By Br. Thomas Cole OSB, chief gardener
Farewell to a glorious and incredibly warm summer, and welcome to the bounteous and beneficial harvest of autumn! The waning of the daylight and the contraction of plant life in the polytunnels can give a slightly mournful air to this season, yet one cannot but praise God for the glorious bounty of the garden this past year. Also, of course, for the consoling colour of the fruits and leaves all about us.
Just to give the reader an idea of the garden’s produce this year, I start with the brightly painted apples, whose collection we are just completing. They are enough for cooking and eating until about April; plus 1,000 bottles of apple juice already made, and about another 1,500 bottles to come.
More humble, but still not lacking in colour, is our pumpkin harvest. Our standard Silver Crown Prince Pumpkin and dark green Hubbard Squashes have been accompanied by bright orange Hokkaido Squash as well as a few large, pale yellow Pacific Giant Pumpkin (one weighed over 40 kg). We now have enough for one meal per week, as the squash/pumpkin we grow store for a long time.
For the first time in my memory also we have had great numbers of large, attractive pears to eat … and in fact there are so many that 5 crates of them are being juiced with the apples. Blackcurrants, glorious raspberries and gooseberries have been very productive this year. Unfortunately many gooseberries were lost because we just didn’t have the manpower to harvest them. Also: the wasps came in swarms to devour them instead!
Inside the polytunnels there has been an abundant fecundity of climbing French beans (purple, green and gold), cucumbers, peppers, chard, beetroot, sweet corn, lettuce and, of course, tomatoes. On the last, we experimented successfully with a number of beef steak types: still being harvested and used raw and cooked as I write! They are: Feo de Rio Gordo (a Spanish variety “Ugly from the Wide River”), which had the largest - weighing in at 967 grams; Wentzel (of Canadian provenance); and the reliable Moskvich. Other well performing tomatoes were Amish Paste (a large American plum type for bottling, or even sandwich making), Czech Breast, Ukraine Purple, and our standard cherry tomato, Sungold.
Just to give the tomatoes company in the middle polytunnel, we included some early melons on the old strawberry rails dangling 1.3 metres in the air: a midget Cantaloupe and Petit Gris de Rennes. These were not as plentiful as the tomatoes, but still they produced enough for several pittances, and one hors d’oeuvre for a Solemnity. The scent of fresh Cantaloupe melons alone is worth the effort in growing them!
Thanks be to God, we have had and are still experiencing an abundant harvest: the freezers are near full and the storage shelves are groaning under the weight of apples and squash. Deo Gratias!
