As Growing Vegetables comes of age – it weeks that count in this field, not years – I’ve decided to abbreviate the title. Everyone does it these days, and who am I to argue?

It’s complicated. It’s really simple. My twin themes for the week. Also this feeling I get sometimes when I’m deeply moved by something, when some connecting lines of my life join together, a feeling that brings tears to my eyes, tears of joy and excitement, at the same time tears of fear, of terror, almost always so overwhelming that I let the source of the feeling slip away, and I quickly forget it and carry on with something else. I had this feeling yesterday reading Mary Reynolds book ‘The Garden Awakening’. Here is a link to a talk she delivered in Wexford in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZcFYf01ns8 Finding the link and attaching it here induces the feeling again. It stops me in my tracks. She is talking about what I believe in so passionately, with a winning smile and a lovely Irish lilt. It’s too much.

Now, cricket. On TV on Tuesday I watched Eoin Morgan hit a world record 17 sixes and win a game for England and yesterday I watched Kane Williamson bat doggedly on a difficult wicket, hitting only one six. That six took him to 100 and won the game for New Zealand. I’ll quote Michael Vaughan “Eoin Morgan grabbed the headlines for his power-hitting exploits yesterday and rightly so, but this Williamson innings was something else. Under immense pressure he played an old school gem. What a player. What a ton.” It was astonishing – and I wanted South Africa to win! This paragraph is here because the thought of writing about it as I ate my breakfast induced the same feeling of delight and fear.

My purpose, my desire, is to distill this feeling, to somehow bottle it and examine it. Of course I can’t do that, and anyway what’s the use of a preserved specimen? What matters is growing vegetables. That’s what this is all about. And I will put my week in pictures below, including some fabulous leaves that I photographed from the top of a multi-storey car park in Winchester, all glossy with the rain. My world is a forest.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•