A Catch-up After a Busy Start of Autumn.
This newsletter comes late after a busy period in October-November and is, in part, a notice of what you may have already missed or what you may already know.
The middle of Autumn is harvest time, the time when the soils, plants and trees are most forthcoming. There are tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes, runner beans, chillies, tomatillos and cucumbers, agastache, basil and an array of other aromatic herbs, but also the orchards are bustling with apples and pears, quince and cobnuts. Squash and pumpkins have started to make their way to the greenhouse to cure, and cauliflowers are showing their curds. From the soils come the first of the celeriac and new season carrots, and leeks. It is an overwhelming delight; there is too much to choose from, and sadly, we can’t possibly fit everything on the menu.
Stockport ginger
On the Landing, we are harvesting the first of the chicories. Radicchio di Treviso is a deep purple, crisp chicory that hails from the Veneto region of Italy. This bitter leaf is persistent and healthy against the deep winter frosts that come with the bora wind in the North-East of Italy, but it does pretty well in Stockport, too. Its bright white stems are robust and give a tangy bitterness when eaten raw, but take on a sweetness when sautéed.
As well as this, Nathan is harvesting our first ginger. We planted it in the greenhouse in January. It is a rhizome, meaning it spreads its roots sideways under the soil, pushing up new shoots to flag its growth. We start with a selection of mother bulbs. They look like any ordinary ginger bulbs from the grocers. They are soaked in water overnight and then placed gently on the top of a light compost. We heat the sil with matts through January. Eventually, the bulbs offer new shoots, and that is when we transplant to the beds that are hooped with plastic sheets, sort of like a mini polytunnel. What we harvest is bright green tropical leaves and stems that lead to a neon pink bulb that blends into a succulent white root. It is, perhaps, my favourite-looking plant. And the raw bulbs slice finely, have the crispness of a green apple with a delicate and floral zing on the tongue.
The treviso and ginger are served in a crisp salad with salted plums and go alongside Elaine’s roasted chicken.
We have been planting and growing ginger for about three years now. At first it was purely experimental; we were planting chillies, lemongrass, Thai basil, phoona keera cucumbers from India and other rare to these isles treats. It was really just to see what happened, to push the boundaries of this erratic Northern climate. Over the years, we have put some experiments aside and perfected the techniques of others. For me, the ginger now serves as a mark of the potential of what can be achieved by our own fair hands: it always makes me giddy when we harvest the first ginger, grown on an empty rooftop car park, above a shopping centre in a Northern English town.
