams for ourselves. We prepared them and took them down to our cellar where they would salt cure for a while. When curing hams I go down to the cellar every day to turn them and check that they are fully covered with salt.

The rain pelted down relentlessly and we were surrounded by a sea of mud. All we could do was to stay inside and sit the storms out. The hams had been down in the cellar for a couple of days sitting in their boxes of salt on a high bench. I went down to do the daily turn, only to find that half way down the stairs I could go no further…we were flooded and the hams were nowhere to be seen!

Some nice men with a big pump came out pretty quickly to get rid of the water for us…about 3 ft of it. They worked tirelessly outside in the dark and the rain and all I could think about was making sure they had an endless supply of hot drinks to keep them warm. Eventually they emerged and came to have a quiet word with me. ‘Madam,’ one of the nice men said in hushed tones, ‘we have cleared the water and we are taking an inventory but I just thought I should mention that there appears to be some…er…flesh…in your cellar.’ He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

‘Oh!’ I said, ‘Hams!’ I had quite forgotten to mention them, ‘…Just a couple of hams, that’s all!’ and realising what they must have looked like where they had come to rest on the cellar floor, I added reassuringly, ‘Really nothing to worry about.’

The flooded cellar has been an ongoing problem over the winter because we have clay soil here and the water table was so high that there was nowhere for it to go, so it came into our cellar. After a while we were told that the water would have to stay in the cellar until it drained away of its own accord to avoid the pressure from the waterlogged land outside pushing our cellar walls in. Our house was being held up by flood water!

The cellar is all dried out now and we are renovating it and sorting out the drainage because it’s a great space for storing wines and preserves and has the perfect humidity and airiness for hanging chorizo and air dried sausages.

Halfway through December when most people are decorating their Christmas trees and tweaking the bows on the gifts that they have wrapped for under the tree, we took delivery of our three sows from the abattoir. Two of them went straight to the Tin Drums and we kept one for ourselves. Mark from the Cottage down the road used to be a butcher and he came up to our house with his tins of cider to teach us how to butcher a whole pig, a lamb and a venison. You have to work really fast doing this and it’s best done when the weather turns really cold, which it obligingly did. Whilst the men butchered, Charlotte (the Tin Drum’s Land Girl) and I prepared salt cures and molasses cures for hams, sweet cures for sides of bacon and pancetta, and herb and spice mixes for sausages and chorizo. For three days we worked late into the night as the snow settled all around us. Dave, in true Heath Robinson style, turned one of our sheds into a smokery and after the meat had been salt or sweet cured, it was cold smoked over hay and oak chips. The results are truly delicious.

The clock was ticking and Christmas was almost upon us. We went out one snowy evening and bought our Christmas tree but when we came to decorate it, we couldn’t find the decorations. They were under water in the cellar. All ruined. We did our best with jewellery and chandelier droplets and salt dough angels but it didn’t look quite right. But word had gone round, and friends from Brighton and the village brought us gifts of baubles and hearts and and ginger biscuits to hang on the tree and by Christmas the tree was the loveliest I had ever seen it. One day just before Christmas there was a knock at the door and Tess who owns the Village Shop, and her cousin Sam, came in bearing the most amazing gingerbread house. It was ‘Gingernash’ – a perfect replica of our home with almond roof tiles, chocolate finger ridge tiles, pathways made of boiled sweets, flower beds filled with liquorice allsorts and a tumble of sweets falling from Dave’s bio-diesel shed which the children were allowed to ‘tidy up’. How kind people are.

We snuggled down for Christmas. In the new year, the snow whirled and drifted and settled all around us. The holidays went on and on and it seemed to the children as if a miracle had happened and school would never open again and they would grow up in a pure white world catching snowflakes on their tongues, sledging on trays and building giant snowmen. We were isolated; there was no way we could get into Brighton even in the Landrover and so we settled down to work on the Tin Drum menus.

Over the past year or so as we have been growing our vegetables and rearing a few animals, we have also been learning traditional ways of preparing and cooking food. At the smallholding we have been working on recipes using the food that we know we can produce ourselves. Last week Stuart - the new manager of Seven Dials Tin Drum, and Greg, Pete and George – the head chefs from all three of the restaurants, came out to the smallholding for three days and we turned our kitchen into a training kitchen.

It was a chance for us all to work together and refine butchery skills, experiment with traditional ways of curing and preserving meat and discuss, develop and cook all the dishes that will soon be on our new menu. At the end of each day we opened a couple of bottles of wine and all sat around the farmhouse table to eat and discuss the dishes.

We are really excited about the new menu. It is the culmination of a real team effort. It will be fine, local, rustic food served with great wines and beers, and we hope you will enjoy it.

Hangover Cure

2009-11-19T06:29:00.001-08:00

I was chatting with my Uncle Roger the other day about hangovers. I didn’t have one and I presume that neither did he but he had written a very amusing article about the perfect Hangover Cure and how there is actually no such thing. Since then I have done some research.

Last night Dave came home with a few half full bottles of wine left over from a wine tasting at Hove Tin Drum earlier in the day. Obviously, it’s quite important that I give a second opinion on certain matters so I gave the wine tasting my full attention – and, well, they all seemed rather lovely to me in the end…but that was last night.

Getting up this morning was a very nasty business. I crept downstairs for water expecting a few more hours sleep to discover that the morning had already set in: the sky was aluminium grey and a bullying wind pummelled the house. Dozens of black birds were being tossed about in the air; up and down they went as if on an invisible roller coaster. I wanted to be one of them, frolicking in the gale rather than wondering whether I was about to die.

There was no question of going back to bed and calling the day off: children had to be chivvied to school and we had people booked in to come and help outside, although I did think – as I watched the majestic oaks bowing under the force of the gale – that a nice mug of cocoa, a fire and a good book might be more sensible. I was just working out how to put this brainwave to Dave when he came into the kitchen with an agenda: it was far too wet to plant broad beans and garlic so Charlotte and I were to clear out the greenhouse, and move pigs again, whilst chef Matt – out from Hove for the day – would help Dave with more manly stuff.

The pigs have to be moved to fresh ground every week at the moment because in wet weather they can turn a vegetable patch into a swamp in a couple of days. Still, we have evolved a very efficient procedure for moving them. Pigs have the intelligence of a three year old child, apparently, and they do seem to know exactly what is going on and how they are supposed to behave. We have a holding pen in one corner of the field which is quite a walk from where the pigs now live. To move them, we wait until they are hungry and then I lead them with a bucket of food. It is all very straight forward and they follow obediently behind while I chat to them in a soothing way to keep them focused on me and the little walk that could go so horribly wrong if they had a mind to take a diversion.

The walk to the holding pen went without a hitch and we all blithely chatted about how easy this pig moving routine has become. Charlotte and I then grappled with the electric fencing string in the gale but eventually set the pigs up with a nice L-shaped floor plan bordered tantalizingly by parsley, celeriac and chard. It was then time to move the pig ark which is best done with four strong people and a lift from the tractor loader (although last week a frisky gust lifted the ark out of the mud, flung it in the air, twisted it around a bit and dropped it back down in a crumpled heap narrowly missing the pigs). Just as we needed an extra pair of hands Sam arrived in the field still dazed and blinking from youthful slumber. Sam is related to Mary Poppins. He blew in to Starnash one night on an east wind and here he still is - tending, mending and lending a hand wherever the need arises.

We set up the pig ark in its new location and then off we went to bring the pigs to their new home before lunch. Sam came with me and I gave him their bucket of food and opened the gate of the holding pen. I remember the words, ‘Just keep in front of them…’ drifting off on a breeze as three hungry pigs crashed through the gate, bypassed Sam, and broke into a combined 30 stone gallop heading straight for Dave. Seeing this tricky situation hurtling towards him, Dave did what any self-respecting bar owner would do and leapt into an assertive star shape. I don’t think the pigs noticed. Into the vegetable plot they thundered and by this time I had the food bucket and was trying to run ahead with the shrill cry of, ‘Piggies…Piggies!’ which means ‘Food…food!’ But hey, why eat pig nuts when there is a kitchen garden spread out before you? And, come to think of it, why confine yourselves to a kitchen garden when there’s the world outside? So that is where they headed: one for the orchard and the fields that lead to the Cuckmere River, one for the main road via some ponds, and one to the next door neighbours house.

Golden rule: never chase a running pig – they think it’s really funny. And they’re nippier on those little trotters than ever you would believe. So, we all chased the pigs. All around the field they darted, round and round the house, through the back yard, flummoxing the chickens, and off to the orchard where the whole escapade was suddenly arrested by a glut of windfall apples. After about half an hour of running round we had all three in the orchard. We filled the bucket with apples and acorns and offered it to Big Sow. Big Sow was pleased. A couple of grunts from her and the other girls fell into line and off I ran, leading them with the gentle call of, ‘Piggies…piggies!’ through the garden, up a wooden plank, past the greenhouse and the huts, and into their new quarters where they settled down to a nice pile of pig nuts. On went the electric fence and we all heaved a small sigh of relief, and then I realized that not only was I feeling relieved, but that all signs of a hangover had completely disappeared and that I wasn’t going to die after all.

The Pig Run

2009-11-04T13:45:00.000-08:00

November is a stroppy month. It comes flouncing in with its winds lashing, throwing fitful rain storms at us, and then all of a sudden it is over and out comes the sun sparkling off the slippery mud as if nothing of the sort had happened. Things are beginning to look pared back but not clean and bare as in mid-winter. There is a scruffiness about this time of year. I open our back door to the yard and there are the hens in a huddle on the door mat, looking dismayed, their feathers bedraggled by rain. Overhead fly the ducks in formation, their feathers oily and sleek, quacking mirthfully. My urge is to light a fire and snuggle up indoors and I am tempted to think that it is all over now until the spring but when I step outside there is still such a choice to be had. It is a time of year when there is no longer a confusion of produce, so we have to think more creatively about how to use what is out there.

Here are the Tin Drum Land Army – Mark, Harvey, Magnus and Abbie - clearing the kitchen garden for no more than the price of a Guinness and some cheesy chips down at the Local. The bean poles are now down, the courgette plants are on the compost heap, the ruby spinach and salad rocket have gone to seed.

One day last week when the sky was white and the air was dry, Charlotte and I gathered seeds and laid them out to dry in the sheds. Seed gathering is an intimate procedure and one of ultimate satisfaction - remembering the moment the initial seed was planted, thinking of all the food that has been consumed from a single plant and then saving for next year dozens of seeds borne of that first one .

Thistles and nettles have now taken over where once there were lettuces, broad beans and potatoes. At first sight it looks uninspiring and yet you walk around and look a little closer and there, right at our feet, are still box loads of vegetables. I set the children onto the field, hunting down Paris Market and Rainbow carrots, golden beetroot and rubine sprouts. Hidden away under giant dock leaves each find became a treasure. And growing in the field we still have our rainbow chard, spinach, Brussels sprouts, celeriac and more. Then there are the winter hardy herbs – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and bay. And medlar fruit now perfect for harvesting and bletting.

Early one morning last week I was drinking tea and looking out of the bedroom window while my bath was running. It was too early for thought, let alone running round a field in my pyjamas chasing a tractor with a trailer load of steaming manure. And yet that was how that day started, and every subsequent day for the rest of the week the same thing happened – a local farmer…'friend of So’n’so down the road – heard you wanted some muck’…would clatter up the drive unannounced and tip a few tonnes out onto our muck pile.

We now have thirty tonnes of the best manure from local farms; it ranges is colour from black to sepia and knowing what it is going to do to our soil and next years crops, it is really quite a beautiful sight to behold. After a fortifying pint at the Plough Inn, the Tin Drum team set to work on the muck pile, laying it out thickly on the field…oh how they worked – and look who got to sit in the tractor!

November is a time to think about meat. Traditionally a pig would be ready for slaughter at this time of year so that hams could be salted and preserved in time for Christmas and the winter. It is also when we eat wild meat – pheasant, pigeon, rabbit and venison - that has reached maturity naturally. Sometimes, when I am cooking supper, the local game man turns up at the door with his catch of the day. We don’t order specifically from him, we just see what he’s got and then it goes onto the Tin Drum specials menu.

We have three Gloucester Spot-Middle White cross pigs at the moment. They have been working on a rhubarb patch for us for the last month or so, but we decided it was time to move them to fresh land and put them to work digging up the vegetable plot for us whilst rooting around for all the goodies we have missed. The pigs are a fair size and quite feisty now. Pigs are not slow and cumbersome, on the contrary, they are nippy movers and will knock anything out of the way in the pursuit of food. Our three acres isn’t stock fenced off from neighbouring properties and to a ‘Tamworth Two’ escape while we ran them the distance between their old home and the kitchen garden we had men, women and children on hand with boards to guide them should they stray. That was the plan, anyhow, but the great thing about pigs is their love of food and in the end a bucket of pig nuts was as good as any lead and they trotted along obligingly into their new quarters.

Small Things

2009-10-02T03:43:00.001-07:00

Autumn came very suddenly one day about two weeks ago. It wasn’t a gradual process - noticing that the leaves are beginning to fade and turn or that there is a slight nip in the air. No, it was the light; it was as if someone had popped a golden filter over the sun and angled it down in the sky. Blimey! I thought, This is It…End of Summer. And as I thought that thought a flurry of copper leaves fell at my feet and whirled about in an obligingly spooky spiral as if dancing to my thoughts. The wind picked up then, in an instant, ruffling the hens’ feathers and chasing them off squawking in a panic stricken queue, heading for nowhere in particular. The clothes on the washing line billowed and danced like crazy folk and the cats jumped out of trees to avoid a sudden avalanche of prickly sweet chestnuts. And then there were squirrels – four or five - rushing hither and thither, gathering nuts as fast as they could, calling to each other with their strange monkey cries as they ran the electricity cable tightrope up to our loft with their haul. All of this I just stood and watched as if I had nothing better to do and then it dawned on me that I should be doing the same – preparing for battening down the hatches against winter when it comes.

I love this time of year with its whiff of change. Sunny days in September and October feel like a stolen treat. But there is no time to waste and we are constantly multi-tasking. There is the harvesting to be done still – blackberries before the last day of September when the devil spits on them and turns them bitter! (Yes, apparently so!) Then there are the haws and the hips to gather – all to make hedgerow jelly which will find its way onto the the Tin Drum menus. Yesterday Charlotte and I picked bucket loads of wild damsons. Charlotte now works for the Tin Drum – she is our Land Girl, with twigs in her hair from clambering up trees and striding intrepidly through brambles in her flip-flops at the sight of a mass of inaccessible sloes.

When we moved to the smallholding we had just a house in a field. No outbuildings, except one small brick shed in the back yard which was immediately requisitioned for the the dark art of turning the Tin Drums’ spent cooking oil into bio-diesel. Freddie, the bio-diesel machine, lives in there gulping and gurgling as the alchemy is performed.

On a smallholding you accumulate Stuff. You can’t do anything without equipment; tractors, ride-on mowers, strimmers and chainsaws. We pick up antique tools from farm sales – we don’t know the names for these implements and you can’t buy them in garden centres or hardware stores, but they’re invaluable to us and they need places to live. So every now and then we hitch up the trailer and drive for miles to collect someone’s unwanted shed. Now we have a row of them, like beach huts. Sheds are wonderful things when everything has a place – and I am imposing a satisfying order to them with tools hanging from nails on bits of found wood. Nothing goes to waste.

Back in March we took our first pigs to slaughter. We had fine cuts of pork and learnt to make sausages and salam i and hams. Five legs have been salt cured and air dried and are just about ready to go on to the Tin Drum menus later this month. We now have three more piglets eating acorns in the field and they should be ready by Christmas although we are thinking of keeping one of the sows for breeding but this will mean restoring the old pig shed near the house.

Our cat, Dixie, had kittens a week ago – three of them that fit altogether into the palm of my hand. She always has her kittens in a wardrobe and after a week she likes to move them under a pillow on someone’s bed. For about six weeks she moves them every few days into the most peculiar places and then one morning they will join us for breakfast and that will be it; kittens tripping you up, kittens in your shoes and wellies and hats, until they leave us at nine weeks old. And then, to add to the piglets and kittens, Peggy the labrador puppy arrived – our guard dog! I can’t see it yet - she is somewhat smaller than a hen and seems to rather like the idea of being one of their flock.

The kitchen garden is beginning to look depleted, and in a way that’s quite exciting. It means that we can bed down the soil under a blanket of manure. I’m looking forward to watching the dark stillness of the land in winter, knowing that unseen beneath the surface is seething industry as the worms do the work for us, turning the earth and manure into something wonderful and nutritious for next year’s food to grow on.

Dodgy plumming

2009-08-31T01:12:00.001-07:00

Don’t for one minute think that living on a smallholding is like a Good Housekeeping gingham and roses article with a delicious homemade Victoria sponge always on the table. It’s not. It’s the aim, but the reality is that there is always something needing tending, mending, cleaning, picking and processing from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year.

We took a little holiday to Crete this year. We left the vegetables peacefully growing in the field, the tomatoes ripening in the greenhouse, the plums swelling in the orchard. It was the beginning of August.

Crete was beautiful, arid and hot. Only the hardiest plants showed any signs of life – silver leafed olive trees clinging to the red rocky mountain slopes, cacti, fragrant wild sage and splashes of magenta bougainvillea against white-washed walls. Nothing seemed to be actually growing, just waiting. The cicadas, hidden from sight, scritched loudly day and night, the Meltemi wind bowled down the mountains bending the eucalyptus and olive trees under its invisible wave. We lay in the sun reading books, we swam, we drank cold beer in cafes. It was delightful. I thought, ‘Could I live like this?’

When we landed back in England the sun was shining and the greenness was startling. We drove at 6am past grazing sheep and cattle, gardens garish with summer blooms in their prime. We wheeled our suitcases up the lavender lined path to the front door and thought it might be a nice idea to have a little snooze after 24 hours without sleep. But then we thought we might just take a peep at the field and the greenhouse first with a cup of English tea in hand.

We had been warned about the blight while we were away by friends who had come for a little family holiday in the country and had ended up tirelessly digging up and burning all our tomato plants (as well as coping with a spot of cat terrorism!). The warm damp weather had been perfect for the blight and it had taken out all our carefully nurtured tomatoes and potatoes.

In the field there was a riot. I wondered whether to sit down with my cup of tea and look at a thistle for five minutes to see if I could actually watch it growing. Forget time-release photography. The weeds swayed in the light morning breeze, robust and triumphant. Every species of weed under the sun seemed to have moved into our little plot. Where had they all come from? All around is pure pasture that wouldn’t even accept my gift of lovely wild flower seeds in the spring and yet on our veg plot the variety was astounding and they had taken over every inch of ground completely hiding my carefully sown rows of spring onions, carrots and beetroot.

Of course, we started to pull out the odd weed, tea in hand, and one weed leads to the next and finally after about an hour of toiling we found a carrot top. So they were there, bless them…my babies! Meanwhile, just behind me, I was sure I could hear a faint creaking and rushing of sap as the weeds gathered pace - growing, growing - faster than I could pull their brethren out.

The Weeds fall into my tending category – an on-going job, but I’m delighted to say that my baby vegetables are soldiering bravely on with their growth and now stand like rows of well behaved children in orderly lines ignoring the mayhem around them.

Nature is fantastic. Living in the countryside, I am constantly amazed by the abundance all around us. Well, to be more honest, right now I’m overwhelmed by it. Nature’s abundance comes all at once. Everywhere you look are delicious edibles, perfect for just such a short time. In our orchard the plums were weighing down the branches and the wasps were licking their lips. It felt like a national emergency to get them all picked. Children were deployed up the trees and plums rained down. Marvellous! We breathed a sigh of relief at a job well done and hefted the brimming trugs inside. There they were, picked - all our plums, all needing processing or they would all end up on the compost heap!

Processing sounds very clinical, but preserving is a clinical procedure. You have to have just the right amount of sugar or vinegar or alcohol to keep the bugs away; specific temperatures have to be reached and maintained for a certain time and then of course there’s the sterilization of all the receptacles that are used in the process. It may be a sweet smelling process but it has been like a laboratory in the farm kitchen for a week or so now. I have de-stoned hundreds of plums, I have de-stringed hundreds of runner beans; courgettes and beetroot are piling up awaiting my attention and all around glossy blackberries and elderberries twinkle at me as I peg out the washing, just crying out to be picked and turned into jellies and chutneys and wine.

The jam jars and kilner jars are stacking up colourfully on every surface. We have eaten jam with everything…jam on lamb – not bad! But jam is sticky stuff and a lot of washing up needs to be done, which is fine if you have a tap. But there lies a problem: somehow our kitchen tap came off in my hand the other day. Water sprayed everywhere, soaking me and entertaining the children. I rammed it back into the hole where it remains wonkily emitting just the faintest trickle when full on. So now I have to boil pans and kettles for the washing up, which, as you can imagine, just adds to the fun.

Seedy Thoughts

2009-07-14T04:39:00.000-07:00

I am eating onion soup fresh as can be made from onions we picked from the field first thing this morning. It is delicious and particularly special as we did not actually plant any onions. What I thought I had planted so laboriously back in February were shallots...but hey! I was wrong. Ah, the joy of catapulting oneselves into a completely new way of life with little research other than watching a couple of episodes of the Good Life.

Back in the gloom of last winter I went online to the Garden Organic website and whiled away a morning choosing my seeds. Click...lettuce - Marvel of Four Seasons; click...lettuce - Bughatti and so on. A few days on, and, surprise, surprise, Postman Pat arrived bearing a box containing 103 packets of seeds and lots of shallot sets. So many packets to hide around the house whilst I worked out how to justify such a seedy frenzy. But there were just too many varieties to choose from - what was a girl supposed to do? I based my choices on nothing more scientific than their fancy names: my beans are regal -Purple Queens and Great Windsors, and the Marquess d'Auvigny peas have delusions of grandeur. I shopped by colour too...beetroot Golden Detroit, Rhubarb chard and Canary leaf beet; Rainbow and Yellowstone carrots; kohl rabi Azur Star. Oh, I could go on, but you get my gist.

There was a time when I might have just chucked the seeds all at once onto the ground and waited in vain for a bountiful harvest. But over the last few months we have been through The Learning Curve (more like a Learning Spike in our case). Books are helpful and magazines such as Grow Your Own and the Garden Organic magazine are useful too, but there is nothing that compares to being shown. Dave's Dad, John, was a market gardener for years and still has an allotment at the age of ninety. He has shown us how to set up irrigation using our own well-water, how to pinch out tomatoes and train them up strings in the greenhouse, how to plant each and every vegetable that we now grow in the field. He has told us when to worry about the state of a plant and get rid of it to make way for something else and when to just leave a young plant be and let it recover from a nippy breeze. We now know how to tweek off the tops of broad beans to prevent black-fly, when to cover the brassicas with fleece to keep off the cabbage white butterflies. We have dug by spade and fork and quickly learnt that we can't do this thing without a tractor. We know that it never stops out in the field and if you are not weeding you are sowing, and that if you sow everything at the same time, it ripens at the same time...yes, I know it seems obvious.

There have been moments over the year when we have thought that we'd never do it -that we had overstretched ourselves this time. But then you go out onto the field on a morning like this, sun just up, mugs of tea in hand - and there it is...abundance glinting beneath dew-spangled leaves. The children sat on the tractor, eating their toast and marmite, while we washed fat bulbs of purple French garlic, the 'shallots' that grew into onions, bunches of beetroot, violet kohl rabi, carrots - long, short, yellow, orange and purple, courgettes of all shapes and colours, tomatoes from the greenhouse. We packed boxes of produce and hefted them into the back of the landrover to be dropped off at the Tin Drums after the school run. And there it was - a good morning; the way it was meant to be.

From Field to Fork

2009-07-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

10.00am: A gorgeous blustery day...the sort that makes you catch your breath with joy at being out in it. And better still, it is not obligatory (as it has been during the heatwave)...there is just enough of a chill in the air to be mildly off-putting and what clouds there are in the blue sky look heavy as if at any moment they would drop their load right over me. So, a perfect excuse to stay inside and turn on the computer. The rarest of treats.

Suddenly it seems there is going to be a storm; the wind has whipped up outside now but inside it is quiet except for the scamper of kittens. They are everywhere...five of them...all over my lap, my lap-top, in and out of guitars, wellies, the wood-burning stove. Dixy, their mother - not much more than a kitten herself - grew up fast and now sits on the window cill, watching them with a baleful eye, her tail flicking slowly. She spends hours berating them with her strange purring mother-meiow, hours suckling them, hours cleaning each and every one of them and hours shopping for them out in the field, coming home every day with a selection of baby animals for them to share under the kitchen table as we have our breakfast. Unpleasant, indeed, but if we take them away, the carnage is worse - she plunders the fields anew. She's a very diligent mother.

Outside in the bread oven is another maternity ward. Our hens went broody weeks ago and I had to start buying eggs from the supermarket again. There were dozens of eggs being sat on for weeks by all these grumpy hens. I didn't know what to do! I asked the Ladies of the Dicker for their pearls of wisdom because we went way over the twenty one days alloted to a fertile egg for hatching and yet when i inadvertently cracked the odd one, they were quite definately 'with chick'. So we bobbed the eggs up and down in bowls of warm water, discarded those that sank and popped floaters back under Black Betty (uber-mum). Ousted, all the other hens flounced off to take mud baths after so many weeks of pointless brooding. Then one day last week during my morning egg-fret I noticed a titchy beak tapping through the shell. Naturally, I nearly dropped the egg with excitement, but regained composure and ran all eggs and fast as I could to the safety of a disused bread oven we have outside and then rushed Black Betty to her new safe haven too in case Dixy decided to make a few menu changes. When the children got home from school, there it was - one tiny fluffy black chick - gorgeous! And eleven eggs still to hatch. So for the next few days we lifted Black Betty up-down, up-down, to perform chick check. But no chicks. We did the warm water test again and clearly some no longer had living chicks in them so we removed those eggs. Then Black Betty trod on one of the fertile eggs, and upon inspection it was definately not fertile, just very old with a rather antique pong. And so it was with the other eggs - all duffs and profoundly smelly. So we have just one chick. Louis announced our new arrival in the playground to one of the mothers who breeds chicks. She asked how many we had; 'Just the one,' he said, 'How many have you got?'

'Eighty thousand,' she replied.

2.00pm: Here is the storm; thunder cracking over the flat fields; rain like I have not seen for a long time, a waterfall cascading down the side of the house. Rain, then flashes of sunlight - the vegetables will love it. But our soil is dense clay out here - waterlogged at one end of the field in weather like this, rock hard after a few days of sun. The vegetable plot was pasture before this year but over winter the pigs dug it up neatly and fertilized it for us - wonderful creatures! We are planning how to improve the soil for next year and chatting up the local horsey folk in search of heaps of unwanted manure - we're going to need a lot.

This morning Dave was up early to take the Landrover round to the field for a lamb delivery from Tottingworth Farm; then out to see what could be harvested for the Tin Drums before getting Martha into school in Brighton on time. He took in herbs and garlic, beetroot (my favourite, especially the amazing golden ones which I am planting more of tomorrow), first ripening tomatoes, spring onions, kohl rabi (which have lovely blueish leaves and are interplanted with blue borage flowers - I didn't expect the vegetable plot to look so pretty), tender yellow French beans, and at this time of year, plenty of courgettes.

I must think about feeding the family now and like the cat go out into the field to see what I can find to put on our forks. All I can hear is distant thunder, the rain, a ticking clock, the cats purring...no tv, no cars, no sirens - time to log off.