SUMMER has well and truly arrived on The Journal allotment. It’s not just the sun that’s out on what looks set to be a perfect day weather-wise.
Everything else is blooming too from the pastel pink double-headed poppies bobbing their heads alongside the golden marjoram to the sage with its mass of purple flowers.
The golden marjoram and sage have their culinary uses. But the pink poppies?
“Oh, they’re there because they look pretty,” says Gibside’s community kitchen gardener Sue Adamson.
“A vegetable patch doesn’t just have to be for vegetables. It’s nice to have a bit of vibrant colour alongside the greens.”
Sue has been carefully tending The Journal allotment in Gibside’s walled kitchen garden since the beginning of this year. And now the time has come to start reaping the rewards of all that hard work.
It promises to be a bumper harvest thanks to the exceptionally warm early spring weather the North East basked under.
The strawberries are looking big, juicy and a wonderful glossy red. The first of the peas are almost set for harvesting, their firm, vibrant green pods hanging temptingly on the vines.
The herbs (chives, sage, golden marjoram, mint, rosemary and parsley) are ready for picking, while the potato tops have bushed out into a verdant green canopy.
Sue, a full-size fork in hand, is itching to dig deep to see if the first of the Rocket potatoes, an early variety with a firm waxy texture and white flesh, are fit for eating.
Normally she would use a smaller border fork for digging up root vegetables, but says: “I find that you are less likely to damage potatoes if you use a full-size fork.
“After all the effort of planting, growing and tending to them, it would be a shame to ruin it all by spearing them.”
Despite recent rain the soil still has little moisture after the driest spring for a century. Sue’s fork easily cuts through the dark earth as she gently lifts a potato top.
It comes up effortlessly, the dirt falling off the roots in great clumps to reveal a clutch of round, white-skinned new potatoes of varying sizes. A few more seconds’ work and there are 15 lying among the loam.
Sue can’t keep the smile off her face. “I wasn’t expecting that many,” she says. “I’m really pleased with that crop.
“They’ll be nice boiled with some mint. It’s a very special feeling harvesting and eating something you have grown yourself.”
July on the allotment is, as Sue points out, “about enjoying the fruits of your labour and relishing being out in the open air in your own garden. It’s when you can sit back and admire what you have achieved.”
Not for too long, however. While July and August are a time of plenty it won’t be the same story in a few months’ time. Winter isn’t something you want to be contemplating with the sun shining hotly down from a cloud dappled sky.
But now is exactly when you need to be planning ahead for when “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
“No one likes to be thinking of winter in July, especially after the last two we have suffered,” Sue says.