Tuesday 2 August 2011

Lammas

It's Lughnasadh, or Lammas; the beginning of autumn, the season of the reaper, but also the time of first fruits. I'm working on drafting a pitch letter for "Ramundi's sisters", and tonight I go home to eat my first home-grown tomato of the year. Writing the pitch letter is agony, easily my least favourite part of this "trying to get published" lark. Seriously, I'd rather write five love scenes than one pitch. But I'm hoping that first red, shapely tomato will be good. I think some of the chard might be just about big enough to gather, too. Here's to first fruits, and baking hot late summer days, and to remembering the blessings of life as I make my way home sweating gently across the baked, dry grass of Kew Green.

2 comments:

Miss Robyn said...

is this late for your first home grown tomato? I thought they would be coming to an end - here our flush of tomatoes always happens around midsummer.
how hot does it get where you live? I smiled when you said 'sweating across the baked dry grass'.. I never imagined England to get like that :)

Imogen said...

Oh, Miss Robyn, you ask a Brit about the weather?! Brace yourself... No, seriously, I'll try not to launch onto a long speech. The climate here is so immensely variable that it's hard to be precise about how hot it gets. Today is fairly hot; about 80 degrees, with high humidity (it's the humidity that flattens me - I can take any amount of dry spring heat but not this...). We had a similarly hot spell over the early spring, then in May it started to rain and barely stopped for eight weeks or so. I would normally have hoped for tomatoes a bit earlier than this, and to have my first beans by Lammas - this year the beans have only just started to flower, and only two of the tomato vines have any flowers of fruits at all as yet. Mother Nature seems as tired and confused as her human children at the moment...