A Country Diary 88

INSPIRED BY VIRGIL’S GEORGICS, which I have been reading in the excellent Loeb edition, I have written my first ever piece of Latin verse. It is:

Rastris adsiduis glaebas frango
Herba insecto arvaque iuvo

[With unrelenting mattock I break the …

A Country Diary 87

USING A VERY SIMPLE recipe from Jocasta Innes’s excellent The Country Kitchen, I made eight pots of hedgerow jam. The first step was to collect the hedgerow fruits. Arthur and I went out with a basket and filled it with …

Country Diary 86

THE OTHER EVENING, as I went to empty the compost bucket into the scruffy bins that I made out of pallets four years ago, I was surprised to see a badger eating up yesterday’s vegetable scraps. He scrambled away but …

Country Diary 84

THANKS TO THE GOOD weather, everything in the vegetable garden has been shooting up. I lifted the early potatoes. There were about ten kilos of them, which at Riverford prices are worth about ten pounds. Delicious, but is it really …

A Country Diary 83

MAY HAS come at last, the merry month of May, and I have bought a copy of Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, first published in the 16th century. Tusser himself was rather a comical and even sad …