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Travels in my vegetable patch, from French beans to Indian aubergines

New shoots appear almost by the hour, like exciting destinations popping up on an airport’s pixelated departure board - getty
New shoots appear almost by the hour, like exciting destinations popping up on an airport’s pixelated departure board - getty

Locked down and restless, many of us found unusual ways to escape, without actually leaving our homes. I jetted off to New York and enjoyed coffee with Woody Allen. I escaped to Provence – not for a year – but for a sundowner with Peter Mayle, and I stumbled around Vienna’s shadowed streets with Ultravox.

For two months, movies, books and tunes became my fantasy city breaks. But now that the weather’s turned, I’m going long haul – to my allotment, half a mile from home – where new shoots appear almost by the hour, like exciting destinations popping up on an airport’s pixelated departure board.

First in are the French beans. Their remains have been found in Mexican and Guatemalan archaeological sites that date back 7,000 years, but they were most likely first domesticated in Peru.

Christopher Columbus introduced them to Europe at the end of the 1400s, and over the next few centuries they migrated east to Indochina and the Indian subcontinent. I’ve seen them grow as big as boomerangs in the foothills of the Himalayas under multi-coloured prayer flags.

Some French restaurants serve them crunchy, in goose fat and breadcrumbs, but I’ll likely cook mine Bhutanese-style, in a cheese and chilli sauce. My taste buds can still wander, even if the rest of me can’t.

My tomatoes are already up to my knees and hopefully they’ll be producing grenades of Mediterranean sunshine by the end of June. These ruby gems also originated on the West coast of Latin America, and came to Europe at a similar time to green beans.

At first, tomatoes were regarded with suspicion by 15th-century botanists, because they belonged to the often-poisonous nightshade family. The French began by growing them for their ornamental flowers, and in Spain and Italy they started out as tabletop decorations. Unsurprisingly, their earliest mention in an Italian cookbook was published in tomato-loving Naples in 1692.

"The chilly summer dew collects on my potato stems just like it does in the Peruvian Andes" - getty
"The chilly summer dew collects on my potato stems just like it does in the Peruvian Andes" - getty

I’ll stagger my new plants for the next four months and eat their sweet but tangy fruits with olive oil, rock salt and fresh basil. Then, when October’s chills arrive and their aromatic leaves begin to crinkle, I’ll whizz up what’s left and freeze. Even if lockdown continues into midwinter, this smooth passata will transport me to the Golfo di Napoli, bathed in hot summer sunshine. Maybe I’ll go the whole hog and search for a soundtrack of “beeping Vespas” on YouTube.

Most of us are hoping for a warm few months – it will make staying at home that little bit easier, and if we do creep up by an extra degree or two, vegetable growers like me will be able to jet off to ever more exotic climes.

Aubergines like it hot – they hail from India where they thrive in temperatures in excess of 30 degrees centigrade, but often struggle in the UK. They travelled to Europe via the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century.

In France they help form the classic ratatouille, but my favourite recipe is a Sicilian caponata – chopped and chilled with olives, capers, celery, onion and diced tomatoes. If we get ourselves an “eggplant summer”, I’ll be ordering a bottle of limoncello to celebrate, and while I’m at it I’ll need to restock the factor 50.

Like most people at the moment, bad days usually follow the good ones. Sometimes I feel upbeat and optimistic, but then I plunge into depression and lethargy. But throughout it all, my homegrown vegetables serve as a reassuring constant. The chilly summer dew collects on my potato stems just like it does in the Peruvian Andes. And on a sunny afternoon my polythene greenhouse throbs with the thick heat of the Amazon.

There’s a big and exciting world out there waiting for me – over the horizon, just beyond the broad beans.