Zucchini flower

My friend, Sarah, and her daughter arrived a little after 10:30am to pick me and my daughter up for our annual pilgrimage to the fruit farm, a shortish car ride away. This has become a bit of a hunter/gatherer trip for us over the years and reminds me very much of my childhood, or at least a game I used to play when I was a child. I always had a thing about going back to nature, living off the land ~ played happily up in our top garden (as we called it) picking wild things to pretend to eat to keep my sister and I alive (warnings of various poisonous plants and berries very much in my consciousness... although no-one ever told us not to stick our fingers in the foxgloves, or that the leaves of digitalis could be fatal if even a small amount was ingested). It was at the fruit farm last year that I learned the plant I used to strip of its tiny little flower heads and pretend to make into tea to drink is a plant called sorrel, and that in days gone by that's exactly what they did with the flower heads - made tea with it! Some ancient part of me must have remembered.

Each year we've visited the farm we've made our way round to the organic vegetable enclosure and sat eating sandwiches stuffed with leaves of all description ~ colourful chard, bitter sorrel, parsley, chives, oregano, dill, fennel, beetroot. We've naughtily filled our empty lunchboxes with extra leaves for salads later when no-one was watching. Moving into the fruit tunnels, bright red, shiny strawberries as far as the eye can see in all directions, plants laden with fruit, we've both picked for the punnets and eaten our way out of the other side of the tunnel. Everyone does it! They know this!

The baby pigs in the pig enclosure (it being an organic farm, not just fruit), some only a few weeks old, others just days old, were cute... trotting playfully around in the grass and mud, their mothers (some still heavily pregnant) lying around, taking it easy in the sun. We'd actually decided to go to the farm on its busiest day of the year (unknowingly), some special event going on with hundreds more people milling around than usual. It was a stark reminder, therefore, to see the little piglets frolicking round on the one side of the farm, the pig roast hung over the spit at the other - a pole pushed right through its mouth and out the other side, dripping fat over the fire. Both girls were horrified, and to be honest, the sight didn't please me either, nor the smell. Supposing the tables were turned, I thought, and it was our chubby little offspring being fattened for the next person-roast for a load of pigs to queue up and eat, a pole shoved ruthlessly through their mouths as they hung over the fire.

We made our way through to the shop to pay for any strawberries we hadn't eaten and walked back to the car. Looking through the photos later there were many I could have used for today's entry, but I decided eventually on this beautiful yellow zucchini flower, more commonly known as courgette.

And now off to prepare tea for the tribe.... a tea of leaves from the lunch box, courgette (they'd only be thrown on the compost heap due to spoilage, since we rescued them from the floor, the slugs and the heat) followed by strawberries. All in all a successful foraging trip, which pleases that ancient part of me no end!