I’ve moved June 25, 2009

I’ve finally decided to get a proper website with stuff about my newspaper writing and book coming up and grown-up stuff like that. It’s also got blog entries on it and twitter, not that I fully understand what tweeting is. So come to over here instead!

‘More pepper, ladies?’ I’d rather have broad beans May 22, 2009

Last weekend. Paris. Too lazy even to open a guide book, I and my friend (a fellow mother of small children – ie punch drunk with exhaustion and a need for essential oils, complimentary shower caps and an evening in front of the Eurovision Song Contest)  asked at the hotel front desk for a restaurant recommendation. 

This is risky. The second night, we hit dross with La Rotonde where I felt like we’d wandered into that Victoria Wood sketch where the waiter looms leeringly over two sunburnt female holidaymakers with a giant pepper grinder – ‘More pepper, ladies’ – flirting patronisingly in search of a tip, which obviously being British and terrified of offending, we gave anyway. But the first night we hit gold with Le Timbre, a tres intime little place who’s English chef (I know, alarm bells did initially ring) wowed us with the usual French fare of snails and duck, but most importantly a fillet of cod on a bed of succulent broad beans of the brightest emerald, coaxed to perfection with a smattering of lardons. 

We strolled through the Jardins du Luxembourg, wondered why Parisians in the 6th arrondisement need so many children’s clothes shops when, by the looks of it, there have no actual children, and marvelled at how very French France is (queues outside patisseries! old women looking like Brigitte Bardot!  little dogs!  little dog shit!). 

But, safely returned on the Eurostar, it’s those broad beans that I keep thinking about. This is because I have very little capacity for high culture and a very high capacity for food. However pretty the Georges Pompidou Centre is, you can’t eat it. But mainly it’s because the broad beans in my garden are just about ready to pick and the bar has now been well and truly raised. So how do I recreate that perfect broad bean dish?

Does one steam them or boil? Obviously you have to pop them out of their grey pods to avoid wading through a dish of saddlebags, but when? What oil do you use? What bacon? What herbs? Do they need lemon juice? The questions are endless, I need answers…

Hammers at dawn? April 6, 2009

What is it with Gardener’s World presenters and excruciating conversation? I thought we’d reached the nadir in the corduroy era when Monty would treat Carol Klein like an embarrassing old aunt with dementia who’d just wandered out of the shrubbery and she’d be all but making the sign of the cross behind his back when he loped off to the Long Border.

But early signs are that the Buckland era will bring its own range of conversational horrors. ‘Do you want a hand with that nail, Alys’ he jokes as they companiably build a compost bin. She makes some unidentifiable facial grimace in return. It’s meant to look like she’s humourously irritated with him, but it just looks like she hates him. ‘Lovely to see you Carol.’ ‘Lovely to see you too,’ she replies through teeth so gritted the grass is covered with powdered enamel. It’s like being stuck in a drinks party in which someone has just run off with someone else’s wife but they’re all still passing round the G and Ts.

It’s not that I really think they hate each other. It’s just that they’re not trained actors and can’t summon up ‘natural’ banter with people they don’t know very well while standing in a featureless field surrounded by JCBs. If they were trained actors, Carol’s voice wouldn’t break when she got excited (ie when she saw a plant) and Alys wouldn’t get so shrill only dogs can hear her. It kind of makes them more likeable really. Still don’t get  Joe ‘apples and pears, me old missus’ Swift though – where did he get that accent from? Isn’t his father in Keeping up Appearances and his mother Margaret Drabble? 

Also I know it’s very brave new world, new start to feature a new garden and build it from scratch and all that, but I’ve always wondered why Gardener’s World can’t just be set in a normal garden with overgrown clematises and dandelions in the lawn and greenhouses that have rotting frames and big scary unidentifiable bushes that you can’t kill. Then I’d really learn something. Instead I learnt that you have to have a bespoke shed made by trained craftsmen (with a specially angled roof, naturally) and that you have to build your own compost bins with offcuts of something with special grooves for the sliding oh whatever the hell it was. Not all gardeners like wandering around with a power drill, you know, some of us would rather click Buy Now and wait in for the nice man from Parcelforce.

Blackcurrant slugs and charity shop lady chic April 4, 2009

I missed the opening Gardener’s World last night. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I did turn over briefly to see Alys Fowler and Toby Buckland scintillatingly lifting a window frame up to a shed wall before D said ‘Can’t we watch some real telly? Like The Wire? [though as anyone knows, this isn’t strictly real telly because we can only understand one in 20 of the words– or one in four if we put the subtitles on]’ But I shall revisit Gardener’s World at my leisure thanks to the wonderful people of Sky series link.

If for nothing else, I must keep up with what Alys is wearing – I think she’s pioneered a new genre of gardener’s clothing – not so much charity shop chic as clothes worn by the old lady who works in the charity shop chic. The blouses. The cardigans. It kind of works. And it’s high time there was a new look for lady gardeners. The Vita thing has gone on way long enough. I’ve been pioneering the baby porridge on pyjama Croc combo look for some time, though strangely it hasn’t yet caught on outside my house.

Actually, I’m rather delighted that Alys Fowler is finally being allowed to speak on Gardener’s World. There was a long period during the Monty era when she would just lurk around in the background, wearing a strange blouse and planting a tree. 

Out killing slugs this morning I realised that I can’t see one of the little charmers without being mentally transported to a cinema in the mid 1980s stealthily making my way through a jumbo bag of Rowntrees Fruit Gums without spoiling Short Circuit for everyone else. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t see it too…

 

garden slugs

fruit gum

Spring rising March 30, 2009

Been a bit busy lately –  having a baby and looking after a toddler too (unfortunately, it seems the two and a half year old can’t look after the baby) – so my blog has rather fallen by the wayside.

Now the clocks have gone back, I can hold back the tide of spring enthusiasm no longer and must once again bore all incomers with minutiae about my London kitchen garden. The carrots that won’t germinate. The blurry close-ups of redcurrant flowers. Sorry, but I’m compelled to. Especially since the Sunday Telegraph has stopped my weekly Edible Gardener column for the time being due to reasons of ‘budget’ and ‘space’, those twin horrors of the freelance journalist. 

Meanwhile, in the world of media gardening, Carol Klein has driven around Britain in a Nissan Sunny with the roof down and continued her tireless championing of the rolled up jean, Sarah Raven has come up against the wrath of lower-middle class England with mutterings about cous cous in the Sissinghurst kitchen (‘But Vita and Hadji loved Morrocco!’) and Toby Buckland has become the host of Gardener’s World, channelling Geoff Hamilton. Which some may think is a marvellous thing. Some.

Garden highlights from my early morning garden patrol: two peas have germinated in the wine crate and a cat has sicked up a piece of baling twine. 

Here’s a blurry close-up of a redcurrant flower…

 

3 things I learnt yesterday August 19, 2008

 

1) Andy Sturgeon is really really nice (sort of guessed that already, but turns out I was right)

2) It’s amazing how you don’t notice the rain and cold of a British August when you’re high on adrenaline and caffeine and have a radio transmitter velcroed to your upper thigh

3) Being filmed for the telly is not quite as terrifying as I thought it would be

So a TV crew came yesterday to film me and my ‘edible London’ garden for a show that’s going to be on in November and the lovely Andy was presenter. Naturally, being August, it rained so everything looked wet, but I’m hoping they can do amazing things with the wonders of television. And, obviously, being a publicity-hungry media hack, I’ll be letting any reader(s) of this blog know exactly when it’ll be on when I do.

Now, when I’ve finished pulling up all those plastic aubergine plants, I’m off to that darkened room…

In the fright garden August 16, 2008

Something very exciting/deeply terrifying is about to happen, in a garden kind of way, over the next couple of days. I can’t say what it is yet because I’m too busy a) panicking b) snipping and deadheading and c) secretly wondering if I could get away with buying a packet of runner beans from Sainsbury’s and tying them onto my runner bean wigwam with fishing line.

‘I’m too busy to eat!’ I shouted at D when she suggested that a 6-month pregnant woman who’s spent all day tying things in while standing on a chair should probably have lunch.

All will be clear by Monday afternoon (when I’ll be resting in a darkened room)…

Toby Buckland, new king of the Long Border August 13, 2008

Just goes to show – you slave away long enough building woodland enclosures for UKTV Gardens daytime and writing features for Kitchen Garden magazine in which you show how an electric drill can bring a whole new exciting spin to the kitchen (if I remember correctly, making holes in potatoes and stuffing them with carrots) and you get the new main presenting gig on Gardener’s World.

All you budding gardening presenters out there unafraid to bounce around in a red sweatshirt with the logo Garden Invasion (or some such) on it, to wax lyrical over a shower curtain as an exciting al fresco feature and to concoct over-exuberant pretend team rivalry with another presenter in a different brightly coloured sweatshirt, take heart!! You too could eventually be presiding over the Long Border.

Good luck, Toby, at least you’re not the BFG.

Step away from the raspberry bush.

 

Last year I wrote a Sunday Telegraph column about how my Autumn Bliss raspberries tasted really disappointing – ‘like diluted fruit squash wrapped in cellulose’ – prompting a Mr Chris Stephens to email in defence of their taste, adding, incidentally, that ‘Your description of the 2007 as “the great raspberry washout” is way over the top and typical of today’s media’. Obviously, he’s right about the last bit (I rather like being ‘typical of today’s media’, as though talking about my raspberries is akin to exaggerating global warming), but it turns out he might be right about the taste too.

So there I’d been kicking along thinking home-grown British strawberries, raspberries and blueberries weren’t quite as sweet as those you could buy in the shops, and it turns out there was a simple explanation. I’ve been picking them too soon. 

My partner has been wise to this habit for some time, barricading the secateurs in a locked box and clutching the salad spinner at my approach as if it were a small child in the encroaching shadow of a military tank. But I just can’t help myself. Even after five years of this growing your own lark, I get so excited that anything’s actually grown (which to be fair, it rarely has) that I snip any fruit off the minute it turns from green to… any colour at all.

Thwarted in my hasty culling by the fact I’ve been hundreds of miles away on holiday for the past two weeks, the raspberries and blueberries had actually been allowed to ripen properly. And, a revelation, it turns out they’re absolutely blooming amazingly sweet and fantastic. Very probably the finest thing man has ever eaten. It’s the great raspberry and blueberry bonanza of 2008!! And obviously I would never exaggerate. 

 

Watering costs… and right here’s where you start paying July 29, 2008

… in cat feeding. I love living in south London via Trumptonshire – my road where neighbours unaccountably talk to rather than knife each other. One of the greatest assets is my neighbour who is so outstandingly nice that she’s not only agreed to water the garden every day for 3 weeks while I’m away in France but actually claims to ‘enjoy it! (I know, weird…)

But here’s the tricky thing. How do you brief a non-gardener (for, despite her efforts with lettuce, she is one) on the intricacies, skill and exact levels of water required for each of your precious plants to make it to fruition without sounding like you’re mad? You may start well, affecting nonchalance and simple gratitude – ‘Oh, just wave the hose over the raspberries, the salad is in the shade so doesn’t need much…’ – but it’s not long before you’re agonising over whether your instructions have been sufficiently detailed. You invite them over for a ‘watering briefing’, jabbering, pointing at things like a maniac and demonstrating how to hold a garden hose. This is to stop yourself shouting in the middle of a Ryanair flight ‘THE POTS!!! WHAT ABOUT THE POTS!!!!’

No doubt she’ll have similar anxieties when she goes away later this month. She might say ‘Oh just feed the cats twice a day and give them fresh water’. What she probably wants to say but won’t for fear of sounding like a loon is ‘that one likes his ears tickled and that one will only eat her food if you arrange it in a pyramid formation. And they both like The Today Programme.’ I wouldn’t really care but I suspect she may have installed CCTV.