As a young child, I sat through school assemblies where September meant singing the hymn ‘Harvest Home’. Girl Guides’ church parades involved bringing something to add to the pile of harvest ‘stuff’ at the altar – the lucky kids with a fruit tree in the back yard brought an apple, some of the parents took the chance to offload one of their marrows and my mother grabbed a tin of beans out of the cupboard to give me something to offer. I would love to know what the poor and needy of the parish made of being given a marrow, a tin of Heinz and an apple for dessert. It was a time when a real meal meant scrag end of meat, accompanied by a few vegetables boiled to death. Should have taken them one of the mice that used to run across my pillow occasionally (except that I wasn’t that bothered by them, and wouldn’t have sent them to roast in a stranger’s oven)

These days, I have a real veg plot. Five metres by eight and an overspill patch next to the greenhouse, I grow enough food to keep us in vegetables for about a third of the year and as I don’t eat meat, that means I can take about a third of my meals from our back garden. I’ve even had some small success with lentils, and the plants self-seeded enough to keep themselves going for the last four years.

Autumn really means harvest to me these days, in a way that an east London childhood failed to register the season. I buy my seeds from the Real Seeds company, based in Wales but with connections across the world. The seeds they sell grow heritage varieties designed for particular conditions; tolerant of poor soil, short summers, cold weather. We got through the first lockdown on the canned and dried stuff we’d bought to get us through recuperating from surgeries, and for fresh vegetables we relied on what came up in the garden – Real Seeds kale that had self-seeded, potatoes that came up in the compost heap, over-wintering onions and field garlic.

The thing about Real Seeds is that they sell seeds for plants that have been rescued from dying out. The commercial seed companies can offer only the plants that are so mass-produced that they can guarantee that the variety they sell will be exactly the variety and not cross bred – that means that there’s a small pool of candidates for each type of fruit or vegetable. Real Seeds sells under a ‘club’ type licence, with each gardener agreeing to grow and pass on the seeds from their plant if they can.

Each plant has a story. Real Seeds tell of a man who graded seeds for a commercial seed company and (as a hobby) bred plants that thrived in his garden and were excellent for taste, cold-hardiness, productivity. He saved, labelled and graded the seeds he collected. When he died, his family cleared his house and shed, throwing away those bins of seeds. The neighbours hopped over the garden fence after the family had gone, collected all the seed they could from his vegetable patch and grew those varieties on, many of them passing on the seeds to Real Seeds later. An elderly lady passed on the seeds of the kale that survived Sutherland winters to a younger relative, who in turn passed them on to Real Seeds (named Sutherland Kale, I have seen it shrivelled by snow in my own garden and returning to full health ten days later). Real Seeds’ message to their customers is clear; buy our seed to save the variety – save seed from it and pass it on free of cost or licence.

Saving seed is a great intellectual challenge. I love veg. I love kale in a stew, a soup or a homity pie – home-grown peas in a paella – getting out the last of the stored onions and potatoes in March for a meal. But. It takes planning in the growing. All the brassicas cross-breed like Hollywood superstars, so if you want a pure-bred Sutherland kale you need to make sure that there’s no other kale, chard, broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower running to seed within half a mile. Carrot cross-breeds with other carrot and carrot ancestors – so pull up every scrap of Queen Anne’s Lace growing in your garden, neighbour’s garden and on the roadside nearby. Cucumbers cross with other cukes, as do chillies and sweet peppers and onions and garlic. Anyone remember the accidental wild courgette crosses that produced the bitter (and poisonous) courgettes in 2021? Affected Mr Fothergill’s, Thompson and Morgan and Suttons, so that they had to admit that they sourced their seeds from the same commercial grower.

I have grown only Gerghana cucumbers this year, as I do like them better than the other kinds. Melons, I grew fifteen plants – so my Bishop melon might not be pure Bishop Gris de Rennes, and my Eden Gem might have some Collective Farm Woman in it’s ancestry. I grew King o’ the North peppers alongside my Californian Wonders, so I may have a cross there. The Californian Wonder peppers were fabulous – blocky, large, lime green and thick-walled – and I will definitely grow them again.

What I have been doing for the past week or so is saving the seeds I want to grow next year in huge quantities. Some of these will not grow seedlings – some will sprout but not survive – and some of the people in my village are getting keen on growing their own plants, so I hope I can give away some packets of seeds locally and to friends.

Melons, tomatoes and cucumber seeds are the same – scoop out the jelly, put them into a jar of water, shake, pour off the water and change it every day. Gradually loosen the seeds from the jelly until there’s nothing in the jar but clean water and seeds. Remove all the seeds that float, pour the rest of the water through a strainer and tip the seeds onto kitchen paper to dry. Dry thoroughly. I’ve had seeds rot and grow mould in the packet, so these days I dry them for several days before I put them into a paper packet and label them up. Variety and date collected. It works. All my cukes this year came from seeds collected in 2021. Wicked Witch chillies come from seeds collected from a plant I bought in 2015 (and their descendants). Pepper seeds are easy – scoop them off the piece in the cap of the pepper, sweet or chilli. Don’t bother with supermarket peppers, they’ll all be F1 types and won’t breed true. Buy a pack of heritage variety seeds, treat the plants nice and never buy seeds again.

On top of that, I’ve been helping to process the quinces that all decided to drop at once, the extra abundance of aubergines from my neighbour’s plants and the crab apple crop.

That’s without the cider…

We had 24 hours to spare before picking up our cats from the cattery, and my original thought – a night’s stargazing in Northumberland’s dark sky reserve – was scuppered by the almost-full moon. Instead, we went to Ironbridge.

I’ve been there in July of this year, but again, himself was left behind to look after the cats while I had fun. As a retired engineer, he would have loved to go in my place (though he would have snoozed through the lectures on romantic novel techniques). What else could I do but take him there as a tourist?

We agreed that as this was my second visit to Ironbridge (although just a few hours on a Saturday too hot to walk far), that he would have first pick of which museum to go to. He chose the Museum of Iron at Coalbrookdale, and I asked for a trip to the Clay Pipe factory at Broseley. On paper, these were just over a mile apart, and roughly a mile from the accommodation we were staying at. I had no idea at the time that Coalbrookdale would choose to throw a small party in the form of a Heritage Day, with free admission and a display of steam engines and classic cars – nor that Broseley Pipe Works would close for the season the weekend before.

We arrived at three on Friday afternoon after a horrible journey down the M6, settled in and set off to see the Iron Bridge. The first part of the journey was all up… then as much down… and then we reached The Hill Top Paper Shop. Bad sign. It was steeply downhill from there. One mile underfoot on flat ground takes us about twenty minutes at an easy pace – up and down took us longer, and we felt the after-effects of a few days’ stiff hillwalking.

A meal and a pint in the Tontine Hotel and a wander over the bridge gave us the oomph to set off back uphill, but not before we spotted a familar little warrior;

We climbed back up the hill faster than we thought we could, and even had enuff puff to argue over which route was quicker – down this street and turn right, or down the next street and turn left. As soon as he set off down his chosen street, I started to run down mine, hoping to arrive at the meeting point early and pretend my route was better. Which would have worked if I hadn’t had to get the camera out for this;

The next day, we looked at the route we’d have to take on foot and saw a lot of up, a lot of down, and much of it along fast roads with no footpath. We drove, to save our feet for the museum. Lucky we did. The Museum of Iron is on three floors, and took us two hours to go through the lot. One of the items on exhibition was a small kitchen range. I remembered our old neighbour from Stratford telling my parents that when the woman who bought our (rented) house from the landlord stripped out the walls of my aunt’s kitchen, she found a Victorian range cooker boarded up in an alcove. I wonder now if it was a Coalbrookdale range.

Outside, we had a meal at the cafe on site, then went to explore Enginuity, a museum for children (half-expecting to be turned away). It was fun, and there were other adults there pressing buttons and peering at the exhibits whirring around (though I think we were the only ones unaccompanied by children). After that, we went out to let the retired engineer ogle the steam engines and the classic Landrover displayed outside, before going in to the exhibit of the archives, curated by Georgina Grant. Where Oliver Meeson, clay pipe maker, had a home-made rig set up and was making clay pipes in the traditional way.

With an hour to go before all the museums in the gorge closed, it was obvious we weren’t likely to see the china or the tile museum on this trip. We went around the furnace at the north end of the site, where Suzanne Spicer took us for a tour of the furnace and explained the history, the difficulties of running a factory that depended on a certain river level and how the iron for the bridge was probably made as pigs here and transported down to the site to be cast.

We left at half past four and made our way back for a mug of tea and to pack the car. We left at 7pm, and got home at 9.30, ready for a good sleep before retrieving the cats the following morning and getting back to our normal lives.

Back in March, I reported on a trip to Melrose in Scotland. The intention then was to let himself see where I’d been with my OU writers’ group, and to finish a long-held ambition to climb the Eildon hill where Thomas the Rhymer was said to have followed the Queen of Elfland before being taken into the land of Faerie for seven years. I’d stood at the foot of the hills and looked up to the summits in the early 90’s, but hadn’t had the time to climb it. Back in March, the weather closed in almost as soon as we reached the halfway point and we retreated out of caution.

The plan was to get fitter and return in September for more than a couple of days, get up the hill and back before the weather had time to spoil the party. Two out of three ain’t bad. We arrived in Melrose on Monday, slogging through a stripe of rain to get there in bright sunshine, and made an attempt on the hill on Tuesday.

It’s sensible to plan for any serious hillwalking expedition. We had a map, a compass, food and drink, strong walking boots, waterproofs, gloves and a fleece over a lightweight T-shirt. By the time we got to the gate up to the start of the hills, fleece and waterproofs were weighing down the rucksack and didn’t go back on until long after we arrived back at the accommodation.

We took the route up through the Melrose Golf Course (yes, it’s allowed – stick to the road and watch out for golf balls for the first 440 yards), past the log cabins for hire and up St Cuthbert’s Way to the saddle between the two hills. This involves a long hike up, a section going down and then a climb up to either North Hill or Mid Hill. North Hill boasts the attraction of being the site of a Roman signal station and fort; Mid Hill was, I think, the hill that True Thomas climbed. The difference in height is minor – 404 metres to the cairn at the top of North Hill, 422 metres to the top of Mid Hill – but the route is very different. The official path to the top of North Hill is long, slow and alternates between mildly steep and fairly gentle slope, while the only route up Mid Hill from the saddle is… vertical.

We did it on our first day in Melrose – got to the top of Eildon North Hill and sat enjoying the views. I should have brought suncream and midge repellent, but hey. We chose North Hill as there were enough people on Mid Hill that day to stage a rugby match with substitutes, while just a few people were heading for North Hill. We don’t like crowds at all.

There were three people at the top when we arrived, all sitting quietly and admiring the view, so we patted the cairn to say we’d arrived and went to sit apart from them. Unpacked the food and drink and talked quietly.

We set off down the eastern slope of North Hill. Steep, but stone slabs have been laid in steps all the way down to about 200 metres from the base of the hill. We were both finding our knees creaking from the strain of going downhill, and by the time we reached the road we were both wobbly. Logical thing then is to go for a pint…

The next day was a day of holiday rest. Meaning, no strenuous hill climbing, but there’s sights to be seen and the town’s just a mile from where we’re staying. We got the chance to see the grounds of Melrose Abbey, and the chainbridge over the Tweed close up, and we walked back to the accommodation from there. So, not really a rest, but no considerable uphill walking.

The acid test was Thursday. Having left the most fearsome of the hills till now, we were hoping the weather (and our fitness) would hold up. We set off from Bowden Reservoir this time, for variety, and got as far as the path around the flank of the Mid Hill before I realised that my worst enemy was my mind.

I’m afraid of heights. Afraid to screaming at times. I love the new perspective I get from the top of a church tower or the ridge of my own house roof, but the sheer terror of getting there and getting back down means it takes me a while to appreciate it. I was fine climbing to the path and looking back down the slope to the reservoir. Fine walking around the flank through the stunted pines. It was when his feet began to slip sideways on the narrow path ahead of me – and the path is barely wide enough to put two feet side by side – that I thought of how easy it would be to slip on the gravel. When the crow flying past the hill fifty feet below us let out a ‘Yahhh! Yahh!’ I realised there was a steep slope a few inches to my left with nothing to stop me bouncing fifty metres or more to the level of the water. After that, it was all I could imagine. Falling.

Bless him, we turned back straight away. He knows that I can stand spiders, mice, wasps flying around the inside of my crash helmet while I’m driving and riding a motorcycle through fast urban traffic, but heights defeat me. We went back to the crossroads where the path headed back down and discussed.

Instead of going back down – we went east, between the Little Hill and Mid Hill. The path went down, through the woods, with Mid Hill rising up bare and high above us. It was very like the scene in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ where Frodo tells the other hobbits to ‘Get off the road!’ just before the Black Riders clop past. But sunlit. The path went up and met St Cuthbert’s Way and from there we turned uphill to the summit of the saddle between North and Mid Hills.

Here we met another walker, a lady who advised us to be very careful; that the North Hill was lovely to walk on, while the Mid Hill was scary and difficult. The scree path was steep and loose underfoot, she warned. We parted ways, and I got an entire fifty yards before realising that the slope and the potential fall were just not going to let me get up the hill. Legs and lungs were willing, but the mind was cowering under a blanket and whimpering.

There is only one official route up. The topmost 150 metres of North Hill is a bare, scrubby, steep cap with a small summit. Going up is face to the gravel; coming down, I’d have to face the gravel, edge down on all fours and hope not to skid and tumble. Better to acknowledge that I am just not able to enjoy any experience that involves heights, sheer drops and steep slopes.

On the way back, it was a good walk. We were tempted to climb Little Hill, the only truly volcanic outburst in the set, and ate lunch looking south along the flank of Wester Hill and over the plains and towns stretching back to Carter Bar and Northumberland.

I don’t think I will ever defeat my fear of heights enough to climb steep and gravelly hills or exposed castle battlements just for enjoyment. The only other reason would be to see the view, or to tick off an experience alongside all the others that day.

I’m content. I would love to climb Wester Hill one day, and walk more of St Cuthbert’s Way, but it was a successful visit.

I may have some followers who don’t agree with the idea of monarchy, but I do. It isn’t the people involved, but the system. I knew I would outlive Queen Elizabeth the Second (barring serious health problems or accidents) but yesterday’s news of the Queen’s death was a shaker.

My passport, the notes in my wallet, the coins in our change mug and the stamps in our drawer all have the Queen’s name or the Queen’s head on them – getting used to having a king will be a hitch. Especially as every generation down to Prince George has the kind of skeletons in their cupboards that the true traditionalists won’t accept.

I will miss having Queen Elizabeth as the head of state. Interesting times ahead.

I’ve been following Dot Productions like a stalker for the last few years. They formed in 2008 and tend to have five actors, a producer and a wide view of what they want to perform. Three years ago, we saw Sense and Sensibility – last year, we saw their adaptation of Jane Eyre. Both were adapted from novel to play form beautifully by Pat Bush, who played parts in both productions; she was Robert Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, which fitted so well with Austen’s vision of the foppish Robert that I wonder how nobody else has thought of it.

Yesterday’s treat was ‘Pygmalion’. I bought tickets because it was in Coggeshall Barn, a lovely setting – because Himself had no idea what Pygmalion was about (even My Fair Lady struck no note of recognition there) and because it was Dot Productions. Like the Propellor Company, everything they do is worth going to see.

We took better seats this time. Last time we went to Coggeshall, we took our lawn chairs and realised only later that the high backs that made them so comfortable also made it impossible for the rows behind to see anything on the stage. This time, I’d bought some light folding chairs that had backs low enough to see over. My bad. The seat part was just tall enough that the people who settled behind us (with low-slung seats) muttered to each other about swapping places at the interval. We were just tall enough to see over the seats in front. It’s a lottery.

Again, there were five actors – a different five, but the same Dot magic. I have to say that the subject grated on us, with the snooty Henry Higgins able to tell the Cockney flower seller to ‘Sit down and shut up!’ But by the end, Henry’s mother tells him outright that he’s a fool and Eliza finds her way out from under his control.

This is loud, boisterous and funny, and although we left thinking that we’d just seen an unpleasant piece of Edwardian snobbery, we’ve been thinking it over and seen how the end of the play leaves Eliza and Henry. She was clear thinking, willing to pay for the education that would open a world to her. Henry was sneering at her low origins and what he saw as her inability to put any delicate substance into her new genteel speech, but it was Henry who was called out for his swearing and callous attitude, while Eliza’s dignity drew praise from his mother and friend.

Dot Productions plays are always fun, and they bring some unusual works to the theatre. They’re still touring ‘Pygmalion’; you’ve missed Coggeshall, but watch out for them at Brome, Sudbury, Swindon, Brentwood, Bedford, Richmond and Doncaster.

It’s been too hot to sit outside beyond 10am here through much of August, let alone work. There’s no pleasure in barefoot gardening when the grassy areas are worn down to straw and bare earth, especially as we have a cedar tree that sheds dead needles all year round (and needles is the word for it – tough, sharp, driving into the skin when I tread on them). I have very tough skin on my feet but the cedar needles go straight through the hard outer layer and stick upright, driving further in with every step.

It rained elsewhere in Suffolk and Essex in mid-August – flooded a couple of businesses three miles away, briefly flooded the streets of towns within ten miles of us – but nothing here till Wednesday. On Wednesday, it rained heavily all day, big hefty blobs of rain and some thunder too. The pond is now full to within a couple of inches from the top, the fish are coming to the surface and it’s cool enough to work outside.

The first job I tackled after the weather cooled was to dig up the potatoes. I tried following advice this year, not planting too many or too close together, planted in long trenches and earthed up every week. It’s worked. Digging them up this afternoon was like digging in potato mines – they were packed together in great clumps, large potatoes stacked one on top of another.

There’s more yet to do, but first I’ll need to wash these and store them. In theory, these are stored in a clamp – the potatoes covered with straw and earth or sand packed around the straw. Basically, bury them again. Which sounds daft – why not leave them in the ground where they grew? – until you look closely at the soil they grew in. Tiny thin worms. Possibly eelworms. Not taking any chances. Next year, the potatoes will be planted in a different row, avoiding the eelworms and slugs that have been drawn to this year’s crop.

Clipping the spare shoots off the cucumber vines is a constant job. Cucumber and melon vines grow side-shoots from the joint between main stem and leaf, exactly as tomato plants do, and it’s best to remove those as soon as they form. I have had the experience of letting those just grow, and not being able to get into the polytunnel without treading on vines sprawling across the path. We spent two days that year cutting back those shoots, disappearing into thickets of vines snaking across the floor and taking barrow-loads of vine cuttings away to be dumped. These days I get in there twice a week to prune back the sideshoots and tie up the new growth to the ropes. Each plant has a thick twine tied to the crop bars seven feet off the floor to grow up (you can just see it in the photo, with knots in it for the ties to grip and not slide down like Nora Batty’s tights).

I’ve had an interesting exchange with the Real Seeds this week. Almost all of the seeds I plant are bought through this company. They supply seeds of rare and heritage plants – those plants that didn’t make it into the commercial seed catalogues when the regulations tightened. There are plants in their catalogue that were developed to withstand Siberian winters, to grow six foot tall cabbage ‘trees’ and to make onion plants walk across the veg plot. There’s instructions on their website on saving seeds from the plants you grow from the seeds you buy from them, so that (in theory) you buy a packet of seed from them once, treat them well, and have seed for that plant for the rest of your life. I haven’t made it work yet, but I have had some success – parsnip doesn’t just make seed, it spreads it all around and lets an army of parsnips spring up next year. Cucumbers, though…

In 2021, Real Seeds stated that they were not going to stock Gerghana seed until 2025. Gerghana is my favourite cucumber (alongside Tamra) – straight, green, sweet and with small soft seeds. I was running out of Gerghana seeds then – just six left, and not all of them survive to ‘adult’ status. So I did what Real Seed recommend and planted only Gerghana cucumbers in the tunnel last year, so that every cucumber plant was pollinated by Gerghanas and every seed was of pure Gerghana stock. I took five cucumbers at the end of the season and followed instructions, scooping out the core and soaking it in a jar of water, shaking it and renewing the water every few days until all the jelly had been flushed away. Then I removed all the seeds that floated, laid the rest out to dry on paper for a week and poured them into seed packets.

This is what I used for the cucumber plants this year. I was really proud of myself until I tasted one. Bitter. Nothing like last year’s crop. If I picked a young cucumber, it tasted sweet – but only on first picking. Cut the cucumber and come back to it a few hours later, and that bitter taste was there. What’s worse, cucumbers are curcubaticeae – members of the squash / gourd / courgette family. Anyone remember the bitter courgettes grown from seed last year? The ones that caused sickness, stomach cramps and hospital stays? That was down to the parent plants being cross pollinated by wild courgette plants growing near their field. Wild cucumbers in Essex… there’s a story in that.

I asked Real Seeds for their advice. Within 24 hours, they came back to me with a very kind and informative email. Apparently, it’s more likely to be the result of large variations in temperature or water stress – and we have had temperatures between 49 degrees C and 20 degrees C in the tunnel this year, and the soil has dried out sometimes despite being well watered every evening. So it’s likely. They advised me to take off all the mature fruits, let the younger fruits develop in these cooler temperatures and go on picking the fruit for use when it’s small – using the lot in one go, as it does develop a bitter taste after being cut.

Well, as South Park would say, I learned something today. How to grow sweet cucumbers in exceptionally hot weather. That I did do the seed-saving right last year, and I can go on using those seeds. And that small seed companies are the absolute best. Kate’s email to me was like a good friend’s advice to a less experienced gardener – encouraging, reassuring and informative. Real Seeds Company for all the seeds I buy from now on.