Harvest

My delivery last week to the veg bag scheme : cabbages, cucumbers, runner beans, beetroot and courgettes

Being the sole owner and manager of a vegetable garden in late summer means I am having to find something to do with the large quantities of foodstuff sprouting everywhere. So far I've had just shy of three hundred courgettes off my twelve monsters in the polytunnel (and that's counting two small courgettes as one). Fifty-three fat cucumbers have been plucked from their seven vines with many more developing. 25 kg of runner beans have so far been snipped from amongst the two hundred bean poles (and I'm writing this before the regular Tuesday harvest). Eighty decent beetroot have been wrenched from their birthplace with perhaps the same again still growing. Thirty-five big green cabbage heads are no longer attached to their cabbagey bodies; more are awaiting their cruel day of dismemberment. Not to mention all the mange tout, spinach, salad leaves, coriander, basil, carrots, french beans, chard, tomatoes, sweet peppers, jalapenos, kale, leeks and squash that are being or will soon be harvested.

Making some money from these valuable commodities is clearly a sensible goal to be pursuing considering it is my one and only business, and naturally I have been finding ways and means to part people from their coinage in exchange for the privilege of owning 'New Leaf'-branded fresh and edible merchandise. Being eaten by myself is another worthy fate for my veg, although it tends to be the mis-shapen or the slightly nibbled that ends up on my plate, along with at least one courgette per meal (I haven't managed to sell all three hundred).

Vegetables also make fine gifts, if offered at the right occasion (i.e. not when someone's just about to go on a fortnight's holiday) although it seems everyone is fed up with courgettes and runner beans at the moment so it's best to choose your present wisely.  And a fourth usage is bartering, simply swapping them for something else in a presumably mutually beneficial exchange. I haven't done much of the latter, in fact probably the closest to this I've got is to provide a variety of my veg to a carpenter friend of mine who gave up an afternoon and several pieces of plywood to fix my trailer floor, a transaction which it's hard to view as perfectly equally beneficial, but hey, he really likes spinach!

A trailer in need of repair

The fifth and perhaps least desirable end-game for a vegetable of mine is to end up on the compost heap. Those that couldn't be sold, bartered, given away, and were excess to my own eating requirements, languish in the storage cupboard (which looks oddly like my caravan's shower cubicle) until they begin to rot, whereupon I sling them into the kitchen-waste compost dalek. At least in there they will finally fulfil a purpose – once fully decomposed the rich and nutritious compost that ensues will feed future generations of vegetables.

 

I knocked the rest of the rotten flooring out

To those such as myself who have dedicated themselves to growing food uncontaminated by pesticides a recent news article covering a report from the University of Exeter makes unnerving reading. Professor Sarah Gurr reveals in her study that Britain has “significantly underestimated” the risk that crop pests pose to its food supply. Food-growing nations like ours will be “overwhelmed” by pests within the next 30 years due to climate change, inadequate biosecurity measures, and new varieties. Will this doomsday scenario play into the hands of the likes of Monsanto who will be beavering away to provide new poisons to deal with the new pests (which will no doubt continue to evolve)? Or will we find other less environmentally harmful ways to deal with this problem, perhaps encouraging the right predators, or even changing the types of food we eat? Who knows what kind of veg I'll be growing on my plot in thirty years time. Watch this space.

As good as new!