Flaming June after two years of washout – it’s been pure bliss – particularly a picnic supper at the top of the hill, basking in the sun’s lowering rays, debating the location of church towers in the far-flung distance, and feasting on the first strawberries, with gooseberry puree, honey and clotted cream. The cream was not from Bertie’s Cottage, but skimmed from the milk of the very cows that grazed the sward on which we were sitting, then ‘scalded’ by our kindly neighbour, on her kitchen stove.
Smallholding may be hard work, and I’m permanently grubby and dishevelled, but what better way is there to end a day than sharing food fit for gods with your family, smelling roses to the serenade of birdsong, and following the slow trajectory of a still-warm sun as it dips down over the horizon?
Smallholding may be hard work, and I’m permanently grubby and dishevelled, but what better way is there to end a day than sharing food fit for gods with your family, smelling roses to the serenade of birdsong, and following the slow trajectory of a still-warm sun as it dips down over the horizon?
I had guarded the secret of the first strawberries zealously to allow for the crucial extra day’s ripening that deepens their red and maximises flavour and sweetness, but now, in addition to the slugs (foiled by growing them in hanging baskets) and blackbirds (scared away by pendant CDs), an altogether trickier pest (of the tall tail-less variety) is plundering the patch!
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