When we picked all those beans a week or so back and said we had a lot of cooking coming up, what we didn’t mention was that we were taking them away to a Yorkshire cottage where we’d be spending a week self-catering with the rest of the family.
Well, that’s what we did, and of course it raised a bit of a self-sufficiency dilemma: what do you do with your plot and your crops when you’re away?
Even absent weekends can be testing on some of the fruit. Particularly the tomatoes, which are very picky about having regular waterings. Andrew’s tomato harvest was ruined last year when his plants developed blossom end rot, which can result from irregular dousing in the hot weather. Tomatoes are creatures of habit, you see.
Fortunately we’d already earned ourselves a favour by watering next door’s beans, raspberries, tomatoes and aubergines while we were feeding their cat a few weeks ago, so we could ask them to do the same for us.
And what a job they did. We came back to find ripened tomatoes, a profusion of tiny white chillies waiting for the sun to give them some colour, and cucumbers that had swelled so much they were starting to look like vibrant green potatoes. As a bonus, they also got very excited about the chicken coop in the garden, so we already know we have a couple of hen sitters eager to step in the next time we go away. We’ve already promised them free eggs in return, and gave them the pick of the ripening beans on our vines when we were gone last week on the condition that they weighed whatever they took.
The moral of the story? That the ‘self’ in self-sufficiency is true only to a degree. Unless you’re willing to devote each and every day to your goal, it helps to help out your neighbours in the hope they might return the favour the next time you need a break.
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