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So to begin with: how we saved the planet this week, or to be precise, how Keith, Peter and I did, or anyway made it a slightly better place to live. We made a terrific tomato sauce.

The aim was to reproduce an utterly delicious sauce that I discovered in a deli on Clifton Gardens about twenty years ago. This involved much cooking, many tasting sessions, and lots of deliberation. One of the things I like about Pete and Keith, in fact all the staff, is that they are really enthusiastic about getting a thing right.

Anyway, I’m pleased to say that what we’ve got now is pretty much it, and you might wonder what all the fuss was about, because there’s so little to it. On the other hand, it is so unlike the stuff that comes out of jars, you might think it was worth the effort. More life enriching FOOD! Next Saturday morning (June 14th) SPIT ROAST ORGANIC LAMB will be sizzling outside the shop, ready for you to put into a roll. We will serve it from about eleven clock onwards.

The lambs, like most of the meat in the butchery, come off the farm. They taste really, really good. We’ve had roasts for the last couple of weeks and they went so well we’ve decided to do more. My excitement at our first asparagus was huge, in inverse proportion in fact to the size of the crop. Next May there will be more, as the plants become more productive.

Other firsts to look forward to this year are organic strawberries, raspberries, and gooseberries. Anything that adds to the diversity of the farm gives everyone on it a lot of pleasure. We now have a few geese, about thirty in fact, which will be with us until Christmas. Another thing we are trying to perfect, the perfectly simple burger. Like good tasting chickens, it’s a hard thing to come by. All it takes is good beef, a little oil, a touch of freshly ground pepper - no salt, salt dries out the meat, no rusk. Plain, it may be, but cooked properly, i.e. left pink in the middle, it’s great.