22
November 2008
CdP
CdP
It was my medlar harvest that brought me up against this. Lovely things, medlars. Yes, you can see why they were called openarse (and why, given that this was what they were known as, their popularity might have waned; the French were no better with their name cul de chien). But without considering them too figuratively, they have a warm, earthy medieval look about them, like something very old with one of those tastes that our over-refined, over-salted and -sugared tastebuds just can’t get to grips with any more. And in fact, though you can tell that they are closely related to the apple, their flavour is very uncompromising: tongue-wrinklingly tart, especially the skin, unless bletted which means half-rotted. Left to their own devices (some say spread on straw, others in a box, others left to rot on the ground beneath the tree for a bit, preferably with a hard frost or two to speed up the process) the decay process breaks down tannins and acids, letting the sugars come to the fore. I’ve never reached that point with them to find out what they taste like. Someone – Dr Johnson perhaps? – wrote that they were the very best fruit to eat with wine: bletted,sliced in half and then scooped out of their wrinkly skins with a spoon.
But now I shall attempt to let mine rot sufficiently to be able to make things with them: medlar jelly from the juice when they’re boiled, medlar chutney from the pulp pushed through a sieve. For the moment, I’m undecided between leaving them in the red bucket under the kitchen table where they are right now; and taking them up to the first floor of the chicken house, removing the walnuts from where they’ve been drying on the very small patch of floor that isn’t occupied by all the ridiculous amount of clobber that we should really just haul off to the tip, and spreading the medlars there. I’m always worried that whatever I leave up there is going to be gnawed by mice, just like the bulbs I made the mistake of hanging from the rafters one year (though they’ve never gone for my garlic, I have to say). The fact that we seem to have lost the lovely old rusty key for the door to that room means that it’s always open now, and has a distinctly catty small about it: one of the local semi-ferals has clearly made it his home, which will keep the mouse population down, of course… but do I want a flea-ridden cat stalking over my medlars?
(My walnuts, by the way, are not as good as last year. Many of them are rotten or wormy inside. But the ones that aren’t are delicious. They’re a good size too. They have been up there in the chicken house for weeks now, because I’m rather afraid of bringing them in. I removed the green outer husks with a knife this year; the idea of scrubbing each one off like I did last year was just too horrible to contemplate. But they don’t look so good, with bits of now-blackened husk clinging to the shells, and I’m slightly worried that the decomposing corpse smell that the dessicating husks give off might still be around, which puts me off bringing the things into the house. On the other hand, if I need that space for the medlars, what else can I do?)
You see? This lack of foresight on the storage issue throws up one problem after another. I was thinking about it earlier today as I weeded and fertilised my fruit trees. They’re all still small, and I am terrible about treating them so that they don’t fill up with insects and disease, therefore output so far has been paltry. But what if, one day, we find ourselves with barrels full of apples and pears? (The plums, all right, I’ll make jam from.) Where do we keep them? Will I have to invest in – and find a place for – huge drawers of apple and potato racks?
I remember back at NH Farm, the weeks through late summer and autumn with brown wrinkled fingers as we peeled and sliced our tiny little tart cooking apples, dropped them into water and lemon juice, then blanched them briefly and put them in plastic bags in the freezer. We had apple pies all year. But this harvest ritual was painfully dull and finger-cracking. What’s more I never turn the freezer on here, unless we have lots of people staying and we need the big fridge-freezer in the laundry. (This reminds me that I bottled peaches last summer; we’ve only opened couple of the jars: one was delicious, the other tasted of absolutely nothing. I must try some more.) Ah well. One of the apple trees is growing rapidly: it’s a limoncella and native to this part of Italy. And the apricot tree is doing very well indeed, though early last summer I failed to notice that the battery in my water timer wasn’t working, so a few days without water at a very dry time meant all the apricots fell from the tree before they had even ripened.
Maybe, come spring, we’ll have an onion drying and storing problem. I planted dozens of tiny bulbs today, and have covered the raised bed in fleece in the hope that the porcupines will leave them in peace.
***
My new resolution is to work five days and garden two. The two could be the weekend (like this week) or could be two others of my choice. For the moment we are without Vittorio, both because he seems to be terribly busy elsewhere and because we are so poor at the moment that we can’t really afford him. So I need to get out there myself.
I thought that, living up here, I would be whizzing into the garden in every spare moment. But of course, the fact that I have my life and work up here was beginning to have the opposite effect: keep me away from the garden. At least when we were in Rome we packed up on Friday night and drove up here, and that was the weekend, for doing housey, gardeny things. Now, with my usual lack of discipline, I find myself forgetting to close down my computer and go outside. So yes, two days outside, five days in. That sounds like a good system. And one that should allow me to keep some kind of order outside. I guess when I really can’t cope I can summon Vittorio back.
