The healthy forager

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I panic about August – when I’ll be eating wild and homegrown for a month. “What if it is a particularly bad year for mushrooms?” “What if there’s a drought and there’ll be no fruit?” Probably spurred on by these moments of night time panic, I’ve been planting an awful lot on our own patch. To the point that I’m now likely faced with an entirely different challenge: how to eat it all!

Here’s what’s growing within a relatively small space in our front and back garden:

Strawberries

Raspberries (yellow, the best!)

Gooseberries

Red currants

Plums (though this year the tree is taking a break)

Cherries

Apples (4 varieties: James Grieve, Fiesta, Christmas Pippin and Scrumptious)

Blackberries

Rhubarb

Potatoes

Carrots

Onions

Beetroot

Cucumber

Chard

Nasturtiums

Beans (Yellow Frisian Forest Beans, an heirloom variety from my home country)

Butternut squash

Thyme

Here are some pictures of all this lovely produce-to-be:

Of course not all of this will be ready to eat in August, but quite a lot of it will. Looking at all my plants, caring for them every day, I find myself gradually becoming more optimistic about the variety of meals I’ll be able to cook without going to a supermarket. Imagine a slow cooker dish with onions, potatoes, carrots, porcini and thyme…. Yes, I’d sign up for that!