Six Square Metres
September 2013
Things are going to seed. I don’t mean in a bad way. There are none of the musty smells and nasty stains that we imagine when we talk of people and buildings that are past their best.
Instead, there are yellow broccoli flowers bobbing in my front garden, the rocket has grown higher than the balcony balustrade and the cos lettuce have taken on the look of greenshelled rockets, their central tubes of furled leaves pushing higher every day.
The flower heads will pop out any hour now, the tight roll of leaves will collapse and grow bitter, and it will all be over for those plants this season. Now is the time for the hurried making of salads and for planting new seedlings before the year tips over into heat.
In the meantime, I have been dealing with the fruits of winter: to be specific, lemons. I have no room for a decent lemon tree – the gall-wasp-infected specimen I keep in a pot graces us with only half a dozen fruit a year, despite doses of potash and muttered threats. But a good friend of mine is moving house and the tree in the backyard is laden with fruit, some the size of grapefruit. I have been taking the opportunity to harvest as many as I can before I lose access.
Yesterday I took the shopping trolley round and loaded it up. Now my fridge and my three fruit bowls are full and the whole house smells of citrus. The family thinks I am mad. Why take more than you can use? Perhaps I am greedy. I love the bounty, the getting of lots of stuff for free, and my head is full of thoughts of lemons And I can use them. I have made three tubs of lemon curd. Tonight, we will have lemon meringue pie. I squeezed lemon juice over potatoes and baked them in the oven. I have squeezed another dozen or so, and frozen the juice in ice-cube trays to grace gin and tonics in the summer months to come.
I found a recipe for preserved lemons that seems deceptive in its simplicity. Cut the lemons in quarters, freeze overnight, thaw, pack with salt and bay leaves and peppercorns and cover with more lemon juice. Then let it steep, and use the peel in summer pastas and tagines. So we carry winter into summer.
Already it seems warm enough to plant beans and peas. One of my gardening books advises that the way to judge this is by sitting barebuttocked on the ground. If your bum doesn’t get cold, it is time to plant. Given that my back verandah is visible from the McDonald’s drive through, and the little strip of land at the front faces the post office, I won’t be trying this method. An index finger in the soil will have to suffice.
Am I imagining that the seasons are coming faster now? Usually, it is October before I lose the winter brassicas to flower. Normally gardening relaxes me, but the possibility that the seasons are changing – that the climate change we all fear is already upon us, means that my trips into the garden are tinged with anxiety.
Not already, surely. Not here, in my garden. Please.
It was Voltaire who, contemplating the broken nature of the world and our powerlessness in putting it to rights, declared that “we must cultivate our garden”. He meant, I guess, that we should look after the things closest to us, and the things that we know.
I have cut the broccoli flowers and put them in a vase, and I will use a shovel to hack the plants into compost-friendly sections.