The vegetable garden: not for the faint of heart
Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for almost 15 years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotter with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too hesitant to set something on fire. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her mind every week. This time: a brave attempt to start growing her own vegetables.
One morning, at the end of May 2018, countless hairy yellow-and-black caterpillars wriggled across my cream-white baby cauliflowers. By the end of that same day, they had almost completely devoured them. Just a few perforated, limp cauliflower florets recalled their earlier, seemingly promising existence. Just a bit of bad luck, I thought at the time. So I would never see those cauliflowers grow up, let alone eat them. It happens. Get over it. A shame. That much was true.
Having my own vegetable garden had been one of my enthusiastic good intentions for the past year. With lots of types of lettuce and Swiss chard in all the colours of the rainbow, courgette flowers and many more delicious things, much tastier than those from the supermarket. A not particularly well-thought-out, but charming and also rather brave intention, I thought myself. I have the opposite of green fingers, after all. If I look at a plant, it dies. I understand nothing about plants. I respect them, I like looking at them, I don’t argue with them, but they are not my friends. That was going to change in 2018.
The one with that fucking name
In mid-June I harvested my first beetroots. I had planted four varieties. Planted, because sowing seemed more like something for advanced gardeners. Yellow, orange, red and chioggia. Visually, perfectly good beetroots. I even took photos of them and sent them in a group chat with a bunch of foodies, which I otherwise never do: share something modern. On the outside, there was genuinely nothing wrong with them. Roasting them, I thought, was absolutely the best way to bring out that deliciously sweet, earthy flavour of home-grown beetroot.
‘What a shame,’ I muttered at the table that evening. Those beetroots had very little flavour. None, to be precise. Not the yellow ones, not the orange ones, not the ones with that fucking name that everyone always pronounces incorrectly, and not the ordinary red ones either, but oh well, still very nice: beetroots from my own vegetable garden. I quietly threw away the baking trays full of them that I had prepared to give away and freeze. Never mind. Keep going and carry on.
Drowning in beer
About three weeks later, the slugs got to the other cabbages (the green, white and red ones). Where there had once been smooth, tight, closely packed leaves, there was now more hole than leaf. ‘Get up at night and relocate them ten or so kilometres away,’ said one utterly fanatical vegetable-garden blogger. ‘Crush them,’ advised another. ‘The eggs too, of course. Or drown them in beer, that works too.’ Jesus. What had I got myself into?
Bitter endive
I could feel my need to go to war against the fauna in order to save the flora rapidly diminishing. Watering, okay; weeding, fair enough. But murder? Kidnapping? They probably aren’t even that tasty, those red cabbages, and I still had pointed cabbages. Or so I thought. A week later, the rabbits got to the pointed cabbages. Gnawed down to the damp, black earth.
Not long afterwards, I gave my vegetable garden back to nature. They can have it, that bitter endive and those bolted fennel bulbs. They lived here before I did, those caterpillars and cabbage whites and slugs, those roe deer and rabbits.
In 2019, I can actually live with not having green fingers.
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