Vera Atkins Memorial Seat Dedication Saturday 24 September 2011

I always like to be home from France by mid-August, because I need to be in sunny Derbyshire for the start of the drupe harvest.  Buckets and buckets of Warwickshire Drooper plums together with six varieties of apple (ok, so I like apples) and a sack of onions from the Asian food stores in Hyson Green were transformed as if by magic into a year's worth of Delia's finest spiced plum chutney.  Recipe and pictures here.  My jollies in France this summer meant I missed the tayberries.  I'd netted them off at the end of May, of course, but as I just threw the damned netting over the canes in a rather hurried fashion, it really wasn't surprising that I returned to a smug resident blackbird population and ZERO fruit.  I didn't make the same mistake with my mulberries, and when they started ripening during September on went the netting and off kept the blackbirds.

And then August filled up with weddings; two each week until last week.  Beautiful churches, handsome grooms, delightful brides; chinking flutes and everywhere women guests in fabulous hats and too much gossip.  Pane, amore e chi chi chi.  This week I went to my first funeral of the year.  On and on the year turns.  Tomorrow I'm off to the National Arboretum in Staffordshire.  

http://www.thenma.org.uk/index.aspx

At 12.30pm the Allied Special Forces Association will dedicate the Vera Atkins memorial seat remembering the women of the Special Operations Executive who lost their lives during WWII.  They really did give their tomorrows for my today, and my love affair with France.    

"Vera May Atkins was the Intelligence Officer- French Section of the SOE, formed on 22 July 1940 to conduct warfare by means other than direct military engagement.  SOE's mission was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as the core of the Auxiliary Units, a British resistance movement. 

"As an exile from Romania Vera came to Britain before the start of the Second World War. She joined S.O.E and was soon managing most of the men and women agents who were being sent into France to carry out clandestine work behind enemy lines. This memorial seat is a tribute to her courage and that of her women agents who lost their lives. Her dedication and resolve to go into Europe and find out what had happened to them after the war ended was not well recognised, except by the families of those lost. The tree at the centre of the memorial seat was grown from a seed found in a Fir cone picked up in 2005 from inside the electric fence that bordered Natzweiler Concentration Camp, which is near the village of Moussey, in the Vosges mountains of eastern France.

"The Natzweiller Tree is also a special tribute to S.O.E. agents Andree Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden and also to Sonia Olschanezky, who was a locally recruited member of Robin, a sub-circuit of the Prosper resistance network.

"After capture earlier in the year the four women were taken to Natzweiler Concentration Camp on the 6th July 1944 and executed by lethal injection and their bodies burnt in the camp crematorium that very evening. Three had landed in enemy territory to work as clandestine radio operators, couriers and resistance fighters to assist the French Resistance Forces. Eight other woman S.O.E. agents had also been captured and 4 executed at Dachau and 4 at Ravensbruck, including Lilian Rolfe, Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort and Violette Szabo.

Home Again & The Difference Between Summer & Winter Squash

I'm knackered.  I've worked like a slave this spring mostly ego-stroking and hand-holding (things I find terrifically difficult), and shuttling back and forth between airports (which I love).  Last night I threw my laundry on to wash, opened a bottle of Gavi and sat out in my garden and just looked at the greenery.  I further stoked my sense of well being by taking something out of the freezer and by the time it pinged I knew I'd be fine. 

My garden has survived its sporadic attention / neglect quite well.  The carrot seedlings are all through, the radishes too.  All my delishy climbing beans and French beans are all through and looking very lush and eager to climb.  The tomatoes are small and look a little on the "struggling" side, but we're still in May so there's time enough for a growth spurt.  All the apple, pear and plum blossoms have developed into lovely little fruitlets.  The Merlot vine has gone bananas after its prolonged freezing under the winter snows, and my lovely tayberry and blackberry canes are rampaging over their wires and up into the hedges and trees.

The pumpkins and squashes are a bit hit and miss, probably due to the less than ideal, erratic attention I've given them since early May, and the age of some of the seeds.  Never mind; over 48 Butternuts have germinated, and at least 7 Turk's Turbans are already stretching upwards.  I've even managed to grow three Harlequin seedlings from seeds I scraped out and saved from the parent squash I bought in April 2006 at Sainsburys.  All it took to break a 5-year dormancy was a good soaking after planting and then a fortnight's neglect in the heated glasshouse.  I've had similar success with my summer squash and courgettes.  Here's the laundry list;
Black Beauty
Grisette de Provence
Patty Pan
Yellow Scallop
Golden Zucchini
Di Nozzi

What's the difference between a summer and a winter squash? It pretty much boils down to keeping qualities.  Summer squashes have generally thin, edible skins and soft flesh and seeds (think of all those watery courgettes); winter squash have generally harder skins, firm flesh and hard seeds (think of the real threat of amputation each time you attempt to halve a butternut.)

Crouching Gardener, Hidden Spade

Rubus Tayberry, is a cross between the raspberry and blackberry. The fruit is dark red in colour and longer than a raspberry. Tayberries are juicier than raspberries, and ripen over a many weeks in July and August. They are best when allowed to fully ripen to a dark red colour before picking, rather like mulberries. Mine don't really last long enough on the canes to fully darken, as the resident blackbird population decimates it each year, invariably first thing in the morning just after the dawn chorus. I don't really mind, as I love the blackbirds. So does the cat that's just moved into the neighbourhood, judging by the bits of blackbird under the canes this morning. I shall sit here, silently, and wait.