My previous reviews of the year just gone have been more factual and measured than this one will be. However much of my focus through 2017 was not so much what was growing in the garden or how much produce I was getting but on how I was interacting with the garden and whether or not that interaction boiled down to some basic principles that would translate to other situations.
The answer to that question is yes and I have a folder full of notes and lots of scrap paper and notebooks covered in more notes confirming it! I am in the process of writing up what I have discovered from watching myself interacting with the garden – how I watch it, what I notice, how I make decisions to do something or to refrain from doing it.
But of course I have also very much enjoyed actually being out in the garden and both harvesting and eating the produce as well as enjoying the flowers and the bees and birds and other creatures that come visiting.
There has been kale virtually all year round, more than we can eat and the neighbours have been enjoying it too.
variegated Daubenton’s kale
Daubenton’s kale
Many of the fruit trees and bushes bore their treasures for the first time this year and I harvested – jostaberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, gooseberries, raspberries, cherries, wild strawberries, apples, plums and one very precious and delicious mirabelle.
There have been onions a plenty from the first months of the year to its’ finale – three cornered leeks, few flowered leeks, perennial leeks, chives, Welsh onions, tree onions, garlic. I have been able to save bulbils and offsets to make more plants for next year.
perennial leek bulbils swelling nicely
tree onions amongst marjoram
And this year there will be even more of these lovely perennial plants to come through all the wondrous seasons in their turn.
April cowslips
salsify, nasturtiums, love in a mist, onions (of some kind) having a ball in the July sunshine
Fennel and Taunton Deane kale on a misty November morning
But right now this is what I am looking forward to quite soon:
snowdrops in a local churchyard on a sparkling February day
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