Alright, just when I feeling all smug at my bountiful and varied courgette harvest, I read somewhere (Carol Klein I think) that they are the easiest veg going to grow, and that given the right conditions, can even grow to harvesting stage in one day. Well, I am still proud of mine. The round ones are wonderful hollowed out and stuffed. I used chopped hollowings-out, onions, garlic, celery sauted down with a cheesy breadcrumb topping. The yellow ones are even more prolific and very tasty. I am now getting very silly about them indeed, and spotted this homage to that beautiful, here described as ’sexy’ (can’t think why), veg (or are they fruit?!) Turn up the sound to full to appreciate the majesty of this very worthwhile produce (and don’t forget that the flowers are delicious too!)

I am so busy out gathering and processing the bounty from my kitchen garden right now, that I hardly have the time to write the blog. The garlic is up and drying and I have burgeoning onions, salads, peas and mangetout, radishes so plentiful they are going woody before I can eat them and summer cabbage, beautiful leafy and purple, hearting up nicely.

Soon there will be more space in the raised beds as I take up the broad beans etc, so I am planning the next planting, and some of the young brassicas I have been raising in my greenhouse will go in this weekend.

I do really love courgettes, including eating the flowers stuffed with a cheesy mixture and deep fried in batter. So I decided this year to grow several varieties. I must have forgotten just how prolific courgettes are!!! By now, I am picking young specimens which are popping up all over the place! Here’s a photo of my first sizeable harvest showing the variety. The round one is an Italian variety from Franchi seeds which are well worth a look for unusual varieties and big colourful packets of seeds, which are plentiful and reliable. The yellow courgette has a subtly different, meatier texture and taste, whilst the green one is a bush variety which produces smaller fruits - I have some of them growing in pots.

Ratatouille tonight I think…

Some people may have recently seen the BBC show on St Kilda, called Britain’s Lost World. St Kilda really captures the imagination, so I was very interested to see it. Whilst a lot of the content, particularly on the spectacular wildlife there, was absorbing viewing, I was disappointed at the very cursory  overview of the people themselves, the mysterious, mutated and tough-as-old boots St Kildans.

One thing that Kate Humble kept saying though was that she couldn’t believe that this stunningly beautiful, misty and remote place, was part of the British Isles. Having just got back from the Outer Edge of the Outer Hebrides, I can certainly relate to that. We were also living on an abandoned island, wild, raw and untamed, with souvenirs of people long gone littered about in old chapels, graves and croft buildings, half given up to the elements, now tumbling and enigmatic ruins.

To say where it is would be to give away a very treasured secret, so here is photo to prove that I was there. Its almost like a dream to me now.

I have often wondered what it is that gives London its soul - something Peter Ackroyd describes so well as the heartbeat of a great and ancient city, teeming with life and echoing with many centuries of history. Then I remember where I sense the heartbeat of London the most, and it is of course when I am near the great river, the sacred Tamesis, the River Thames.

Each of our great rivers has its own unique character and spirit - I live near to the confluence of the Thames and the Kennet - the latter dark, sensual and feminine, the Thames majestic, free-flowing, like a national artery, arching through the glorious landscape. I recall other rivers I have loved - the Ribble, gifted by the Goddess Brigantia; the Ouse, ancient trade route; the Avon, gentler, fecund, picturesque; the Severn, tide racing wild woman of dark mystery. Rivers are the heart and soul of our great cities - founded on their communication routes, acting as protective moats. Shrewsbury, for example, is almost encircled by the Severn, and what would Newcastle be without the Tyne, or Liverpool without the Mersey.

And our rivers bring such life to the land - coursing freely, they irrigate and feed the land, carrying energy to each part of it, blessing with libations. I am put in mind of the lyrics of a favourite band, Dragonsfly, in their song The River, “the river that moves between the mountains, rushes strong and free, giving life to all it leaves in its wake”. The song was inspired by “the mountains and the water and beautiful, simple life”.

A blessing on the waters. A blessing on the Land.

One of the highlights of my year is the Midsummer Gathering of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Gatherings are held twice a year in Glastonbury, around the solstices, but the summer assembly is the one with the big ‘draws’: meditations, fellowship, a glittering and colourful public ceremony on Glastonbury Tor, a great feast and entertainment from the finest Bards; and, for the brave and the new, a dawn ritual at Stonehenge. To end it all, there are words of wisdom from Philip Carr-Gomm, the Chosen Chief (not as sermon like as it sounds! Not at all!) After things wrap up on Sunday lunchtime we take our leave, re-inspired, invigorated by what we have shared together, ready to go out and live our life’s purpose.

The Great Spirit speaks through us and to us, and if we are open hearted, and therefore able to listen, guides us and teaches us. So today I have learned this - repeated over and over in lots of different ways, through different people and through the natural world:

The importance of Vision in relation to manifestation is an ongoing theme in this blog. Another theme - dreams don’t become real if we just sit around doing nothing - vision also needs execution.

But there is more! We need to be fully present in the world, living in the here and now, and with divine purpose. We cannot live ‘provisionally’ - we cannot put off being fully ourselves until we have put that last piece in the jigsaw puzzle. There is no ‘when I get there’ - we are already there - but having a vision too means that we are both being and becoming.

For a while now in our little house we have been talking about bees. Bees are wondrous things. They are symbolic of community and industry, pollinate crops and make delicious, sweet and unctuous honey which takes on the flavour of the flowers which they have fed on - in our garden here I think it might be veg flowers of all descriptions, combined with nasturtiums, geraniums, chives and thyme. There is something ancient, arcane and mysterious about bees - I feel compelled to learn more about keeping them and yet all that learning seems bound up in an oral tradition which has to find you - the bees have to choose you it seems.

Last year we met an old beekeeper at a wedding. The event was special in that it was a collaborative occasion where lots of guests had contributed something of value to make the whole - a bit like bees really - the champagne, the flowers, the pig for the hog roast, the cheese for the cheese board, the cake, the entertainment - and the mead! The mead was a gift from the bride’s father, the old beekeeper. And very delicious it was too.

The beekeeper told us that he learned the craft from another who had also donated his first swarm. When I met up with some Druid friends last week it seems that some of them are learning beecraft the same way. So I will need to commune with the bees on another level to ask for the help we need to get going!

Synchronicity being as it is, its no surprise that my current muse is the Oxford folk band Telling the Bees, who have just released a new album Untie the Wind, which I can’t wait to get my hands on after the teasing tastes of unctuousness I have sampled via the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids’ podcast. Their new website is sensitive and evocative - a visually beautiful honey-like piece of rustica, and they describe their work as redolent of a ‘darkly familiar England of rustic charm and savage beauty’. Tracks like Wood and The Worship of Trees strike such a chord in my beating Pagan heart with lines like ‘lately I have succumbed to a old atavistic urge - the worship of trees‘.

And ‘if you follow the bees and they will bring you the sun’ … come on, bees!

I am SO with my garden right now, as months of planning and loving tending are coming to manifestation. Things are coming up everywhere, the peas are flowering, the potatoes are burgeoning, the salads being picked, tomatoes potted on, courgettes and runner beans planted out, broad beans making pods and apples fruiting. Whilst I am still taking maximum organic preventative measures in the form of slug pubs, bird decoys and soap sprays, I am now resolved to the fact that the Earth, in the form of slugs, snails, birds and insects, will take something back. In the end it will be me!!

On matters of mortality, I am still gutted about Monty Don leaving Gardeners World, and have noticed that the BBC blog records similar dismay at Monty’s departure and concern for his health. I just read Alys Fowler’s (Berryfields’ Head Gardener) blog, and it moved me to tears. Just the words “Monty has gone. The swallows have moved into the tool shed’ were enough. ‘The Mighty ‘D” is such a touching and poignant posting.

Like a lot of Gardeners World fans, I think its time for a woman as national Head Gardener. No-one mentions Alys (though Carol gets a lot of votes), but it struck me that she is perfect for the job. She has Monty’s gentle affability, youth, pleasant good looks, is very well qualified and has a quirky little dog to entertain and beguile. I agree that Chris Beardshaw is also very easy on the eye, but I do think that the time is right for us gardening girls to strike out. So Alys - go girl!

Well - it seems that my ‘missing Monty Don’ postings were a bit prophetic. Its just been announced that he has suffered from a stroke and will be stepping down from the Gardener’s World Head Gardener job with the BBC. His shoes will be extremely difficult to fill, but I really wish him well for a very speedy recovery. What more can we say but get well soon, Monty.

I do have an addictive personality, I admit it, but usually its chocolate. Currently though, I have been bitten by the Facebook bug.

When I first got my profile set up a few months ago, I was bemused by it - my kids thought I was spying on them and got all twitchy, my much younger siblings removed my comments from their photos and their ‘walls’ - clearly I was way too old, uncool and totally weird to be associated with. For a while I thought I was the oldest person on Facebook, then I discovered a load of old(ish) Druids that I know on there as well, and I was away (I really can’t see the point of having ‘friends’ that I don’t even know)!

So now I am completely drawn into all the superpoking, hugging, throwing strawberries at, feeling the force with, being green with and having largely inane conversations with people who I know to be spiritual and erudite, feeling all included and fuzzy when I get sent friend hugs and karma etc. Sending love hearts to my other half who is sitting with his laptop in the same room. What’s more, doing extremely silly online quizzes and finding out what my aura colour is, sending people ‘gifts’ which are actually just little pictures of cute bunnies etc and feeling all satisfied about it. How extremely odd.

Facebooking is the second most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and only ranked lower than the ipod! You can believe it - and there are 70 million users worldwide taking part for hours daily in this extremely addictive displacement activity.

Employers disapprove of it, marketeers love it for all that data  - Facebook Inc have to make their money somehow! I make sure that my profile is only accessible to my friends and am careful about privacy. I worry that my kids have everything there for all to see, including pouting pictures of overt self absorbed behaviour - you know the thing.

My innate caution and cynicism is very aroused by Facebook - and yet I can’t help myself. Back to my ‘notifications’…

Okay, now that I am on this ‘descriptive writing about Monty Don’ trip, I am finding all sorts of waxing lyricals about him. He really captures the imagination, doesn’t he - that’s because there is something of the Earth about him. After I posted last night’s whimsy, Carol announced that Monty is having a break - hope he is okay, bless him. I will look forward to seeing him back on our screens soon!

Here’s an extract from an interview he did with Jane Wheatley in the Times, who has also cottoned on to that Hardy connection - we English love our Wessexness:

The tall, burly man kneeling in a potato patch rubbing friable soil through his fingers as if he were making pastry is terribly good-looking in a Lawrentian sort of way — or Thomas Hardyish, possibly; anyway you wouldn’t shoo him out of your kitchen garden if you came across him there. “You want to earth up your spuds,” he says to the camera hovering over his head on the end of a long jib. “Keep them protected till frosts are over.” He has curly hair, sleepy eyes and dirt under his fingernails; his dandyish costume ­ corduroy trousers, button braces, leather jerkin — has just a sufficient patina of use about it to escape parody. This, we think, is evolved nurturing man, anchored to the land, taking the long view while the rest of us are tossed around like jetsam.

I love the bit about being anchored in the land - that is such a good, good thought, and reminds me how important groundedness is - we need groundedness when we all at sea with the world. Thank goodness for Monty…