Written down as it happens
Notes
Seven pieces about the actual work: watering, pruning, drying, curing, bees and a kitchen. Written when the thing was happening rather than looked up afterwards.
These are the working notes, not a blog. They are dated because the date matters: the watering note was written in the middle of the driest summer we have had, and it reads differently for it.
The family history is not here. That is told as prose on our story instead, because it is not something that happens on a date.
- Keeping a vegetable bed alive in AugustIt is 38 degrees outside. August here is not a growing month, it is a holding operation, and knowing that changes what you do.
- Pruning citrusWe inherited seventy orange trees that nobody had touched in a decade, cut too hard in our first winter, and learned the lesson the expensive way.
- Making marmalade from a small cropSix trees give us perhaps forty kilos of bitter oranges. Here is how we turn that into about 230 jars without ruining any of it.
- Curing olives at homeTen days of changing water, then four months of doing nothing. The doing nothing is the hard part.
- What the bees do across the yearThe bee year here runs backwards from the one in the books. The hard month is August, not January.
- Drying figs without a dehydratorThe method is four hundred years older than us and takes three to five days. The part people skip is the week afterwards.
- Watering an orchard through a dry summerWe are 200 millimetres down on the season and it is the middle of July. This is what we actually do, and the order in which things get cut.
Where to next
What we grow
The crops these notes are about.
The land
The soil and the water underneath all of it.
Harvest days
Come and do some of it rather than read about it.