A Midnight Feast

All through my childhood, the notion of a' midnight feast ' filled me with excitement: illicit picnics with friends on 'sleepovers' when everyone else was asleep, or late evening gatherings around a bonfire when we were teenagers, when we would have happily eaten anything, burned or not, no doubt accompanied by a swig or two of cheap fizzy cider. Last week saw a different kind of 'midnight feast' at Domaine des Rochers. Alas, this was one to which we were not even invited.

We only became aware of it the next morning as we went down to our potager to collect the latest harvest of ripe tomatoes. There was not a single red fruit to be found. Looking around us we saw devastation. Whichever creature(s) had stolen all our tomatoes had also rampaged over all the other raised beds. Every single lettuce had been uprooted and chomped, while potatoes lay scattered across the earth in an adjacent bed. On closer inspection I could see that many of these had been briefly nibbled and then discarded. Bean plants, were uprooted and the recently planted leeks lay wilting and ruined. But who had enjoyed this midnight feast ? Judging by the small teeth marks left in the potatoes we think that it might have been badgers, but considering the amount of damage, they must have held quite a party. Although we hadn't issued any invitations, they had obviously spotted that B. had failed to re-erect the electric fence around the potager after mowing the grass earlier that evening. We may as well have put out the flags.

But at least we had previously gathered enough ripe tomatoes to make a large store of passata to last us through the winter. And what's more, we now know that our midnight visitors definitely don't enjoy raspberries, aubergines , peppers or basil plants, so we still have plenty of those to enjoy.

"And that's not all ," B. adds. "Remember those new lettuce seedlings that I planned to plant, but never got round to? We would have lost those too!" For sure....

...every cloud has a silver lining!