Harvests

The potato harvest was quite exceptional this year - and whoever thought one would write such a sentence?  Here, the two largest with a standard apple for comparison.  One of these weighs nearly two pounds, and is much more than we would need at one meal.

An enormous beetroot, grown by Angelo, our Italian neighbour on the allotments, who has green fingers.  This one is even now being rendered down into soup - beetroot and ginger, eaten with the addition of some crumbly white cheese.

Courgette soup, made simply with the addition of a potato and onion and blended.  Even the largest of the courgettes can be turned into this.  It needs lots of black pepper but is a lovely creamy soup.

Finally, that rare thing: a new taste.  This is sorrel soup, using sorrel grown from seed on our plot.  It has a distinctly sharp taste, lemony, but not actually lemon.  I had never tasted it before, but it is delicious.

Last Sunday, I whiled away the afternoon picking out debris from a raw Norfolk Horn fleece, in preparation for spinning.  It is to be handwoven and will end up on display in this spectacular medieval barn in Coggeshall.  The barn was the grange for the Cistercian monastery and the fleece is to be turned into a replica habit - Cistercians wore white habits.

Finally, two very fine farm carts from the National Trust collection, now housed in the barn.  I was prompted to reread Adam Thorpe's book "Ulverton", in which, inter alia, he mourns the passing of the farm cart as a symbol of the historic relationship of man to the land he farmed.