July is when my kitchen and garden truly meet. The broad beans ‘Grando Violetto’, ‘Aquadulce Claudia’ and a red-flowered cultivar from the Chelsea Physic Garden are fattening up nicely. The first ‘Florence’ strawberries appear and towards the end of the month, the first tiny climbing beans (‘Blauhilde’, ‘Blue Lake’) are usually ready to go in the steamer.
The main harvest comes in about six weeks time but, ever the impatient cook, I usually pounce on some of the young beans as soon as they appear. It is also the month I need to be on round-the-clock watch for snails, slugs and clumsy fox cubs.
Recipes
Best use of space
Lettuce is something that usually does best for me in the cold frame, though this year I am having success in the garden, too, keeping the snails at bay by using copper rings round the base of each plant and a scattering of spent coffee grounds around the outside – the grains survive the rain and have so far kept the slimy beasts away. Best of all the lettuces last year was long, spiky-leaved ‘Lingua di Canarino’, which produced prolifically from late June onwards, and rounder-leaved cos ‘Reine des Glaces’, whose flavour I find the most pleasing of the cos group. I often prefer these crisp heads to the softer-leaved types; their crisp stems are slightly less prone to slug attack than the tender butterheads.
Friends often ask why I grow peas when I have so little space and yes, they do take up a lot of room, but I grow them mostly for the young shoots and tendrils I put into a salad. With their fresh pea flavour and mild crispness they are my prediction for the ‘next big thing’ in the salad world – I could be wrong. I grow a few rows, which means that the peas themselves are used for adding the occasional flash of green to recipes rather than being presented in a bowl with a knob of butter. A personal favourite is to include them in a salad of goat’s cheese and green lentils (see recipe above). This year I have planted ‘Douce-Provence’ and ‘Hurst Greenshaft’ in alternate rows.
The wet weather this spring saturated the plum, apple and pear blossom before the bees were out of bed, and there is unlikely to be a show of mirabelles and pears quite as splendid as last year’s. But some of the younger fruit trees, now nearly six years old, seem to have enjoyed the wet, and both damson ‘Farleigh Damson’ and plum ‘Crimson Drop’ have all the signs of a good crop; last year the last ripening ‘Crimson Drop’ was stolen by a squirrel before my eyes. Pears ‘Doyenné du Comice’ and ‘Winter Nelis’, which both do well against a north-facing wall, produced 30 or more high-quality fruits last year. It looks as if this year there will be fewer than half that. The quince, which has always liked a good soaking once the blossom is over, has more than two dozen fruits. Now seven years old, this tree produces more fruits each year.
Pushing potatoes
The success of ‘Charlotte’ potatoes in one of the small, shaded beds in 2007 inspired me to take a shot at five cultivars this time. ‘Kestrel’, ‘Arran Victory’, ‘Salad Blue’ and ‘Golden Wonder’ all poked their heads above the surface in late April and early May (only ‘Pink Fir Apple’ was still hiding), and they seem to like the shade and relative dampness of the bed. If they perform anything like ‘Charlotte’, which produced more tubers than I could handle from a mere 10 plants, friends and neighbours will be more than happy. Chitted on a windowsill, ‘Charlotte’ tubers were planted slightly closer together than recommended yet stayed immune to blight.
Which brings me to tomatoes. The sunny side of this vegetable garden has been home to tomato plants for eight years. ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’, ‘Marmande’, ‘Gardener’s Delight’ and orange ‘Auriga’ all do well here, happy to sit in the scorching sun that hits that side of the garden in the afternoon. They rarely suffer any problems save that of the occasional fox. There was a raging battle last summer, in which he would dig up the largest of the ‘Marmande’ plants each night, while I patiently replanted it the next day until the fox finally got bored. The plant battled on regardless and produced a good two dozen or so fruits until it gave in to blight in early August. In previous years tomatoes have graced salads with basil and anchovies, or have been baked with thyme, sea salt and olive oil, well into the autumn. ‘Marmande’, the toughest of them all, regularly produces in my garden until the first frosts.
Sadly, in 2007 the tomatoes were, like many outdoor-grown plants around the country, attacked by blight. ‘Green Zebra’, a cultivar I grow for its striking green and black beauty on the plate, was the only one that survived beyond August. We did, however, have some early-season lunches of tomato and buffalo cheeses and, later, an excellent dish of lamb baked with an assortment of everything from ‘Gardener’s Delight’ to yellow-orange ‘Tangelo’. This year the tomatoes have been grown in large pots away from any possibly infected garden soil.
With the limited space of most urban gardens it is probably unsurprising that so much of what I grow is planted in terracotta pots. The largest of these, with a diameter of 50cm (20in), have proved to be a more-than-successful home for my courgettes and aubergines. One of the big advantages of pot-grown vegetables is the ease with which you can control the nutrient levels and moisture. This has meant that I have been able to grow herbs such as lavender and oregano that do less well than they might on my clay soil. Such a method also allows an economical use of water, as I can focus my valuable rainwater collection on the plants that need it, such as ‘Striato d’Italia’ courgettes, rather than blanket-watering the entire vegetable bed.
The real treasures in July are the currants. Although I have ripped up some of my collection of ‘Versailles Blanche’ and ‘Laxton’s Number One’ to make room for brassicas such as ‘Cavolo Nero’, I still have enough fruit each year for a summer pudding, and fruit compotes for several breakfasts with yoghurt and muesli. Last year the blackcurrants thrived on the wet weather producing copious plump fruits. This year it is the turn of the whites to do well. The bushes are the recipients of many of my comfrey leaves, laid around the roots or, when I have time, made into a less-than-fragrant plant feed by soaking the chopped leaves and stems in water for a fortnight.
What I always find extraordinary and deeply satisfying is to see the change in this garden between April and July. After almost a decade of vegetable growing I know I should have learnt to expect it, yet the sudden abundance of herbs, fruit and vegetables always takes me by surprise. Perhaps it always will.