29 early harvests, unexpected encounters, a useful question & a poem

Hello lovely people who have got used, perhaps, to more-or-less regular posts from me and have now waited 3 weeks. Long story of ill-health, anxiety (recent events, plus a harvest of decades of various unprocessed personal and familial stresses and traumas, not to mention the State of the World), and insomnia. I have felt as if I’ve been trapped in a knot in time – the beautiful summer, its days, weeks, months have been sliding past and I haven’t been able to free myself to travel with them. I’m pleased to be coming through this, I fervently hope, and to be back here, and love knowing that many of you who have journeyed with me a while will read this. Thank you. I have written about 10 pages in my journal to type up for you here; but have decided to start from scratch – random notes, really, and with more brevity.

To soothe me and hopefully delight you, above is a picture of the Forest and the Rivière d’Argent (‘Silver River’), as you can see nicely copper in colour; and this small pool debouches into a rather larger and much deeper pool, found by my daughter and swum in with great pleasure by The Man, who has a strong need to swim locally and often. Me, I just sat by it on a rock and felt my breathing and heart rate slow to river-flow.

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Harvests
In this season of all-day-and-sometimes-much-of-the-night harvesting of barley and then wheat in the hot days between rain, the roads and lanes are yellow with grain-slippage. Extended families of sparrows, jackdaws, collared doves feast at the roadside.

August, and the land is starting to look tired. We stand outside at 10pm for the dogs’ last pee, and already, here in Finistère, the sky is darkening into night. To the southeast, a beautiful fat red-gold moon is just clearing the treetops against the indigo – a blue supermoon, apparently: when the moon’s orbit brings her closer than usual to earth. There will be another three of them between now and the end of the year. This one has various names; I like Barley Moon.

As we stand there quietly, a part of the night, two very small bats skim our heads, a flickering almost not-there in the dusky air, circling. I imagine they’re young pipistrelles; the latter being the smallest of the 16 species of bat that live in Brittany.

We think of sowing time and the rich ripe late summer harvest as being the very full-on times in the veg garden which is at the core of our small-scale vegan-based eco-autonomy (phew) project. But actually, from about April onwards, it’s all full-on, what with planting out after sowing (or sowing and resowing repeatedly in some cases), weeding, tending and dealing with a glut of courgettes that have morphed into marrows, of beetroot, and of chard and green beans too. TM built an enormous double enclosure for all the many brassicas we grow, to dissuade butterflies and pigeons from destroying the crop (I believe I’ve said he never does anything by halves, but it’s true that this will be a series of tall dense plants to see us through to next spring. Oh and the green plastic collars are slug-proof – mostly successful):

Ironically, and troublingly, there are not as many cabbage whites, the butterflies that lay caterpillar eggs on the cabbage tribe’s leaves, this year. Various birds are keeping the potager free from other troublesome insects.

There is a great diversity of land here, for crops, rich in trees including our fruiting and nut ones, good for firewood (it took 3 months for TM to clear the fallen branches and trees from the storm of November 1st) and ramial woodchip for mulching, and general biodiversity; much can be left to do its own thing, which includes the woodland and the adjoining areas of regenerating treeland, and some areas we manage a little with the mowing of paths, which creates mulch for the garden.

Some of you will remember that we are trialling chickpeas (doing well so far), soy (patchy but healthy), green lentils (patchy) and quinoa (flourishing), all for protein for us and the dogs, this year; plus a small patch each of buckwheat, the local very useful grain, and amaranth, since we were given the seeds. So far, all so beautiful. These are things to keep an eye on as some are beginning to ripen fast; we will need to collect, dry and thresh some of them and the window probably won’t be wide. Since these harvests are not a usual part of our cultivation, it would be easy to miss the moment.

from top: chickpeas, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat

Speaking of gardens, I’m reading Richard Mabey’s new book The Accidental Garden. It’s engaging and interesting, and at a later stage I might copy out a paragraph or two of his thoughts on trees.

Unexpected encounters
I had one of those unexpected conversations in unexpected places the other day. I was in the bakers’, and Madame, not usually very forthcoming, suddenly turned garrulous when I asked her about the possibility of a veggie version of the good-smelling pizzas that stack her shelves (TM cooks vegan but is himself lacto-veggie). She checked with me the difference between veggie and vegan, and I even confessed that I am the latter (still not common in France).

Instead of looking disapproving, as I feared, Madame, who looks like a conventional short-haired plumpish woman with carefully-drawn eyebrows, probably in her fifties, suddenly launched into a monologue on how appallingly badly French people eat, especially for breakfast. Waving her hand at her own baguettes, croissants and pastries, all made on the premises and the stuff by which she makes her living, she said ‘They eat these things for breakfast, dipped into their coffee or hot chocolate.’

I love it when my assumptions and biases are overturned. What does Madame eat for breakfast? A salad bowl of chickpeas, kidney beans and sweetcorn, for protein, dressed with a little rice or apple. That’s as healthy a vegan breakfast as you’d get, and I’d never have imagined it.

That useful question
Some of you know that I trained in a version of archetypal and Jungian psychotherapy called transpersonal psychology, and that has underpinned all my work, whether courses and retreats or writing. I read contemporary Jungian psychologists with absorption. One of my favourites is James Hollis, and a little throwaway question in one of his later books caught my attention. Just in case it’s useful to you, too, he said (I paraphrase): ‘We all live in the story of our lives and our history. What does it keep you doing, or keep you from doing?’ I had an immediate ‘aha’ moment for myself; clear insight.

And already
the blackberries are ripe. Here’s a poem from my version of the Celtic tree calendar, from the month of September; for some reason, I didn’t include it in my book Spell. Lack of organisation, probably, and poor filing.

Blackberries

Can I believe that it’s a whole half-lifetime 
gone, me the barefoot girl and you 
just a child, in between griefs walking 
our Devon summer lanes with your last-minute-
rescued pony, the one who saved you 
from capsizing with all the gales
that living with me somehow entailed?

– how the pony would pull back her lips
from her pink gums and pink muzzle
so she could pick the ripest fruits
from the hedge-depth with its prickles
and how in those slow summer evenings
everything that had happened,
everything still to come, was softened

by the sweetest summer juices,
how we’d let them ink our fingers
as the evening thickened, how we knew
that those moments counted most
in which the shadows hadn’t yet colonised
the hill, and that the thing with blackberries 
is to let the dark sweetness run.

© Roselle Angwin 2014

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the full moon.