From Bitter, Comes Forth Sweet.

From Bitter, Comes Forth Sweet.

We had a strange Christmas, what with 24/7 on-call hospital duty for over a week, and with six week’s treatment on the table for afters, apropos a very near-miss. Our son, who has special needs and had to endure drips, long-lines, ECG’s, scans and an operation, following a spider bite of all things, was discharged just in time for my wife and daughter to dig the tree out from the loft, decorate it, and collect the turkey from the local butcher’s, whilst I made batches of soup with herbs and veg from the garden, to go with warm, fresh-baked bread; all between seemingly endless OPD visits for IV’s and wound checks. What had been days on end of intense pain and high drama on the wards, watching him suffer bravely with never a word of complaint, turned into a most blessed time of celebration, of real peace and goodwill to all men, once the 25th came round and we realised that we were, at long last, winning the battle. Never has a turkey tasted so good.

Above: Carrots, leeks, parsnips, Charlotte ‘new’ potatoes, onions and fresh herbs from the garden, on Christmas Day. A meal fit for a king. Close call, because the parsnips and carrots were frozen solid in the ground, the evening before the main event. Oops!

The garden’s a mess, though; there’s no other word for it. Always is, at this time of the year; ‘carrot-and-stick’ syndrome. Want the food? Get cracking, then!

The days are slowly getting longer.

So, I bit the bullet yesterday, after the snow melted, and emptied the wormery of all of its high-octane contents, twelve long months’ worth of consolidated worm excrement, and extremely heavy with it. That’s twenty bucketful’s in all, carried up two flights of steps to the plot. But, what may seem like a thankless task, on the face of it, and certainly halfway through, I was beginning to question my sanity, slip-sliding away in the mud, becomes unavoidable, once the New Year kicks in and frosts become the order of the day, under clear blue, cloudless skies. For, with the cold snaps typical of January, the worms’ metabolism grinds to a complete halt, the bin overtops and veg trimmings from our roasts, soups and casseroles start to accumulate outside the kitchen door, in vast amounts. It’s the easiest place to put them. I suppose that’s good. They don’t attract vermin and, once emptied, the wormery needs recharging with a fresh batch of greens, in order to feed the two buckets-worth, heaving with worms, that I skimmed from the top and set aside to carry on the task of turning waste into gold, in 2026. And they do, year in, year out. Thirty now and counting. If you don’t have a wormery, I’d consider starting one. They’re simple to set up and easy to maintain. Only my 50/50 manure/leaf-mould mix comes anywhere close, when it comes to boosting soil fertility and yields. And it’s completely free.

Speaking of leaf-mould, the first thing I did, when I got an hour off ward duty, in December, was to hike over to the woods, just for the fun of it, and collect four more barrowful’s of leaf-litter to mix with an equivalent amount of horse manure from the stables, for the coming year and, probably, a fair chunk of the next. It’s hard work, but the air was clean, after a storm, and nobody else was about. Just me, the sunshine and my private thoughts; so, no echo chambers to contend with (I discovered in hospital that I’m going very deaf), and no conversations explaining our extended absence. It proved to be the best therapy; me, the Greylag geese, an egret, a gold-crest and a couple of deer. Not so much food for thought, as thought for food; which was an interesting twist, because for what seemed like eons, food was the last thing on the list of things to do. Suddenly, we wanted to eat. In fact, I was ravenous!

Above: Turkey soup, made with the bones, a garlic clove, onions, herbs, baby leeks and a few good-sized carrots. A dash of full-cream milk, half a tin of sweetcorn and a stock-pot, it was as sweet as a nut and completely different to broth made from a 5lb chicken. The chicken broth is better still, by far. It’s full-bodied and sets to a jelly.

Garden Tipping Point.

It’s fair to say, the last ten years ,of the forty that I’ve been gardening, have been particularly pivotal, with crops and yields improving incrementally, every single season. Not because I’ve got green fingers. I haven’t. Each has bettered the one before, in ways that I could not possibly have imagined; and despite regular failures (we all have them), it’s been a consummation of a singular willingness to make changes, sometimes on a hunch, more often because of a lead from my betters. I’ve had some good mentors, along the way, when it’s mattered the most. I’m a very good copycat. Stalwarts on the local allotments, American off-grid pragmatists, whose annual food supply is critical to survival and, of course, John Seymour and his book “The Self-Sufficient Gardener” have all helped carry the torch of discovery, something I really relish. I watch and learn. Some call it ‘good husbandry’. I’d call it ‘incentivised learning’.

Above: After Christmas, eating can become a bit of a chore; but this roast belly pork, with my trimmings, hit the mark. It was fantastic. A perfect foil to turkey dinners.

Above: Another good example of ‘incentivised discovery’: fore-rib of beef with roast buttered parsnips for New Year’s Day. These Gladiator parsnips were sown as an afterthought in one of my cold-frames, last year. Two 4’ rows have fed us, nicely., since July. Cored and parboiled, they’re unbelievably sweet and tender; finished in the oven.

Above: I know the soil in my cold-frames is ~3’ deep, end-to-end. I built them from the ground up. However, I didn’t expect the parsnips to grow quite this big. Getting them out of the ground is a mammoth task. This one specimen weighed in at 2.75lb.

Above: The carrots, too, have really shone this season. This is an Autumn King, sown in leaf-mould in a cold-frame in July, when the beetroot were lifted for pickling. Winter carrots are naturally particularly sweet; and their flavour is like nothing else, I know of. Carrots, like onions and herbs, have become a mainstay in our kitchen.

Food for thought.

The long and the short of it: During our hour of trial, and it was a trial, watching our son suffering so much, whilst the rest of the village was partying and winding down for Christmas festivities, we had a garden to fall back on and help sustain us, when food, otherwise, would have stuck in our craw. We didn’t want to eat; but we also desperately needed to, to fuel the fight. Stress consumes vast amounts of energy. Onions and carrots, with herbs and tender leeks for soups, when soups and fresh bread and butter were the only things we could stomach, really helped to save the day, ferried to the hospital in flasks on a daily basis; and carrots, leeks, parsnips and ‘new’ potatoes for roasts and stews, when our son had finally turned the corner and was discharged from the ward into community care, and we could all breath a big sigh of relief and face a proper dinner, made for real celebration. It’s not a gimmick. Having that food-source right on our doorstep is key. No need to go shopping; no need to expend time or energy you don’t have.

Lion-hearted.

Finally, it would be very remiss of me not to mention the love and devotion that my wife and daughter showed, throughout our son’s ordeal. My wife stayed by his bed the whole week, day and night, through thick and thin. She refused to leave his side and was his comforter and advocate; necessary, believe me, in an NHS tending towards total chaos. No fault of the doctors and nurses. They were great; but two computer systems in use and at variance with one another, always ensuring that essential drug regimes were not passed down the line from one department to the next, and appointments made between departments vanishing into the ether, the number of times we turned up at our appointed venue and time, only to be told, “You’re not in the system”. That’s abysmal!

The Good News.

Today, our son got the all-clear from his Consultant. No more OPD visits; no more intrusions into his and our lives. No more needles, no more poking around his anatomical parts. He desperately wants to get back to his friends on the farm, and at the ones who frequent his local youth-club. What matters more to him, and believe me, he is totally focussed on it, is continuity in his life and family, and with his friends. He misses them, dreadfully.

Has he changed? You can be sure of it. We’ve rarely, with over seventy cumulative years of Medicine in Britain between us, witnessed such courage and strength of character in any of our patients. There are some. They live with us, too.

So, the star of the show, in all this, has to be our son and his strength of character. He has innumerable medical impedimenta, all compounded by untold restrictions on his understanding, and yet he took all of this on the chin. No complaining, whatsoever.

When going down for the CT scan, his MRI scan and, finally, after an awful long wait, going into the operating theatre with his “Bods” (Mosquitoes, Spitfires and Lancs), he sent us, his most trusted allies and friends, packing. He wanted to face each and every ordeal on this journey, on his own. That speaks volumes. How he endured the three attempts at a long-line thrust in his arms, as darkness fell, on the last evening in hospital, I’ll never know. I helped. And I am a doctor. It was awful!

“Out of the strong, came forth sweetness.”