Harvest

All you need is love... cock-a-doodle-doo!

I’ve probably written about harvest before on here. I’ve certainly written about harvest many times in the past few decades in various places, because why wouldn’t I? The abundance is gratifying and you can forget that there is abundance because of all the effort that was put into it rather than just through luck. Polytunnel and veg garden activity on steroids. The pricking and planting and picking, blanching, freezing and cooking. Caring for poultry, hatching the eggs, rearing the birds, dispatching, plucking and dressing the birds. The same with sheep, cattle and pigs - well not the plucking or dressing as that is either irrelevant or done by the abattoir and butcher, but you know what I mean.

Right now, I have a fragrant batch of ratatouille doing its thing in the oven, and it includes the first aubergines of the year, the beauties. It will be served alongside locally caught tuna and picked samphire and there, on a plate, will be heaven. Lunch is lettuce, toms, cues, roasted red peppers from the garden plus a wodge of the heavenly mature goat Haytor made by Curworthy cheese which is as wildly delicious as the very best parmesan and for the goat haters among you, has not a whiff of the nanny. I know that I’ll be adding black olives and they are not local, nor is the olive oil, but I forgive myself for that.

This year’s onion harvest

Going back to the poultry theme, this week I’m picking up new turkey poults, the old breeding pair having lost all sense of fertility. Even though the eggs were forthcoming, the stag had left his lead in some long forgotten pencil and blanks were the only things being shot. But because we are thrifty and love vintage meat, they were both dispatched and portioned up last week, the hen made into the most unctuous stew, providing us with numerous wondrous meals, and the stag in bags in the freezer, all 32lbs of him. Long slow moist cooking for him too as you might not find him a tender roasting option. If you see something in our freezer labelled “old cock”, you know it’s as guidance for the cooking method rather than an indication of something more macabre.

The old turkey stag

The majority of our hay crop is also in the barn, and that is not to be sneezed at. This prolonged hot dry spell is causing ructions across the country with farmers already feeding winter forage as their fields dry to dust. Being in wet Devon, we still have grass and good ground coverage and nothing is mooing or bleating for lack of food, apart from the freshly weaned ewes who are having to work a little harder than usual on the aftermath of our hay cut and make the best of the headland which is left uncut for the benefit of wildlife. This is a deliberate process to ensure the ewes’ milk dries up and avoids mastitis. After a couple of weeks they will move onto sweeter, greener pastures once their udders have shrunk, but for now they are feeding the soil with their dung and eating a slightly restricted diet. They all look as fat as butter for this stage of the year, so do not fret.

One harvest that is slowing down is duck eggs. From six or so a day, we’ve moved onto one. I expect few eggs if any once we move into August, and we return to the slightly humdrumness of chicken eggs. But so it should be. Seasonality and all its pleasures means boom and bust for crops of any kind. And with the loss of duck eggs, the plums will come alive, juicy and perfumed and producers of sticky chins and fingers. Then the blackberries, the apples and pears, the leeks and corn cobs and the reliable chard. The bustiness of the basil will flower and wilt, but for now it is running rampant, in parallel with the tomatoes. A match made in heaven.

And this morning I woke too early out of a very deep sleep, with the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” ringing in my head. As I prised my mind slightly open, I realised it was because one of the growing young cocks is nearing maturity and has just found his cockadoodledoo voice, to the exact cadence, timbre and timing to the responding Da-da dada-da of the brass.