Not quite this bad, but almost.
Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/AFP/Getty Images
As I write this the weather has suddenly become last summer's, but anyone in Britain reading this knows we've had more than our allotted forty days and nights of rain.
In our kitchen garden the results are pretty much what you'd expect. All the varieties of potato have been hit by blight; we've cut the tops off all of them, and lifted most of them. We're not completely silly - we grow only varieties that are difficult to find in the shops, mainly waxy salad types, which we like equally well in salads, as small jacket potatoes, or boiled and "smashed" with the tines of a fork and good olive oil or butter. They are not particularly blemished, and their taste and texture is as fine as ever - but the crop is only a fraction of what is usually is.
After growing tomatoes for nearly 30 years, we're still finding out things not only about which ones grow well in our large, more-or-less walled garden, but also about our own taste. For example, we learned in the last two years that we do not love the type called Black Russian. One of these, Paul Robeson, we found resembled its namesake's political views, in that when it finally goes completely red on the outside, it's gone mushy on the inside.
Yellow cherry tomatoes we find sweetest, and Romano the best for cooking; but really we prefer to eat salad tomatoes that are still tinged with a little green, that have a little bite (if not crunch) and are high in acidity. A trick I learned from Patience Gray in Puglia is to dress tomatoes with nothing but salt, pepper and best olive oil, and never use lemon juice or vinegar, so it's their natural acidity that cuts the oil. Add spring onion and basil if you like - it's brilliantly refreshing and the emerald green colour is fetching. I believe we planted a variety this year that, when green on the outside, is salmon pink to red inside.
I can't tell you what it was called. All the tomatoes are diseased, and the rain has washed the names off the white plastic labels. A couple of red cherry tomatoes have survived and ripened in early September, but most have gone west like the like the dwarf French beans and the chillies, which (I kid you not) have been eaten by hyper-macho slugs.
Have you seen these? They're not the disgusting, brown thin and slimy creatures of yesteryear, but a thuggish race of slimy giant slugs, shell-less black gastropod mollusks as long as my index and middle finger and as wide. Scary - and they literally eat jalapenos for breakfast.
Don't even talk to me about soft fruit. But we have had one success this year. A Black Turkey fig tree I planted at least 15 years ago against a west-facing wall, its roots constricted by being in the tumbler of an old washing-machine, has never produced anything but embryonic fruits. Never, that is, until this, the wettest summer since Noah sent the dove on its reconnaissance mission. This year we have had at least 50 huge, ripe figs since mid-July. They easily weigh 300 grammes each, and fill the palm of your hand. When I boasted of this a day ago to Raymond Blanc he said "and I'm sure they tasted of nothing." Not so. They are oozingly, D.H. Lawrence-ly ripe, black on the outside, with small fissures caused by their near-explosive maturity. Inside they are deep purple, flecked with the gold of the seeds. Their scent is - well - fig-ripe. Bite into one and the sticky juice trickling down your chin goes from inky to mauve.
I can find no explanation for this aberrant, over-generous behaviour except that the tree is obviously trying desperately to reproduce itself. Can it be afraid of drowning? Our other, south-facing fig tree boasts nary a fruit.
We've had some vegetable joys along with our woes - lots of globe artichokes, success with the weird Italian agretti, plentiful salad greens, abundant courgettes that aren't even watery, loads and loads of herbs, good beetroot and parsnips, and small-kerneled but delicious sweetcorn. Does anybody have any idea why the fig tree fruited and some vegetables flourished in the rain?
