Silence is golden

Would you? Could you? The bell has tolled. The time has come. After lying wide awake in bed at some ridiculously early hour, watching the sky turn from lead to gold, we agreed the end was nigh for the Mother's Garden male voice choir.

We are meat eaters. Never a lot to start with, and even less these days, but once in a while in family union we have Sunday roast feasts and assorted other dishes.

We have always kept chickens for various reasons, none of them culinary, and have had to dispatch a few that had either survived a dog attack or grown so weak as to become the helpless victims of the pecking order.

And, as I am sure you can imagine, there have been other unavoidably grim mammal, reptile and insect moments. Yes, the facts of death, in contrast to the rainbow wonders of farm life, are understood by all ages here, with the unwritten yet essential accord that killing is only ever a last resort to end suffering (the serpent that had to ushered away from our back door last week being a case in point). But there is another reason now. We have never eaten our fowl before because their job description has been to supply eggs not meat. So they live very long and happy lives laying in the mornings before free-ranging far and wide in the afternoons until, finally, they peg it. There have been scores of them over the years and, of course, we get to appreciate their different characters. Early on we had the odd cockerel too, and it was the same story. After having them around for a while it became unbearably tough to kill and eat them, emotionally and otherwise.

But when we bought a box full of day-old black Vilafranca chicks in April this year we knew we were committing to something else. We wanted more hens to boost the ageing brood, yet also knew that, inevitably, their number would include males. These would be for the pot. Of the 17 fluffy balls nine have turned out to be plump hens, meaning we have eight argumentative, boastful cockerels that pre-empt the dawn. Actually make that seven. We have always talked long and hard about food provenance and animal welfare and have willingly trailed miles to a village butcher's shop where the husband and wife team rear their own

livestock. But if we are really serious about it then we should be facing up to the realities and doing it ourselves. Farmer's daughter Maggie, who has more experience of such matters than me, is in total agreement. So we are doing it.

The John Seymour self-sufficiency book is open on the kitchen table and a 4lb 8oz roast chicken is on the menu this Sunday when friends are paying a visit. The dish is certain to include potatoes and Spanish beef tomatoes, two other weighty sources of nourishment and labour here right now. The main courgette flourish has been and gone, giving rise at its fridge and freezer-filling height to vast quantities of chilled courgette soup, potato and courgette omelette and ratatouille.

The tomatoes are unrelenting, weighing in at a pound apiece, and no sooner have we worked out what to do with a basket full then it is time to harvest more. But boy are they tasty.

There are daily handfuls of cherry tomatoes and peppers too, for salads or to roast with other vegetables from the garden, such as aubergine, garlic and onion and, of course, courgette, with fresh basil and lashings of Mother's Garden extra virgin olive oil.

I am typing at the kitchen table and Maggie, Ella and Joe are at the other end, having a breather from the vegetables. They are coring and chopping apples to make the family apple chutney recipe as passed down by mother Beryl, who has just broken off from making tomato chutney at her farmhouse table to give us a call.

It has been helpful that holiday cottage visitors have been tucking in to baskets full of our vegetables, and in exchange we have a few euros and more recipes.

As for the spuds, the only varieties available were kennebec and red pontiac. Were that we had more choice of seed potatoes hereabouts, but the crop (four brimming wheelbarrows) is lifted and partly sorted, with several box loads stored for the winter. Meanwhile, we plough through the damaged ones, making patatas a lo pobre. This is described in our essential Moro Cookbook as large Spanish onions, garlic and long green peppers, and a large quantity of potato wedges, tossed together, seasoned and slowly cooked in olive oil.

We have also just wandered out into the summer heat to pick elderberries for Maggie's apple and elderberry syrup and jelly, with an heirloom shepherd's crook to encourage the branches to bow within reach. Then we swung by the lower terrace to see how the pears were coming along, only to find them ripe, and to discover the artwork of a nest that had been woven from dried iris leaves. Can any birders among you advise which bird may have created this? Blackbird perhaps? Such a time of plenty, when entwined with a resolution to waste nothing, can, if you are not too careful, water the notion that you can have too much of a good thing. Thank goodness for bird nest moments to break our pace.

Visitors continue to come and leave echoes of other places. Maureen, John, Tina, Neal and Charlie from Scarborough are in the cottage; my niece Savanna and nephew Caleb and his girlfriend Harriet have returned to the UK after two and a half weeks on the farm; Mioi and Serena from Vancouver have breezed through en route to Seville; 17-year-old Simon and Stuart are working on our woodpile; and we await my godson Jacob and his brother Aidan.

Caravan and tents have all been pressed into service and, as with the vegetable plot, there is little by way of respite. Just today six lads from Ella's school swam in our balsa, having cycled five miles across the mountains from their village. We love people, especially those willing to see and participate in the endless tasks, but there is a need for us to balance this with breaths of quiet time.

Once a week we have been bouncing up the long track to Mac and Conxita's to watch the BBC Proms, specifically the Beethoven piano concertos performed by Paul Lewis. We had the great fortune of seeing him in concert in Barcelona last November (Concerto No 3). Being TV-less and having to make the rare effort to go and see something like this heightens our appreciation of the brimming existence of Mother's Garden in midsummer.

Keeping us buoyant at the moment is that we will be back up the track on September 6 for the last of Lewis's five Beethoven concerto performances, the E flat major Emperor. Mioi and Serena will have returned by then, to collect their belongings left with us while they tasted a little of Spain and Portugal, although we weren't envious of their plans to see Seville, where the average August daytime temperature is 100F (and the record is 120F).

They first came to us after attending a Spanish language course in Santiago de Compostela. Mioi was here last nine years ago, then aged 15, visiting with his mother Brenda during our first bewildering summer. It has been a treat to have him here again (and at 6ft 6in he is tailor-made for almond harvesting ). A lovely, gentle and considerate man, he's the grandson of Maggie's godparents, and another of our vital links with Canada where Maggie was born. Serena was joyful, kind and interesting too. She is the grand-daughter of late Canadian abstract painter Arthur McKay.

This reminds me: I have still not completed Joe's application for Canadian citizenship. Ella already has it, like her mother (in tandem with UK citizenship), for no other reason than keeping all doors unlocked. Visiting Canada is on our wish list, in case you were wondering.

At long last I have completed the sequel to No Going Back – Journey to Mother's Garden, continuing the story of our life here from 2003 to the present. Shaking The Tree: Mother's Garden – the growing years is with the publishers and, with a fair wind, should be out late October time.

Martin Kirby's novel Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy is published by Pegasus (ISBN 9781903490297). No Going Back – Journey to Mother's Garden is published by Little Brown (ISBN 0751535486)

www.mothersgarden.org

YP MAG 28/8/10