Surprise Pumpkins, Crazy Courgettes, and Baby Butternuts

As the River Festival approaches, the vegetables and fruit we use for the Five Elements Fire Feast continue to grow and ripen.

We've had a few surprises this year. I look forward to it every time a wild vegetable self-seeds and appears somewhere unexpected, and there have been plenty of surprises this year, after my first year of vegetable gardening.

Mirella and Nicolas were keen to use as much produce from the garden as possible for the River Festival on 16th September. Following the huge success of last year's pumpkins, I planted a mixture of pumpkins and butternut squash in the kitchen garden, or so I thought...

So far it's been a bit of a disaster, but there's always a glimmer of hope in the garden. Some of the pumpkins turned out to be courgettes. I'm now the village shopkeeper and people aren't surprised to find a random courgette or two on their doorstep. My favourite dish for parties has become the courgette surprise. It's really delicious.

The second challenge is that the pumpkin and squash plants just haven't had the same spectacular, explosive growth as last year. There are a few baby butternuts developing, but the pumpkins haven't emerged from the flowers yet and, who knows, maybe they're melons? I'll never know whether this is due to the very cold and wet start to the growing season or the fact that I didn't practise crop rotation enough.

However, by a stroke of magic, two pumpkin plants have sprung up on the dead cherry tree near the house and the pumpkins are already extravagantly opulent and now adorn the lawn beautifully. There are also a few cherry tomatoes for good measure.

We may not be able to supply all the squash for the event, but there will certainly be touches of L’Oasis delights on the menu and a huge plus point for the River Festival is the abundance of festival figs ready to be picked from the River Café tree which will be at the bottom of the garden.