Perfect Symmetry

One of the things that we wanted to do when we moved the La Basse Cour was grow more of our own food. Despite the odd problems (Tomato and Potato blight, total inability to germinate many seeds last year, pigeons) this has been a big success and we've enjoyed a long list of fruit and vegetables grown by our hands. It's hard to pick out favourites but I do enjoy the excellent symmetry of growing leeks.

We practice vegetable gardening a l'anglaise which means we grow almost everything from seed rather than growing on small plants bought from Point Vert or the markets. Leeks are one of those plants that can survive for a time as bare root seedlings and so bunches of 10, 50 or (my record so far) 100 can be bought. But we prefer the seed route so at the end of March we start a short drill for leek seeds and, as this year, they germinate just as the previous year's crop is coming to an end so they are in the potager for exactly 12 months. We harvested our first leeks in October and our last ones at the beginning of May - that's six months harvesting for a quarter of a packet of seed.

Here is the very last of the crop harvested on 5th May - my readers in the North-East of England would probably regard these as scallions - but we were pretty pleased: