Autumn is definitely arriving this week and it’s time to reflect on one of the benefits of being located on a site in a popular rural tourist attraction in Kent. We thought we would take this chance to review the season’s produce with you and show you that our lives are not all about the ancient ruins.
There’s plenty of space here at the Antoinette Centre and we have used it to our advantage to create a garden where we can spend our few moments of leisure when we’re not musing on the past.
The garden brings us back to the present and helps us look forward to the promise of the songs of spring and better weather for digging, archaeology and gardens!
We’ve even brought some redundant office furniture into use for its true purpose, to be turned on their side and filled with soil (or filed with soil?). we say tear down your offices and build up gardens instead.
Among the flowers and climbing plants, cuttings and seedlings we have been growing vegetables for a few years now. Our courgettes, the vegetable that keeps on giving, have kept us abundantly supplied throughout the summer. A few green beans were excellent, diced in a tomato sauce and eaten with pasta.
Our fantastic culti-cave has brought us our earliest fruiting tomatoes (Gardeners Delight), some cucumbers, fresh basil (Genovese) all year and even some chilli peppers (just Cayenne, nothing fancy). These plastic productivity palaces should be put on the list of desert island survival essentials!
But, our most abundant crop to date is the outdoor tomato farm, the result of a rash seed planting strategy early in the year and several free packets of seeds given away with our favourite garden newspaper.
Our outdoor range includes a few mighty beef tomatoes, the majestic San Marzano for our ‘talian store cupboard, vine plum tomatoes and a very productive cherry variety. Thanks to Wilkinson discounting their tomato planters in the nick of time, all the seeds we planted were nurtured to their late summer prime.
All our remaining tomatoes are beginning to be rendered into the winter staples of sauce for the freezer and chutney to brighten the long winter nights to come.
