How to garden like you’ve got your life together

A capsule wardrobe for your veggie patch and 12(!) recipes to cook from your garden this summer

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I like self help books. It’s a guilty pleasure, a dirty little secret (although not so secret as of now, I guess). I don’t mean the really self-help-y self help books. Nothing by Oprah (no offence Oprah), and I’ve never read The Secret, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus or Who Moved My Cheese. The ones I like are the positive psychology ones - books about viewing things differently, cultivating optimism and tweaking your life, ever so slightly, to make small but positive changes.

These books used to pop, embarrassingly out of the shelves in my study, revealing the inner machinations of my mind to anyone who looked, despite my best efforts to conceal them with the more impressive classics that I never read. Happily, these days I just buy them all on my phone, secreting them away in the digital realm, so no one ever knows which specific constellation of neuroses, relationship problems or insecurities I am attempting to address at any given moment.

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers

• It’s a guide to the easiest and (in my opinion) best vegetables to grow in your garden this summer, plus TWELVE recipe ideas for how you can cook with them

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Anyway, sometime in between reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and Hunt, Gather, Parent I read the book that is (sort of) the subject of todays newsletter: Wear it Well, by Alison Bornstein. It’s basically a book to help you dress nicely, and, as I write this to you, sitting in bed in a torn skirt I stole from my mother and a dressing gown I stole from my father, with nary an accessory in sight unless you count my bedraggled hair, I can’t *quite* say it’s worked. But I like the THEORY. The book tries to get you to pare back your wardrobe. Simplify. Chuck out what you don’t like, wear only things you love, and work out what items can be worn together t bring out the best in each other. It helps you sort your shit out, basically, so that every waking moment you look put together, calm, tidy, poised. Like a real grown up.

Yesss ok. I haven’t actually done any of this, I’ve been too busy writing these bloody emails in my dressing gown. But I’ve decided it is a very good way to approach our summer vegetable gardens!

The summer veggie patch has the potential to be like an out of control wardrobe. Filled with aspirational seeds you never sow, packed with veggies you don’t actually like or can’t be bothered harvesting, or swamped by gluts of things you like *in theory* until you have so many of them you begin to find them slightly revolting. Cluttered, chaotic and not very fun.

In my view, there’s one main reason our summer veggie patches get this way: Summer is the most exciting season to grow veggies. It’s annoying, really. All through winter I’m unexcited by the edibles in the garden. Sure, lettuce grows well, but who wants a cold, crisp salad in July. Coriander thrives, but all of the things I want to eat coriander with (punchy tomato salsa, spicy, chilly-laced burritos) are hot-season foods. And I’m sorry, but I’m bored of broccoli. Summer on the other hand, oh boy. Tomatoes in all shapes and sizes, cucumbers eaten off the vine while they’re still warm from the sun, long cayenne chillies, spicy little Birds Eye’s, snake beans, artichokes, sweetcorn, zucchinis, watermelons, rockmelons, and basil my GOD the basil. Summer is the BEST time to grow food, and if you’re not tactical you’ll get swamped by options, paralysed by indecision or, likeliest of all, you’ll wind up with too many zucchinis because that’s what always happens if you’re not careful.

So today we are making a capsule wardrobe for your veggie patch! Here’s how to work out what will REALLY serve you this summer. What to plant for a garden you eat from every single day, whether you have heaps of time to garden or next to none.

If you have LITERALLY NO TIME | wardrobe 1

Hello kindred spirits with no time and a heart full of dreams.

I’m sorry you are too busy to grow the garden you’re hankering for. I get it. There is so much I want to do in our garden right now. I want to mulch! I want to pull the arrogantly huge mustard greens that are about to topple over and crush mY roses. I want to mollycoddle chilli and tomato seedlings in the hopes they’ll reward me with a delicious red bounty. Alas, alack, I cannot.

There will be seasons for chilli coddling. If this is not your season, here’s your capsule wardrobe for summer. You only need three things: rocket, basil & tomatoes. And although you can’t do this with literally no time, you really could manage it in an afternoon.

Rocket