Garden Labours

We decided not to grow much this year, because we're trying to change the garden round a bit, extending some patio and the vegetable patch, while trying to plant a new bit of lawn. There's a lot to do, especially as all the buildings that were here before our house was built are still mostly lurking beneath the surface. Coming across this kind of thing -



- can certainly slow you down a bit! And here's just one of the piles of bricks and assorted rubble we've dug out of the ground:



As well as trying to get the layout of the garden more how we'd like it to be, July has been a month in which things have started to happen. And finally we've had some wildlife coming back. Stacks of hoverflies this year, which is good and during July, we've seen some bumblebees back again, like this chap:



They love the white & pink oregano & marjoram we've got flowering at the moment. Not as many butterflies as last year, but we've seen a few speckled woods about the place:



There have also been a couple of spectacular peacocks that have resisted the camera's attentions, but hardly any commas or painted ladies that were pretty frequent visitors last summer. We did find this splendid caterpillar though:



Turns out it's the vapourer moth caterpillar - gaudy in its youth, more sober and brown when it grows up.

Plants too have been quite different to last year. Barely any plums at all - just 4 or 5 on the whole tree - when last summer we were worried that the crop was going to break the branches! The loganberry has been ok, but it's the blackberries that we're going to have a glut of:



With the very late cold weather we had, I think it's done for anything early and it's the late crops that will hopefully be ok. We're really hoping for a glut of tomatoes, to which we've dedicated the greenhouse. They started to go orange and red a couple of weeks back:



And there are plenty more potentially:



As I'm writing this, it's absolutely bucketing down outside, but the weather has been better so far for ripening toms - we're hoping for a sunny late summer and autumn so we can turn the tomatoes into sauce for freezing. The variety we went for this year is Amish Paste, a cooker rather than an eater - not much juice at all, mostly flesh and they have the most wonderful flavour when cooked. Very pleased with them.

As we are with our main bean variety this year, the wonderfully-named Cherokee Trail of Tears, which has been putting out lots of beans for the last few weeks:



Both of these come from the excellent Real Seed Catalogue people, who have a wonderful selection of interesting varieties on their website. Highly recommended. The variety of slow-bolting coriander we grew from them (Leaf Selection) has been really good too.

I must do our recipe for Chakchouka here soon, as it's a great way to use up seasonal vegetables. It's a tomato-y, harissa-y vegetable stew which you finish off by cooking eggs in it. We started with the recipe in Annie Bell's excellent Evergreen (abebooks link) and it's very adaptable: so far this summer we've used the beans in it, as well as our first turnips (Purple Top Milan). They are very lovely things:

When you're thinning things like turnips, you can use the leaves for greens, using them like spinach. Great wilted down with some garlic & olive oil. Our onions (Senshyu Yellow) and garlic (Lautrec Wight) too went into the last dish of Chakchouka:

First time we've grown these. The sight of onions sitting on the top of a bed is very satisfying.

Also this year we did our courgettes (Nero di Milano) a bit differently, turning over a whole raised bed to one plant, which is doing really well, far better than last year's, which had to share the space with salad leaves. We got the seeds for these from Wiggly Wigglers.



So, considering this was kind of a non-growing year, we've managed to get a few things on the go. The challenge now is to really push on with all the earth-shifting jobs so we can get planting in Spring next year. Along with everything else, like foraging for sloes for the Christmas sloe gin (great for a fizz or a martini), getting the 'Rumtopf' (using brandy) going with some seasonal fruit and maybe getting back to baking again soon as well!

Musical bargain of the year?

Until the end of this month, you can pick up an amazing bargain at classical music specialists MDT. The classical music industry may be finding things tough at the moment, and perhaps because of this there seems to be a constant arrival of re-packaged classics from the back catalogues of major labels. The giant Warner Records (technically Warner Classics & Jazz) owns the catalogue of Teldec and not only have we seen individual recordings from Das Alte Werk (I'll blog about some of these later this week), but the pioneering complete recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred cantatas led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt & Gustav Leonhardt. 60 CDs which MDT are selling for a paltry £96 until July the 28th (it's currently £150 at Amazon and £144 at Europadisc - both very good prices too!).

I'd thought that Brilliant Classics' astonishingly cheap re-issue of Alistair Dixon & the Chapelle du Roi's collection of the complete works of Thomas Tallis would be the best recent boxset I'd picked up - 10 CDs filled with wonderful music for a paltry £20 - but it's the Harnoncourt & Leonhardt set that has to be, for me, the bargain of the year.

Words like 'groundbreaking' and 'classic' are probably bandied about with too much abandon. But this monumental project for once fits both terms. The first to follow through theories on instrumentation and performance practice and record throughout (with two exceptions) using all-male voices, you can pretty much trace back the 'period instrument' and 'period performance' movements that have revitalised the music of the baroque period to Harnoncourt, Leonhardt and their colleagues. It's probably a bit of an irreverent comparison, but just like punk swept away the bloated musical dinosaurs of the 1970s, this enterprise marks a vital step away from the foursquare 'monumental' school of Bach performance which, for me, can swamp the music.

There are too many highlights to list them here. One highlight that stretches across a large proportion of the set consists of the vocal performances of tenor Kurt Equiluz. I'd earlier come across him when trawling through various recordings of the Christmas Oratorio (Weihnachtsoratorium) for our Christmas website. If anything, the sum of his performances in the cantatas is a significantly greater achievement. He almost always seems able to achieve the sometimes tricky balance between personal expression and the requirements of the text and the musical vision of each cantata. The three cantatas whose equivalent liturgical date was yesterday (BWV 186, 187 & 107) are exemplary - clarity of line, stylish playing and an utterly committed energy run through each one.

There are dissenting voices - Nikolaus Harnoncourt in particular is someone who prompts much passionate discussion on the Bach Cantatas website (for instance, on this page). What do people object to? These are the early days of 'authentic instruments' or 'period performance' and the theory behind it (especially the rather esoteric point about short notes rather than long legato notes during recitatives) and its realisation (particularly what can sound on occasion like a struggle to keep the period instruments in tune) are anathema to some. Similarly, boy sopranos rather than adult female sopranos are used throughout (with the exception of Barbara Bonney in BWV 199 & Marianne Kweksilber in BWV 51): some people don't like the sound, some think the boys aren't up to it.

For me these are quibbles. Again, speaking personally, there are times when it doesn't work - but these times are the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes there are problems with tuning; occasionally the music seems to be a stretch too far for some of the boy soloists. But quibbling over details, for me, rather misses the point. Here it's not so much a question of how important these recordings were - you can understand their effect on performance practice without necessarily wanting to listen to them! What's most important to me is more the way in which you can hear the collective vision, moulded by Harnoncourt & Leonhardt, applied to music of bewildering variety and quality, turned out week after week by the cantor of St Thomas in Leipzig. This is music-making on the edge - the rewards in pursuing such a risky, edgy vision far outweigh the times when it doesn't quite come off. You don't have to take my word for it. Peter Watchorn, whose own harpsichord recordings - especially JS Bach's Well Tempered Clavier - are well worth seeking out, has written an inspiring review for the US Amazon site - linked to here.

It's a huge box of delights and more than holds its own in comparison to people who have turned their hand to the cantatas since like Philippe Herreweghe, Ton Koopman, Sigiswald Kuijken & Masaaki Suzuki (to name just a few). To still stand up so well more than 30 years since it was started is quite an achievement.