Food - Lewes Farmers’ Market

The July weather is frankly barmy - and it’s no friend to potato growers. I spoke to Bryony Elliot from The Potato Shop, based in the Morghew Estate, Tenterton, who tells me that if the rain continues, “the ground may be too soggy to drive into the field to pick our new crop of Nicola potatoes”. Nicola is a popular waxy variety that Bryony hopes to bring, freshly dug, to Lewes Farmers’ Market this Saturday. Fortunately they have eleven other types of potato, including Lady Christl, a small salad potato, and an Irish variety called Orla. I start to wonder why these potatoes seem to be named after women, then I speak to Adrian at Barcombe Nurseries, who tells me they will be selling two new varieties of bean at the Market. And guess what? The purple French-style bean is called Blau Hilda, and the white, flat stringless bean is named Helga. Adrian tells me the purple bean plants have beautiful blue flowers, but the beans lose their colour after cooking. They are grown in greenhouses. Pesky bunnies have been nibbling away at the ones growing outdoors, apparently. My grandparents were almost self-sufficient in vegetables, and I remember the struggle to get beans picked in time before the young, juicy specimens turned, apparently overnight, into tough old ones. It was useful being small, hunting out the rapidly growing young beans hiding under leaves. We’d slice up, blanch and freeze those gran did not cook immediately for Sunday lunch, tossed in butter. EC