This year I have been letting plants go to seed. We will vacate the plots at the end of the growing season and I have refrained from clearing and cutting down everything (although we will of course hand them over, mown and tidy, to whoever comes next). So, for example, I have let the spinach run to seed in its permanent bed. Likewise the rocket, the flat-leaved parsley and the curly-leaved, and the most impressive of all - the parsnips high as hemlocks above my head. I shall be saving seeds from the latter in old prescription paper bags and taking them north.
What a pity that we cannot uproot our soft fruit. I shall be sad to leave my blackcurrant which is having another great year with berries like small black grapes; my redcurrant, also a fruitful bush; the strawberries, the raspberries, the tayberries all delicious in their time. I have struck a dessert gooseberry cutting for M.
I shall be making as much jam as I can from the damsons later this summer and eating or pressing our two varieties of black grapes. We will lay out our apples on the floor of our lounge-diner and finally harvest our winter squash. These hardy plants were a gift from a colleague who commuted from Peterborough.
Seeds are easier to transport than plants. We shall take one herb, a propagated golden oregano whose original was sourced from a garden centre in Poynton, Cheshire and one bush, a blueberry which requires ericaceous compost, a gift from H on the allotment. And then who knows what else our future garden holds? Our Mancunian pastor once observed, 'you always reap what you sow, but you don't always reap where you sow.' I wonder what we shall find.
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