Quiet moments...
So few and far between...
Well…wowsers…what a week of activity it’s been! Much of it a blur by now…and the only moment stolen, was this one…when after hour upon hour of torrential pre-dawn rain (the constancy of sound on our tin roof like nothing I can quite recall experiencing before) the dawn broke clear, bright and still, accompanied by the sound of a gushing roar from the creek below.
Despite our wet summer, none of that rain was constant and the creek hardly flowed at all. Our dams were surprisingly low (given the regular rain and that we’d barely watered) so a weather event like the one we experienced from late Friday into the wee hours of Saturday was a wonderful thing for us (whilst I do so worry for peeps in the low-lying areas who are so badly impacted by these events…I’m well aware that water damage has a devastating effect - believe me, we’ve had our share of problems over the years but none of them from rising water).
Our creek needed a good flush - a surge of water, and although I had a to-do list a mile long, I couldn’t resist almost wading my way down the slope through the long grass to the corner where (on occasions such as this) water from the upper creek on the far side of of our small road bursts through two huge pipes in the old convict-built wall (that forms the southern-most tip of our land) with almost deafening volume. Scan right and it cascades down natural sandstone landforms…all of it meeting, swilling, frothing, rushing and foaming its way with great rapidity…under logs and around great boulders…making its way via Splitter’s, then Flaggy Creek, onwards to join the Nepean River.
What a way to start the day! A stolen five minutes to gaze, breathe, rejoice in the wonder…to fill up on it all. Water…fascinates me. Another topic to which I’ll return in the future, when all is quiet, which is not the case just now.
Larry on the other hand, was not so delighted that the cellar had flooded and he spent several hours fiddling with pumps and pipes (we pretty much had a domestic river flowing closer to the house!) to which I had scant time to pay any attention at all…because I was moving furniture, lost in my event-prep bubble!
All the while, dear Harriet was working quietly in the Dairy kitchen (which we call the pantry) bringing recipes from Amber Guinness’s ‘Italian Coastal’ to life. Harriet and I had met earlier that morning in the house kitchen - in the chilly, dark wee hours…both of us bleary-eyed but excited for the day ahead. Event days have such a special atmosphere. For most of them, I work on my own, slowly making my way through a list in my head, doing what must be done to get to the finish line - that moment when guests or participants arrive. But when in collaboration, often our ‘guest presenters’ stay the night before so they’re fresh and ready to be ‘on’…well rested to do what they do best. I love this aspect of arranging and hosting our events. On this occasion though, a rare one to have someone doing all the cooking…it was Harriet who stayed over, to ensure all the prep was done here and giving her the maximum amount of time from Friday afternoon to do so.
Whilst prep means huge activity, I also appreciate the quiet of it…busy hands, busy head…and a slow bringing together of all the components….from sheer mess and pure chaos, to a semblance of order, with the most fun tidbits really coming together at the very last, just in just the nick of time…making them up spontaneously as I go…but how I wish there were hours to do those fun things!
It’s really rare for me to have an event that begins at 3 in the afternoon - what luxury! (It’s usually 10 in the morning for a workshop, 11 for a guest speaker but even at 3pm I only just scraped in to be ready!). As a result of the late start, Amber’s event had a completely different kind of mood...even from a prep perspective. At one point, when I had the ironing board up (my blue & white tablecloths had been in the cupboard for far too long and I won’t stand for creased ‘fold’ marks on the table!), the prep-atmosphere peaked to that lovely point of expectation…evoking that sense of ‘going to a party’ excitement we all experience as a child, a dance as a teenager, or even a wedding (that poignant sense of high promise captured so beautifully, if my memory serves correctly, early on in the film Gone With the Wind). I think that moment was prompted by something to do with that singular smell of ironing…the heat, the steam on cloth, but in a hurry, on the run! Combined with the aromas of Harriet’s cooking emanating from the pantry, half-open boxes of books and ceramics too…with flowers yet to pick, tables yet to set and the clock ticking away the minutes way too fast…those pre-event hours were an adrenalin rush - that’s for sure!
When Barbara Sweeney had asked me late last year if I might be persuaded to host an event for Amber’s Australian visit, she forwarded some images given to her by the publisher, Thames & Hudson, from ‘Italian Coastal’ to whet my appetite! Whilst all the images are positively tantalising, the one that leapt at me was of a frame of tomatoes hanging to dry. It’s not the first time I’ve seen them displayed in such a way….and any kind of frame or structure - especially one that is not just ornamental but has purpose is likely to draw my attention. ‘I could make one’ I suggested to Barbara! I think that idea sealed the likelihood of the event going ahead!!!!
Whilst it wasn’t prerequisite, I couldn’t let go of the idea and when I was making the first of the broad bean frames in the garden last month, I set aside a whole lot of off-cut bamboo sections to experiment with. I know that what we made wasn’t an exact replica - I would need to be far more skilled and also to have the right tools, but as Clemmie was passing through the kitchen garden on the way to her studio that day, I caught her mid-stride to see if she could hold some pieces together to see if they might splay in such a fashion as to give hope of creating such a thing. An hour later we were still in the middle of the garden - me with my saw, now the scissors, the string….and we had a partially made a ‘tomato chandelier’ as Amber calls them, ready for completion at a later date!
But why oh why is it always the way that things are then left ‘til the last minute? Clemmie tied the finishing braces on Friday afternoon, we did an experimental ‘hang’ and agreed it was ready (if flimsy!) enough to hold the tomatoes on Saturday. As I ironed and snipped flowers, arranged vases, books and set the table, it was Clemmie who balanced and hooked the toms on by their stems…and I think it might have lasted the entire eve, had one of our guests not been able to resist touching it! It mattered not - Amber was delighted we’d taken her imagery to such lengths, everyone oohed and aaahed and cooooed at the fun of it, and in fact, it was far more effective looking a bit drunken on the table!
I had so much fun pairing ceramics kindly lent to us for the event by Alex & Trahanas with both Amber’s books ‘A House Party in Tuscany’ her first book; and the reason for her visit, the publishing of her second ‘Italian Coastal’. The two have been so beautifully and thoughtfully published…how thrilled I was to find colours inside ‘Italian Coastal’ cross-referencing the cover of ‘A House Party in Tuscany’ right at the pages open to the chapter titled ‘Dall’orto…from the vegetable patch’. Placed on the table with our Kitchen Garden in close view, just beyond the window where Amber and Barbara would sit, the colours of the Alex & Trahanas fruit bowl married the vitality of imagery contained within the pages (if you get hold of a copy of Italian Coastal you’ll see exactly what I mean…Amber’s vibrant ceramics are in perfect unison with those of A&H). Then…Harriet and I had all the fun of pairing the recipes to plates too! ‘This for the pasta’? ‘This for the fritters’? ‘Which for the Caponata’? How sad we all were later that eve, to have to pack those beauties back into their boxes to return from whence they came.
Of course the purpose of the entire event was to welcome Amber Guinness (pure delight); for our guests to meet her, first via a thoroughly engaging conversation with Barbara who is such a whizz at coaxing stories and insights, setting everyone at ease, and then in person as Amber chatted away with everyone over a supper of her own recipes, as well as signing everyone’s books.
Whilst the conversation was underway, Harriet had loaded those colourful plates with the most scrumptious dishes…and as the twilight hour fell…the table filled with animated conversation, the candles were lit and…the whole came to delightful fruition. Do I have photos of the food? No! Do I have a lovely photo of Amber? No! Because once an event is underway, I just lose the plot on the snapping stakes! And I never seem to be able to capture people despite my best efforts!
Enough to say the twilight was all we’d hoped for…the last fading sunlight catching wisps of olive leaves, the rusty tin of the Hayshed roof aglow, a peachy sky before the stars came out to play…then our guests departed clutching books, swapping phone numbers, planning and dreaming of trips to Italy. It was all enormous fun.
At this point, you might imagine Sunday would be a quiet day. Post event days are always very much about clean-up - loads of washing to hang on the line, putting away, mopping up, but in slow motion, with a little weariness to the step (whereas event days themselves are always in quickstep time). And you might imagine a good bit of Sunday-arvo gardening might have been on the agenda to revive the vitality too….but not this time!
With another early start, clean-up happened at record speed for it just so happened that Clemmie’s birthday coincided with last weekend and having had that dreaded virus spoil several attempts to celebrate with friends these past years, she thought just a few weeks ago to do something this time ‘round. Hence a ‘relaxed’ evening with a few of her friends was in store. (Yes, I too was thinking relaxed for whom exactly?!!!).
Normally I’d be part of the set-up for such an escapade, but I was still chasing my tail from the night before, so it was Bonnie she persuaded to help with the lugging of it all…the tents, the rugs, the cushions, the lanterns and ladders, the candles…and we all pitched in with the cooking and whatever else was to be done. Clemmie has always delighted in setting up…for birthdays, for Easter, for Christmas. (Probably my fault for initiating the fun from the beginning - for her first birthday I filled the steep staircase in the old house from top to bottom with balloons and remember thinking my chest would explode from all the blowing!).
With two twilight events in a row, by Monday morning I was feeling mildly delirious!
How lucky I was with Friday’s rain that there was no need to water at the weekend, but come Monday, watering down the tomato pipes was my first priority. Remember? Irregular tomato watering begets blossom-end-rot, so that was top of my list! (At least it was after getting breakfast for all those who had stayed on…and the lovely opportunity to have longer conversations with some I’d not previously met - the fun of adult children bringing home new friends is one we all enjoy…how they expand our world).
But our tomatoes…needed me!
All my focus was now on Wednesday…and after yet another clean-up…there was a lot of cooking to be done!
When I was approached at the beginning of the year by Delicious magazine to supply some recipes for an early winter spread, it was easy to imagine exactly the menu I might offer guests at such a time. What wasn’t easy, was to have the ingredients on hand (by which I mean growing in the garden) in advance, for their proposed shoot date!
We all know that magazine timelines are such that they operate months ahead of their release date, and whilst we can understand the trials of poor models having to don swathes of winter woolies in mid-summer or freezing to death, scantily clad in mid-winter…at least those possibilities are interchangeable (a fan, a cold cloth or a blanket can cool or warm a human quite quickly,). Coaxing a winter-growing crop to readiness before its time however, is not something I would generally contemplate! Nor do I like buying ingredients out of season. These are the things that go completely against my grain. Nor can I see the point in participating in anything that isn’t authentic to my principles: at the very core of everything I do here, is encouraging people to grow (and eat) seasonal, organic produce.
And so it was that…I supplied my proposed menu to Delicious and then…went to work in the garden! Whilst I’m not going to spill the menu beans here…my lips are sealed ‘til post issue release, I am slightly surprised that I managed, with some planning, to bring on some beautiful early fennel bulbs, a pumpkin or two and some exquisite heads of radicchio…ahead of schedule! I might even try to get better ahead of the game in the future, such was their success!
By the time the issue hits the shelves, all the ingredients listed in the recipes will be relevant. Which is how I cook, it’s how we eat. If it is’t growing, it isn’t on our plate. What grows together I believe…goes together. It doesn’t mean I don’t buy produce in when I need to, but when I do, it will be something that is in season, preferably organic and preferably local (those last two are not so easy to achieve in this neck of the woods…hence I grow as much as I possibly can).
I believe that what is growing, is most probably the very food our bodies need to keep us healthy at that moment in time…at that particular moment in the season. ‘Tis why, when I began cooking in prep on Tuesday morning, I was thinking to myself those recipes were the very last thing I felt like cooking…or eating. The fact that a change came through as I chopped and stirred and baked….darkening the sky, bringing low rumbling thunder and then the most enormous single clap you can imagine that had me almost jump out of my skin, followed by freezing rain, was a quite extraordinary bit of luck! I went from bare feet to ugg boots in the space of half an hour! And all of a sudden, the kitchen had all the aromas wafting I’d expect of such a frigid afternoon. What coincidence…what serendipity. And although the breeze on Wednesday caused some havoc, the sun shone…and we’ve been eating photoshoot leftovers that seem perfectly in season afterall, ever since!
Photo shoots are such ‘out of the ordinary’ days. Normally, I am cooking to a timetable, to feed peeps food that I believe goes together, in one day: ie the cake I choose to bake for morning tea compliments what’s likely to follow at lunch. And morning tea happens first. But on a shoot, the order of the day is all over the place…it’s all about the light and collaborating with a team (lovely team by the way), with everyone pitching in, contributing their skill at just the right time. For me…days like these are rare, and feel almost like a holiday…they happen in such slow motion to the tune of a photographer, one thoughtful shot at a time.
It was fun. I’ll let you know when the issue is on the shelves and hopefully then you'll see why I’ve been drying fennel seed heads by the sheet load!). I’m enormously grateful to Delicious for delaying our photo shoot for as long as they possibly could, so my produce could grow and they could capture images true to the garden, true to my recipes and true to the season.
Time then surely…to down tools! At least the cooking and event ones. My Easter gardening (did Easter even happen?) set me in good stead. My early successional sowing and planting is coming along well and a weekend such as the one just gone has ensured I’ve not added more…it has sensibly strung out my planting even further!).
But there has been a very pressing job on my to-do-list and yesterday, I made sure to finally get it underway. Last week’s post led with the image of summer’s shade canopy at the forefront of the kitchen garden with good reason - this week, it had to go and with it, the summery character of the kitchen garden has gone too. I’ll leave the canopy shading the leafy greens behind (for now anyway) but the bed at the front where the canopy was, is this season’s designated legume bed, which means the relevant structures need to be erected as quickly as possible. I tasked Thalia with taking the shade down whilst I went about my morning chores and then joined her for the prep.
I don’t mind admitting when I get something wrong and I’ve known all summer long that I shouldn’t have sown the parsnip row quite where I did! I think it’s important you know (that even after all these years) I still make mistakes! In fact, it isn’t as bad as I’d thought…a little bit of fluffing of sight lines and no-one else will notice, but I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of pulling out my parsnips all at once! They’re growing on beautifully and whilst I could make one huge batch of parsnip soup, that isn’t my intention for them. I didn’t mind nearly so much, pulling the row of carrots, that I hadn’t expected to grow well anyway during the summer months. Or the parsley that had well and truly done its dash (the row I’m picking from now has grown from the seed of this spent one). As a result, I have a beaut bunch of parsley and some splendid carrots to use this weekend.
Parsley and carrots out of the ground (parsley roots stayed in), I lined up the position for the long broad bean frame. Thalia has built many of these with me now. Whilst it’s not rocket science and very possible to do by oneself, having two pairs of hands and eyes sure makes the task quicker! One person to hold a stake upright, the other to step back and check they’re all in line before tapping them into the ground, saves a lot of faffing about (and quite honestly…it’s the kind of job Larry loathes!).
I explained a couple of posts back (in the one titled ‘Good morning’) just how I build the individual boxes on the guild side of the garden, to support the broad beans - so that as they grow inside their frame, they are able to rock back and forth in the spring winds…as well as how I sow five seeds per box.
On the traditional side of the garden, I build an elongated version of those individual frames…like five boxes joined together, so that I end up with a whole row of broad beans.
Together, once the stakes were all lined up and tapped in, Thalia and I tied the lateral bamboo supports - re-using the rods from the shade structure (I’m confident of getting one more season from these ones before they really are too split to use again). We’ve measured and cut the cross bars that are yet to go on, but they’re not so urgent and can get in the way of soil prep.
With the most fiddly part of the job complete, next the soil needs forking (in this case we are forking) to add compost, mulch…and then to sow. Next week, which is blissfully clear of events, I intend to catch up and complete the rest of this bed, so I’ll report on progress then.
I hope that by now you can see what I meant when I said some weeks back that…crop rotation is a slow process..it happens over the period of a couple of months, not days…and like others of you who work…my gardening is not all the time - mine too is sandwiched into pockets of available time. Yes..I know I have Thalia as back-up…but then our garden has regular visitors and of course we can’t do it all!
This week, whilst I’ve been otherwise distracted, Thalia has made a good job of raking back some of the paths that got washed away in the downpour and clearing up after we had some much-needed hedge trimming done: the murraya, the cherokee rose and the hedge below the kitchen garden…all of these by either Matt or Dom…both of them good humoured and both with a very straight eye, who pop in from time to time to tackle these seasonal jobs that have got beyond us. We managed them all when they were smaller, for years, but they’re all fully mature now - as are we!
Thalia has also made a very good start on pruning the olive trees. I’m longing to join her in this task and next week I will: the last few years of rain have seen too much dense growth and we need to open them up for better air circulation. More about that as we go..
And on that note I’ll leave you. What I really want to do is sit down and shell this basket of Speckled Cranberry beans! I have double the quantity now and am so looking forward to quietly enjoying such a task! Bonnie snapped this pic last week when Graziher requested an image - I was lucky B was home: on with the hat, on with the apron and quick snap!! There’s an accompanying interview…for their online newsletter that went out last week.
I’ll tell you more about Speckled Cranberries…at the next post!
Have a wonderful week ahead everyone. I realise I haven’t included a recipe (sworn to secrecy on those Delicious ones meantime!) but I highly recommend you bake some sliced fennel bulbs, a loaf of Belinda Jeffery’s Pumpernickel Soda Bread (in her book Mix & Bake). Cut a thin slice, smear it with goats’ cheese, then with a dollop of my parsley pistou (I gave you that one a few weeks ago!) and top with the warm fennel. I made that up yesterday on the spur of the moment for my lunch when I was feeling like a starving, ravenous lunatic (although not on Belinda’s bread which would be perfect). It was simply delicious! Mx
There's always something Sally!!!! :))))
Phew! As always an enjoyable read packed with so much information and wonderful advice. You continue to be such an inspiration. Looking forward to finally meeting you in person and experiencing your fabulous garden at the Paul Bangay event. 💚🍎🐝