Dispatches from Garden and Kitchen

My Sunday Times column from 8 September 2024

Leaving aside the deliriously scented and richly coloured old shrub roses, I think my favourite flower must be the sweet pea. This year’s crop is now at its peak, flowering in such abundance that it needs daily cutting. Otherwise, the plants will start to set seed and, thinking that there work here is done, just give up.

As a result we have several vases full of gloriously coloured and fabulously fragrant flowers on the go at any one time. Unwin’s are the sweet seed specialists when it comes to seeds and this lot are their Perfume Duet. The duet refers to their being bi-colours: each blossom has some pink and some white.

What really impresses me about them is that they thrive on relative neglect. Apart from decent soil and some rudimentary supports, they have been left to just get on with it. You will read about the need to pinch out the growing tip early on, the training of the first two side shoots and a great deal more but I didn’t do any of that and still they are giving of their all.

These plants were sown in February in the tunnel, the Autumn sowing having failed to come up, thanks to damp and cold. This year, I’ll get them started around the end of the month so that they can be planted out next March.

Other crops have been less successful. The red celery got too dry and went to flower early on but it has been useful in stocks and casseroles. The globe artichokes came in a great rush and then decided to retire; they have now produced a solitary head for which we’ll need to draw lots. It looks very inviting.

The apples are patchy, at best, with Egremont Russet the only one that seems to have made a proper effort, the pears are barely existent thanks to a late frost, and the apricots, having produced four unimpressive fruits last year has put all its efforts into growing to an immense height, against a South-facing. Result, no apricots. That tree is likely to end up as firewood. The cherries, as usual, have been exclusively for the birds as is anyone who tries to grow them without a fruit cage, e.g. us.

I bought some French apricots because I had two free range pork chops and I was thinking of a recipe by Richard Corrigan in his monumental cookbook (and memoir), The Clatter of Forks and Spoons. It has, amongst its advantages, instructions for cooking the chops to perfection. The trick is to use good thick chops, say 2 cm,  browning them on both sides on the pan and then popping them into a pre-heated oven at 200ºC (180ºC fan) for exactly 9 minutes. He says to crisp the crackling by standing the chops on their sides in the pan but I prefer to cut it off and cook it separately in the oven, eating it with an aperitif while finishing the dish.

While the chops are cooking, you soften and lightly brown some halved and stoned apricots in butter, drizzle in just a little honey and perk the whole lot up with a few drops of sherry vinegar. Having rested the chops for five minutes, just add the juices to the apricots and dish up. His choice of accompaniment is creamy, buttery mashed potatoes,  making the whole thing properly comforting Autumnal food. Just be careful with the honey and the vinegar: titrate the dose so it’s not too sweet and not too sharp.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way with courgettes – and I know this is a bit of an obsession – is to treat them a little like tofu, as vehicle for other flavours, ideally strong ones. My latest wheeze is to slice them fairly thinly, soften in butter with garlic, lemon and smoked paprika, the hot version if I’m feeling brave. It’s a lovely way to eat butter, garlic, lemon and paprika, and it uses up the courgettes.

It's time for my final sowing of lettuce – a time when the realisation that Autumn is upon us really hits home. This will be Winter Density, for obvious reasons, and the idea is to have lettuce until Christmas. This is, perhaps, a fool’s errand but if you’re not prepared to fail, would we even think of gardening?

My next task is to clear the main outside beds of, amongst other relics of the season, the bolted celery and the remains of the broad beans and to lift what’s left of the Duke of York spuds that got rather forgotten. It’s a satisfying job, revealing the bare earth and giving it a good mulch that the earthworms will incorporate over the following months but, of course, the whole thing is slightly tinged with melancholy.

In a world where we have edible riches beyond compare in every supermarket, doing this job connects me, in a curious way, with the life of our ancestors when Winter was something to be survived, not, as it is for us, just to be endured.

Soon it will be time to light the stoves again – they had a few moments of action during this Summer – and to consider the seed catalogues, perhaps to make grandiose plans for the Spring. And this weekend I may well have my first expedition in search of wild mushrooms. I could really do with a few fresh ceps, just now, but I’ll need to earn them with plenty of leg work.

Wine:

Lidl’s French wine sale is now on and two wines have caught my attention. It’s always good to taste a Pinot Grigio that actually has flavour, unlike so many, and Elsass Pinot Grigio 2022 (€9.99, Lidl) is a good one. Of course it’s gris rather than grigio because it’s French. Very slightly off-dry with a touch of grapefruit zest, it’s good with mildly spicy, coconutty dishes. Château Landiras Graves 2020 (€13.99, Lidl) is a snip, having some bottle age and the mineral tang that goes with the Graves terroir. It’s a lovely red Bordeaux that is very much at home with lamb and the binus is that it  will kick on for another five years or so.