Episode #9: The One About The Lettuce

More tomatoes, peppercorns and cheese to finish.

I’m a day late this week, and this post is going out on Saturday morning rather than in the usual early Friday commute slot. Work got in the way. But better late than not.

This last week has been about the end of summer and the triumph and commemoration of one very particular lettuce.

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This week’s Plot Shot

I know I’m hanging on every last drop of sunshine, hoping that the last tomatoes will soak it up and ripen before The Dreaded Blight hits the plot. Our last variety of the season, ‘Black Moon’ are still hanging on, green to black to purple to deep red globes.

‘Black Moon’ tomatoes, which are taking their time. Source: Author

I keep saying “One more week…”, but next weekend will probably be their last on the plant, and I’ll have to tuck them into brown paper bags to ripen. Either that, or those with purple tops and stubbornly-green bottoms will be pickled in apple cider vinegar with allspice, yellow mustard seeds and blackcurrant leaves for crunch.

Plot work in progress

The plot is very end-of-season messy right now. The unexpected, self-seeded borage billowing out of beds, tomato plants going over and couch grass everywhere.

Plot 101, early October. Source: Author

All the rotation beds need clearing down, weeding and feeding before planting out winter brassicas. The Cavolo nero and sprouting broccoli seedlings in the greenhouse are rolling their eyes at me, I can tell.

Harvesting now

Even though the tomato plants are almost horizontal now, there are still odd fruit here and there, so a mix of varieties for fresh tomato sauce again¹. The freezer is bursting with frozen tomato sauce now.

Also ready this week were the Sichuan (or Sezchuan) peppercorns, pretty in their pink casings.

Sichuan peppercorns, Zanthoxylum simulans. Source: Author

We have Mark Diacono of Otter Farm to thank for these (he’s here as

Mark Diacono

, writing a food book, ‘Abundance’ in Substack instalments). Mark describes them as having “a punchy, earthy yet lemony flavour and an incredible aroma”. All that is true, along with the plants having vicious thorns, even worse than gooseberry bushes. The plants do not give up their babies easily.

Making and eating

Peppercorns successfully harvested without losing an eyeball, these are destined for a stir fry² along with our one lonely jalapeño chilli. The chilli was so sad that I didn’t bother adding it to the plot tally for the week³

Sichuan pink peppercorns. Source: Author

The lack of sun this year meant that our chilli plants didn’t really get going at all. They’ve hardly grown, even in the greenhouse, so I’ll try again at overwintering the plants as perennials. Any tips for how to do this?

E17 Local Hero

This week, I found myself wishing I had some lettuce to harvest from the plot to make this post hang together, narrative-wise, but all our lettuces were munched to stumps by the slugs earlier in the year, and I gave up with re-sowing in the face of the invertebrate onslaught. While I wasn’t looking, nature had other plans.

Mixed lettuces, sadly departed. Source: Author

Hence my E17 Local Hero shout out is to a very specific lettuce also now no longer with us, but which outlasted the term of Liz Truss, a former British Prime Minister, before being consigned to the compost bin (the lettuce, not Liz Truss). In the words of the Guardian newspaper the lettuce “proved itself less perishable than Truss’s premiership”. The power of plants, indeed.

Regular readers here will know how much the good folk of Walthamstow love a blue plaque, whether an official English Heritage one or a more subversive spoof version. We’ll put a plaque up for almost anything, as long as it has wry humour.

The lettuce plaque went up outside a local branch of Tesco on Forest Road, next to the Bell pub, and was widely reported in national and online media, much to the delight of Walthamstow folk.

Community of Practice

This week, to celebrate that the weather isn’t yet terrible, the allotment gang fired up the barbeque for a small wine and cheese gathering on Saturday evening and we practiced our field cooking skills. We don’t do this often, but it felt important to mark the end of the summer growing season, and celebrate the crops we have managed to grow in a challenging year.

Oil drum barbeque. Source: Author

I had completely forgotten how delicious baked camembert is, but there were four of them, all gorgeous goo laced with allotment-grown herbs in their pretty wooden boxes, and rosemary bread for dipping. There were unexpected onion bhajis too - not something I’d previously thought to dunk in camembert, but somehow it worked. French-Indian fusion food, anyone?

While in my cheese dreams later I reflected on how the folk I’ve met on the allotment have become close friends. We’re all really different people, from very different places, and our paths in life probably would not have crossed in any other way, but they’ve crept up on me. They’ve made allotment life special, and I’m grateful for these random humans coming into my life.

To finish, our Fox of the Week is one of the young vixens, Chips.

Chips is (we think) one of Vinnie and Big Ted’s cubs from last year, along with her little sister Scampi (I don’t pick the names!). Chips is just starting to gather up all her courage and come into the orchard. She’s getting braver, as she realises that the humans on this part of the site are the source of fresh raw chicken pieces, sausage rolls and cheese. Foxes really love cheese - strong cheddar for preference.

Chips being a Very Good Girl. Source: Author

Until next week, I’m off the cheese, given the amount of baked camembert I’ve eaten this week. Chips will clean up.

1. Fresh organic heritage tomatoes, 1.2 kilos, currently £8.50/kilo locally, £10.20.

2. Sichuan peppercorns, £3.50 for 25g, £1.

3. Total for this week, Episode 9, £11.20, total to date since Episode 5, £118.13. Five weeks’ produce, based on current supermarket or local farmers’ market prices.