Maybe we learned something after all

This year's borlotti beans last just three meals.

I wash the huge old platter from the last of these, and the pale shadowy winter-y light in the kitchen takes me back to that May twelve years ago when I first started the garden, and really committed myself, ourselves, to cooking and eating from it.

The idea of eating with your own seasons and weather doesn't prepare you for the reality of it, which is that it is very different to eating with someone else's seasons and weather. There are so many things in the mix - your diligence with sowing and weeding, water (too much or not enough), the weather, animal break ins, snail plagues, and all the rest. Seasonal cycles are so much shorter or so much longer; rarely are they 'just right'. Crops are earlier and later and bigger and smaller and there is disappointment and excitement; the cycle of abstinence and abundance, so pronounced, so keenly felt, knits itself over time into daily life. And it changes you.

At first you struggle with the feeling of wanting to hoard things because what if that's all we get? What if we don't get any next year? And what should have been eaten, relished, gets saved for special, that day that never comes.

Then there are the frustrations – the beautiful productive orchard that is wiped out by consecutive wet winters, the carrot crops lost to the dry summer, the figs stolen by birds, the eggs taken by crows, the huge crop of borlotti beans burnt off in the heatwave. Is it all worth it?

You keep waiting to find your rhythm. To learn the right way to do things.

But the secret is there isn't one.

Each year, each season, is different and brings its own struggles and rewards.

There is no right, wrong, good, bad despite what books and experts will tell you – there is only what works, for you, for your place…this time.

There is no predictability. There are no guarantees. No matter how hard you work or want it to be so.

And then you start to understand.

Why people who lived by the food they produced said grace before meals.

Why cultures that have kept their food local are so good at celebrating; the first harvest, the last harvest, the fleeting crop, the spring cheese, the autumn cheese, the glut…

Because once you stop fighting it, and just lean into all the ups and downs and hard days and easy days, you realise that the secret is a different kind of eating. Eating with a great big fat sense of thank you. Eating that celebrates the fact there is anything to eat at all, that delights at the miracle of self sown salad, the perfectly formed fennel bulb, the deliciousness to be found among 'weeds'.

This year's borlotti beans, so damaged by the heat wave, last just three meals.

We pod them over a bottle of wine, every bean a delight of bright pink and white, and set them to slow cook for hours, then overnight, at the back of the wood stove. Friends drop by, and we devour them. Great mountains of beans on huge platters, with slow cooked meat and bread and wine and not much conversation; we are enjoying them too much.

Now they are gone. Until next season, when we'll plant and tend and hope for the best. Maybe we'll get a bumper crop. Maybe we won't. But whatever we get, we'll be eating with gratitude and gusto.

And maybe we learned something after all.