Hedvig, The Blog

A few years ago I read a book called ‘Small lemons yellow’, an evocative book about Sweden, cooking and relationships.  It has sort of stuck with me.  Maybe because I don’t read that many books in Swedish, more likely because of the subject matter.  The book re-emerged from my memories this morning, as I was admiring the three lemons that Tristan picked from our tree last night.

My admiration is undoubtedly fuelled from following a local diet, and citrus at this time of year seems like an incredible bundle of much-needed vitamin C and stored sunlight. I can understand why getting a clementine in your stocking at Christmas was so special, or why, as a young child, my mother asked for a crate of clementines for Christmas, because she didn’t like to be told off for eating more than her fair share.

I bought Tristan the tree as a moving in present in August, and it already had a few small green lemons, and now they are fully formed and ripened.  It has been an interesting to watch in amazement as new growth shoots up, hand pollinate the new flowers and learn many of aspects of growing lemons in England including when to harvest them. Last week Tristan and I were debating just the latter and we decided not to do it just then (when you realise that it takes around 1o months for lemons to ripen, you want to ensure you pick them at the right time).

The following morning I saw the photo on my desk in a different way.  It is a close-up of crates of lemons that I helped sort and pack when I was WWOOFing in Sicily in 2008.  I have it up as a reminder of the relaxed efficiency of Peppe’s place, the amazing sandwiches we munched in the lemon grove, the smell of the citrus flowers in the morning, and the Moro oranges that we ravished during the thought-provoking pruning of the olive grove.  All the lemons in the photo that Peppe and Davide had harvested were the same colouring as ours, so I knew it was fine to pick them.

Yesterday, Ian came over to see the new flat and saw the lemons.  He suggested lemon sorbet.  I also like the sound of Meyer Lemon Marmalade.  But I think sorbet will win out.

It is that time of year again: seed time.  This weekend marks the beginning of this years seed sowing.  I spent Saturday at Stepping Stones Farm, in Stepney, preparing for a series of workshops that I am going to be delivering with a friend (Robin).  I also met the wonderful Alex, who we are going to be working with more and more this summer.   We had some volunteers around and a few visitors, so we did a bit of a dry run and taught them seed sowing.  It is still quite early on in the season, so we started off with broad beans, Super Aquadulce, to be precise.

You may know already that I am a great lover of broad beans, and was very excited last year to get great big bunches of them in my veg box.  This year it is more exciting because I will be growing them myself as well.  Broad beans are sown during the cold months: either during the autumn or spring (depending on the variety).  They are part of the legume family and so fix nitrogen, which is a super useful compound that plants need to grow.  Bees also love the flowers.  Are you convinced yet that it’s a winner?  Hope so.

I went to Seedy Sunday (more on that later) yesterday and picked up some biodynamic Witkiem broad beans.  These are renown as being tasty, productive and hardy.   So I am going to experiment, sowing the beans at three different times of the month and see which ones do better.  I will update you on the progress.