Classic Gardening

The sunflowers have a squirrel eating their faces; dangling upside down and expertly plucking, stripping and eating the seeds. I rescue a couple of big, round half-blinded suns, gather the seed and pop it into an envelope for next year.

The clocks have gone back, and this really is the last gasp of the season.

Without a garden, autumn is a sombre time of decline and death: the days shorten, the nights grow chill. Life moves from outdoors to indoors. It’s an altogether melancholy season.

With a garden, it’s a time of fulfilment of a season’s promise, and for looking forward. There are crops to be gathered, and others to be planted or prepared for.

So, every time we find a garden with some seed-bearing flowers, we harvest a handful. We’ve snaffled hollyhocks, evening primrose, foxgloves, chrysanths, honesty and plumbago. There is vegetable seed too – squash such as butternut and little gem, wild rocket and beetroot. We only discovered squash last year, but they are wonderful. Adapting a recipe from Gennaro Contaldo’s Italian Year in which he suggests roasting a joint of meat on a layer of carrots, we pop a halved butternut squash beneath a roasting chicken and get a truly delicious meal.

Another delight is a bowl of Kentish cob nuts from my sister's tree. They are wonderful – milky, slightly sweet and crunchy. In the Nigel Slater cookbook (Kitchen Diaries – the best cook book I have) I found a recipe for Cob Nut Salad, which involved chopping them into a bowl, adding finely sliced celery and crumbling cheese over them. He recommends Ticklemore, but the Wensleydale we had to hand worked well.

The bare black earth where the failed tomato crop mouldered and died looks like an opportunity, so I spend the morning clearing it and planting a couple of rows of Lamb’s Lettuce and the cloves from six bulbs of the garlic I harvested in the summer.
I took a stroll round the farmer’s market after lunch, noting with satisfaction that my free cob nuts cost £3.80 a kilo there. It’s one of the joys of the market as the season progresses – to check how much my own produce would cost if I had to buy it. To see, for example, that my artichokes – of which I had gathered 15 that morning - were £1.20 each. Garlic is 50p a bulb today, so my six should translate themselves into £25 worth by next July.

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