The first season — Summer 2022

This first year has been an experiment. It began, back in mid-2021, with the generous offer of a promising but onerous patch of overgrowth in Great Wigborough, a table-full of discount seed packs, and an unfounded optimism that it might be possible to grow enough to supplement the offering of a vegetarian menu of a café that didn’t even, at that point, have a premises.

The first weeks were spent clearing dense greenery, revealing trellises which had once supported beans and still held some established grape vines, the vast thorny stretches of an abundant rose bush, the green mist of head-height asparagus ferns, and at the heart of the patch, an old, crouched apricot tree. Kate and Phil, who own the farm, gave us free reign to construct more trellises, a levelled off main patch, and a reworked drainage system to capture hundreds of litres of rainfall from the neighbouring shed roof. 

Once winter had passed, from a home propagation station that had rendered our dining room mud-filled and unuseable for months, we transported across everything we could: carrots, radishes, and as the weather began to warm, beetroot, broccoli, kale, courgette, rocket and cucumbers. In a greenhouse (the second, after the loss of an inherited one that took three days to reassemble, but only an hour for a storm to flatten) we attempted melons, peppers, aubergine and chillies. We pinned our hope on many varieties of summer squash, surrounding corn and beans, and surrounded everything with companion flowers. 

Mondays became predominantly patch day – around our work at the time – spent on serious tending, weeding, and planting, while the rest of the week was a rota of watering schedules from the repurposed monster water butt which has served us well. It was about this time that the venue which was to become the home of patch on Trinity Street became available, and we realised that the vision would become a reality.

In April the first indication of what we might be able to rely on from the patch began to emerge – and it wasn’t something we could claim much responsibility for. The asparagus, which occupied a quarter of the space, and had been growing unpicked among the other growth for years, became an unstoppable and majestic force, producing almost more than it became possible to pick. Following this, the summer squash plants came to life, with many dozens of excitingly shaped varieties emerging: standard greens and yellows, but also squat and dimpled patty pans, cricket-ball striped di nizzas and melon-pale speckled lebanese. Later the long, bulbous hanging tromboncinos swung from the trellises, the bulk of these making up the courgette dishes on our lunchtime menu. The remainder have been pickled in long spiral streams, or dried in crinkled intensively-flavoured rounds, to reemerge on dishes across the winter. Beans suddenly emerged in vast numbers, beetroot and kohlrabi started to bring splashes of red and frosted purple to the top patch, we had some early and easy successes with mooli and radish, and a lot of unexpected and rampant potato plants. Tomatoes made the most recent appearance, and the plants become heavy with the black and yellow cherries, the swelling stripes of the marmondes, and the deep black and purple varieties. Most of these have now been dried and are preserved in oil. Some less successful crops included the cabbage and broccoli, largely decimated by caterpillars, butternut squash, which wasn’t half as prolific as its summer cousins, and cucumber plants, which we took four or five from in total. We managed to produce a single melon, which we ate while doing admin tasks in the cafe a month ago. The year has certainly given us a good idea of where our energies will lie for future sowing, to be able to bring the freshest local produce to the patch kitchen.

We have been fortunate, during what is certain to be an ongoing pattern of climate turmoil, and the UK’s hottest summer, to have been fortunate with our output this first experimental year, and are delighted to present some of it to you as part of our first season’s offering at patch!