I had never grown anything before, I had never stayed in one place long enough to even think about it, and had no idea what would grow well at this altitude, and in a location so exposed to the elements, so it was a process of trial and error. Each year I would try a few new things; if they grew well they would become a fixture; if they failed I would abandon them and try something else. I had a small patch of early potatoes, and a larger patch of main crops. I got a metal dustbin which I kept in the pantry and would fill it to the top with these, enough to last the whole year. Onions and garlic I hung on strings on the woodshed wall, as the mice didn’t ever bother them. Garlic was the only thing I planted in autumn; growing garlic seems magical in its simplicity. Take a head of garlic, break it into cloves and plant them in a row. By the next year each clove will have turned into a new head.
Carrots and parsnips I stored in the ground and lifted when I needed them. The carrots in particular were a revelation; they are hard to grow in most places because of the depredations of the carrot fly, but the altitude here kept my crop pest-free. They grew to over a pound in weight without becoming woody, were such a deep orange they were almost red, and tasted better than any others I have had before or since. My first year I grew a fine crop of broad beans, but the next year and the one after they were infested by blackfly just as the pods were beginning to swell. The blackfly brought a fungal infection that wiped out the entire crop, so reluctantly I had to give up on them. My biggest problem was finding the right green vegetable. I could pick wild greens in season — sorrel and nettle tops, occasionally watercress from the mountain streams — but I needed something that I could rely on. Cabbages were destroyed by flea beetles, and though I managed a small crop of kale it was riddled with holes. Spinach was too inclined to bolt and had a short season. Then I found spinach beet, untroubled by pests and hardy enough to survive the worst of the winter’s frosts. I could dust away the snow and pluck the fresh leaves below, so I had a supply of greens year-round. But if there is a satisfaction to be had from selecting and picking food you have grown yourself as and when it is time to eat, I found far more pleasure in foraging for wild food. Perhaps I am more in touch with my inner hunter-gatherer than my inner pastoralist.
The mushroom season began in late summer. These Welsh hills are renowned for their hallucinogenic psilo-cybin mushrooms. In a good year they would be hidden under every tussock of grass, their potency belied by how drab and inconspicuous they were. But I am talking here about edible mushrooms. Not so much the familiar field mushroom, which I seldom came across, though I would often find horse mushrooms in the fields, bigger and firmer and with a whiff of aniseed. A ring of them would always appear under the old ash just across the fence from my fruit tree, so I didn’t have far to go for them. One year though, there was an incredible glut of field mushrooms, the year the farmer decided to plough and reseed the top field. This field had last been ploughed over twenty years ago, and I would be told the full story by the farmer.
In my front field just over the track lay an old harrow. It had been there so long it had sunk into the ground with only a few tines emerging through the grass to catch out the unwary. This is the way here; there seemed to be rusting pieces of farming equipment in the corner of every field, apparently forgotten but actually not, just waiting until they were next required. Even if that wait was twenty years or more. The farmer came up the track with his tractor and a chain and dragged the harrow out of the ground, then called me out to see the voles’ nest he had unearthed. The nest was a soft ball of finely cut grass, and the baby voles were pink and blind and hairless. I held the nest in my hands, then we replaced it carefully under a sod of turf.
The hillside here was steep, extremely steep in places, and when it had last been ploughed the tractor had tipped right over and trapped the farmer beneath it. He lay pinned there all day, until he was missed at dinner time and his relatives came looking for him. His pelvis had been crushed and he never walked freely again. Once the top field had been ploughed and harrowed again, without incident this time, and before the new seed had started to sprout, while the field was still seemingly lifeless, bare brown earth, the mushrooms appeared during the night. Great drifts of white, as if there had been a snowfall. In a single trip I collected ten to fifteen pounds of them without making much visible difference. The smaller ones, their gills still pale pink, I reserved for cooking; the bigger ones with blackened gills I chopped up and salted down in buckets. In a few days this produced over two litres of mushroom ketchup, seasoning that would last me for years.
There is not much of a tradition in Britain of collecting forest mushrooms, people seem wary of them, but I had lived in Sweden, where foraging in the woods in autumn is practically a national pastime, so I knew my mushrooms. The first to come into season, in August or even sometimes July, were the chanterelles. They grew in the dingle by my stream, though only on the north bank. I never found a single one on the southern bank, where instead there were forest orchids, narrow-leaved helleborines, which never crossed the stream either. Chanterelles are beautiful mushrooms, glowing apricot in colour, and many of mine were a variety tinged with a dusting of amethyst. It was like finding precious jewels shining in the leaf litter, in the darkness under the thick trees. And they are a great mushroom to pick, both for flavour and for the fact that they are completely untroubled by the mushroom flies, whose worms ruin many species of mushroom before they are big enough to eat. There would be more than I could eat so I would preserve them to extend their short season. It is easy enough to dry mushrooms, but they lose so much of their flavour in the process. Instead, I would cook them in their own juices and a little vinegar, then drain and pack them in jars with dill and coriander seeds from the garden, then fill the jars to the brim with olive oil, taking care to shake out any trapped bubbles of air. And that way they would last me until their season began again.
As the chanterelles came to an end, the mushroom season proper began. Most visible of all were the parasols. Tall and elegant in white and fawn, they seemed to fringe every field and every track. When fully grown their caps can be as big as a plate, and I would coat them in batter or breadcrumbs and fritter them whole. There were far more of them than could possibly be eaten. There must have been at least fifteen types of mushroom that I collected and ate regularly; to my tastes, the best of all was the cep, with a thick, bulging stalk and a rich chestnut cap with yellow gills. They also grew down at the dingle by the stream, but only in small numbers and they never seemed to appear in the same place twice, so finding one was always a pleasant surprise. I would break the cap in two to check for worms; if they were unaffected, one mushroom would be enough for a meal.
And then there were the berries. I would make thirty jars of jam each year — not that I needed thirty jars for myself, but they made an appropriate gift for departing guests. There were brambles everywhere, especially along the lanes and the abandoned cart track by my stream, and blackberry jam would account for perhaps ten jars’ worth. Blackberrying had been a feature of my childhood; there is a sense of innocence to it, the prickles snagging on your clothes, the purple-stained fingers. There were a few wild strawberries along the lanes, but these were too small to be anything more than a treat in passing. On the steep hillside beyond my postbox was a mature plantation, five or ten times the size of my own little Penlan Wood, and in the very heart of it was a hidden clearing that I had stumbled upon. It was filled with wild raspberries. A few jars of raspberry jam, and plenty more for eating fresh. Halfway down the track to the farm were the remains of another farmhouse or labourer’s cottage. The barest trace of it remained, less even than of Penlan Farm, but there were two damson trees beside the ruins. It was ironic that the fruit trees they had planted had long outlived their home. I had to compete with the blackbirds and thrushes, but would always get enough for a few jars of plum jam to add to the store.