October 2025
October
Albie and the ‘punkins’
A few weeks ago my niece damaged her elbow so my sister took her into A&E to get X-Rayed. It was one of those autumn evenings where the light was so good, after days and days of heavy rains, and I had my boys and her youngest two with me after school.
We made pesto with the basil that’s going over in the tunnels. Picked leaves from the stems, toasted pecans in a pan. Lemon juice, oil, chunks of parmesan. The kids filled all the seats at our table and spooned mouthfuls of oily, salty, herby pasta up to their lips. No one told me how satisfying it would be to feed my children food like this. How much joy would fill my chest to see smears of their dinner around their mouths, empty plates, licked fingers.
Before they left we walked them out to the veg field and they picked their way through the squashes, hunting them out and yelling. We cut their stems carefully and then carried them in to one of the tunnels to cure. Mainly we had Crown Prince, Black Futsu and Blue Hubbard in this patch- all grey blue varieties- all grown for dense orange flavourful flesh. Earlier in the year we lost about 40 squash plants to slugs and mice, and sowed more from the saved seed of my favourite Spaghetti Squash, and as I walked through the dying stems of the plants I spotted them- luminous yellow and large in the undergrowth.
By the time we made it back to the house, school shoes muddy, children all red cheeked and wind swept hair, my sister and niece have returned. I send them home with a tub of pesto- good for mending bones too surely.
These moments of reflection come thick and fast as the year turns, we’re constantly looking back over the successes and failures of our season. A great year for Padron peppers, chillis, basil, spring onions and celery, a mediocre year for tomatoes, and a dreadful year for cucs! And now there’s the quietness of everything returning to earth, the wind-blown leaves fallen thick on the ground, the skies hanging low and grey and soft, the familiar squelch of the grass underfoot. I love this time of year. Somehow it feels like a deep, steadying in-breath before we breathe out in the spring and begin again.
We are planning for the year ahead, organising buying schedules for the growers we rely on, typing our planting plans, the endless lists of seeds and varieties. The polytunnels are being prepped with winter and spring crops, the propagation tunnel needs clearing out, and we have visits from the international buyers too- chatting about their growers and produce from Spain and France and how better we can support each other. And we have a new grower too! Joe and his lovely partner Anna arrived last week and are settling in on the farm to help run the growing next year, and we’re so excited to see where we go from here with new insight and interests. And we’re just very grateful to have found two new friends who are equally as delighted to be ankle deep in mud, grading leeks in the cool autumn sunshine.
This last week we walked through the now empty squash patch and broadcast forage peas, phacelia and chicory on to the patches of bare earth. Sending roots down that will hold the soil over winter, flower in the spring and grow green manure for us to turn into next years crops. Bringing us full circle.
Good this month:
Squash. Crikey. Eat Squash. Delicata, Sweet dumpling, Crown prince, Uchiki Kuri, Harlequin-all local, all absolutely gorgeous right now. Roast them, curry them, soup them, grate them into pancakes and latkes, steam them and whip them with eggs, sugar and cinnamon and set them in pie. Make a centrepiece. Store them in a cool dry place and keep them for later on, but this year has been excellent for squash, so prices are low and bargains are to be had.
Also good: Dirty carrots! Main crop potatoes! UK Onions! Shallots! Beetroot to die for- great flavour now the sugars in the vegetables are starting to set. Storage crops often sweeten as their flavour condenses as the weather cools- by March a maincrop potato is spectacular eating- but already those flavours are maturing. They also usher in the big price drops we see when the storage crops are harvested- so enjoy that too! Parsnips, celeriac, swede all just arrived!
And on the fruit front we’re switching varieties of UK apples as they come in- at the moment Rubinstep, Rajka, Gala and Scrumptious- hopefully some Russet very soon too. The Conference pears are just immense right now too, they turn juicy and perfectly ripe in a day or two on the windowsill. Persimmons, sometimes called Kaki or Sharon fruit, have just arrived, custard apples are in, pomegranates are outrageously delicious- huge Spanish orbs, and mangoes continue to be excellent.