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The first of the big winter gales has blown through, leaving us a little tattered but still standing. One older, single-span polytunnel was ripped open, but it was overdue for re-skinning anyway. Meanwhile our newer, terrifyingly light gauge (but better engineered) multi-span tunnels survived with only minor damage. Outside, the gale has brought our borlotti bean harvest to a premature end after the crop was left beaten into the mud.
I am just back from a delightful month of lolling in a hammock among the coconuts in Kerala. This region of India has proclaimed itself ‘God’s own country’ with good reason; there is a fantastic array of food plants, mostly perennial and normally cultivated in complex mixtures, which provide a much richer environment than any farm in the UK. In addition to the dominant coconut and banana there is papaya, cacao, coffee, jack fruit, mango, black pepper, vanilla, nutmeg, tamarind and curry leaf, with the understorey cultivated for annuals such as cassava, ginger, okra and chilli.
Last week, as a grim dawn crept into a bleak Vendéean field, we started planting the first lettuce of the season on our farm in France. After a little sun, it was dry enough to set up the cloche-style mini tunnels that will protect the plants from the worst of the frost, wind and rain. All being well, these green Batavia lettuces will be in your boxes in early April, as we enter the depths of the UK hungry gap.
Despite the deluge, everyone is happy enough apart from the chickens. If it is to rain for eight weeks with barely a pause, it might as well be now when the days are shortest and not much is happening in our fields. On the whole our standing crops are bearing up well and there is little to be gained from cultivating or planting before March.
Sally Tripp, the coastal farmer whose clifftop field is home (among her sheep) to my ancient converted bus most summers, invited me to try one of her swedes last weekend.
Issue 12: Fairness and five years.
Find out more about Wicked Leeks and our publisher, organic veg box company Riverford.