Walk into a well-stocked farm shop in October and you’ll find a tableau of squash that makes supermarket produce aisles look timid by comparison: butternut alongside Delica, Crown Prince next to Red Kuri, Spaghetti squash… 

The first British strawberry of the season — a proper one, small and fragrant and warm from the polytunnel air, sold in a punnet at a farm shop in early June — is one of… 

October arrives with an abundance that can feel overwhelming. The root harvest — parsnips, celeriac, swede, carrots, beetroot, turnips — comes all at once, and the instinct is simply to buy what’s there without thinking… 

Before refrigeration, before canning, before most of what we now think of as food preservation — there was fermentation. The process requires no heat, no specialist equipment, and very little skill. What it requires is… 

The exercise is simple: spend Saturday morning at the farmers’ market without a list, buy only what looks exceptional, and build the week’s meals from that. This is how people cooked before supply chains made… 

Walk through a deciduous woodland in April and you’ll smell it before you see it — a sharp, green, garlicky perfume that fills the air on warm mornings. Wild garlic, or ramsons, carpets the ground… 

Rhubarb has a peculiar quality among spring ingredients: it tastes nothing like the season. Where asparagus and peas taste green and fresh and alive, rhubarb is tart, almost confrontational. It demands sugar to become approachable,… 

There is a moment every spring — usually somewhere between the first warm week and the last frost — when asparagus appears at the market and everything else loses its urgency. The spears come up…