Every year, as the bleak Ballarat winter started to falter, and with the appearance of the occasional warm, sunny day, my sister and I would start to get a bit antsy with each other. We would avoid gardening talk, and actually, in recent years it got to the stage that we would avoid visiting each other’s gardens. We still talked on the phone every week or so, but we didn’t mention our vegetable-gardening exploits, AT ALL!
Talk of dinner menus was on the cards. She told me about a recent triumph with a pork belly – “… the skin was about half an inch high, golden, salty and beautifully crackly…” she crowed! I countered with my recent cumquat marmalade success. I went into great detail – the nifty way I had developed to de-pip the fruit, the decision to spend the extra effort slicing the fruit into 2mm strips, instead of just halving them; steeping the fruit overnight before boiling, sugaring and bottling. I mentioned that I was having great success holding back on the quantities of sugar, without affecting the Set!
Of course, we both knew the elephant in the room, but neither was going to acknowledge it, or give it any air! The stand-off would continue for months – a dinner invitation might be tendered, but countered “Oh, bugger, we have Emily’s birthday party on that weekend, and we promised to fly up and share the occasion!”
I had put a lot of effort into bed preparation. The composting had been a labour of love, many hours encouraging the worms, nurturing and ensuring the green and brown quantities of the mix were balanced, and a little regular watering. To raise the temperature, I had thrown a tarp over the mix, and I had sweetened the pile with a couple of handfuls of blood and bone! I didn’t think that was cheating.
I had heard that Tibetan monks took a planting queue from the heavens, only ever planting two days after the first full moon in July. I had that day circled in my diary and was ready. The seeds were sitting in the warmth of the kitchen window sill for a couple of weeks. On the auspicious day, I was up early. It was bloody cold, a slight frost but with beany, and longjohns on, I was ready.
The seeds went into drills along my string-straight rows, each planted 10mm deep, about 25mm apart, and with the same distance between the rows. I mulched the bed heavily, believing that this early planting and the blanket of mulch would give me a useful head start. As I sat back with my cuppa, I acknowledged Tibetan expertise with a salute of my raised mug.
The winner would be declared in October, and I deliciously contemplated that dinner invitation. I would serve lamb loin chops with the first of my new broad beans in a light minty sauce, maybe sauced cauliflower, on the side. Surely, this year my broad beans would beat hers, hands down!