After the hottest weather since 1976, it’s now pouring and the relief is palpable as the thirsty soil sucks in the welcome rain. We have a huge lake that fills up through the winter here on our farm in France, and we’ve been busy pumping, piping and spraying from it this summer. Giant hose reels pull rain guns (giant agricultural sprinklers) slowly across the fields night and day, but it is never as good as the real thing and westruggle to get around all the crops before the first lot start looking thirsty again.
We will start picking sweetcorn in earnest this week. After battling with the weeds through a wet spring, our persistence has been rewarded with a pretty good crop. There are no badgers here but the ragondin (giant rodents the size of beavers) have acquired a taste for the ripening cobs. Introduced from South America for their pelts, they have become endemic and an occasional pest.
Meanwhile we have a fantastic crop of padron peppers, which will be on the extras list for the rest of the summer and will also appear in some of the boxes. These small green peppers are super trendy and ridiculously expensive in all those tapas bars that are taking over the country. They are best picked small and fried gently until the skin is blistered. Serve immediately with plenty of sea salt; most have a mild, wonderful flavour with about one in four delivering some moderate heat, and the occasional lurker with a real kick. They are great as a snack with a beer.
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