Sunday June 27th

Day 69

It’s true what they say - if you eat your dinner half an hour after you picked it, pulled it from the earth, snapped it from its stem - it is like food from another dimension - from planet Life Force. It makes me feel delicious and happy in spite of tiredness leaking from every pore.

So this is what we harvested from the allotment tonight and ate at our patio table, the wood still warm from the day’s sun:

6 potatoes - new and thin skinned like pale pebbles

3 carrots - scrubbed, crunchy, sweet

a whole bulb of wet garlic - sliced horizontally, white fragrant flower circles

an onion - juicy, pungent with all its elegant outburst of long green shoots

a courgette - fat, firm and nearly black green

a bunch of Neroli cabbage - crinkly and springy.

This bounty graced our plates alongside crisp grilled fillets of salmon and sloshings of tangy lemon and parsley mayonnaise.

And on the centre of the table a spray of deep purple lavender to remind us that although we were in Provence yesterday, our holiday over, there’s still plenty of summer to come.