Our garden is approaching its most beautiful phase, with apple, pear and plum blossoms adorning the fruit trees. We have also discovered that we have wild garlic, which we didn’t know before (as my mum had misidentified it as “harebells”) and which Nicky only realised when he accidentally mowed over some of the plants and suddenly smelled garlic. We seem to have much more than we had last year – it’s spreading right out of the flower bed and onto the lawn – but we don’t mind, as the plan is to harvest and freeze as much of it as possible and make an English aberration of classic Genovese pesto for our Yuletide hampers, using wild garlic and hazelnut instead of basil and pine nuts.
Nicky also decided that this was the year when he would finally create his herb garden, and he did this by very cleverly recycling an old storage pallet; by shifting a couple of the wooden slats around and filling it with compost it was rapidly transformed into a sort of quadrilateral herb wheel. The only problem was that, as it rested fallow before we filled it with herb plants, something appeared to be venturing in and digging holes. Obviously the first name to enter the frame was Nimbus, but I was fairly certain a lazy lump like her would just find it too much of an effort to jump up and do her thing in a pallet of soil precariously balanced on the coal bunker, when there was a perfectly good litter tray and lots of soil on ground level. However, having defended my poor cat, I felt rather silly a few days later when I caught her in the act, and this time evidence of her “leavings” was quite clear.
This weekend we went to a wonderful plant fair and bought, amongst other things, curly parsley, coriander, dill and three types of mint, which Nicky has just planted out (after scooping out Nimby’s “leavings” and placing a sheet of chicken wire around the pallet to keep her out). My mum and Nicky both felt it would be perfectly fine to plant the herbs as intended. However, I still feel slightly queasy at the thought of consuming herbs which have essentially been grown in a giant litter tray, and right now no amount of hearing Nicky say, “But it’s no different from horse manure”, will make me change my mind…
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