A hand holding a bunch of freshly pulled beetroot, leaves and roots still on, above the bed
Journal · From the Garden · August

The diamonds are hidden
among the flowers

Our garden looks like weeds with ambition. Look closer and dinner is standing between the amaranth and the cosmos. A walk through August, with a recipe at the end.

Christoph Neumann Journal · From the Garden Villa Oiva · Brandenburg August 2026 7 min read Auf Deutsch lesen

Anyone who visits us in August sooner or later asks the same question. Never loudly, more carefully, with a glance towards the beds: are you planning to tidy that up?

No. What looks from the outside like a bed somebody forgot is meant to look exactly like this. Tomatoes stand between cosmos, amaranth and mallow. Under the canopy of squash leaves the soil stays damp, even after a fortnight without rain. The fennel is flowering when it should long since have been cut, because the hoverflies need it. And we need the hoverflies against the aphids.

Harvesting here is not a job to be ticked off, it is a search. We set out with an empty basket and no real idea what will end up in it. Push a few leaves aside, bend down, look, and underneath lies a courgette that was not there yesterday. Our son is four and runs into the garden in the morning before he eats breakfast. He worked out what this place is for faster than most adults do.

In short

  • Our garden in Brandenburg is a permaculture garden, companion planted. Vegetables, herbs and flowers share the same bed instead of standing in separate rows.
  • It looks disorganised and it is not. The flowers bring in beneficial insects, the leaves shade the soil, and the food grows in between.
  • In August this bed gives us beetroot, courgettes, squash, purple climbing beans, tomatoes in five colours, cucumbers, chillies and a herb bed that never runs empty.
  • At the end of this piece there is a recipe made from exactly that: courgette fritters with herb quark and a warm bean and tomato salad. Serves four, 45 minutes, nothing you need a special shop for.
01 / First impression

It looks like weeds.
It is a larder.

A tidy vegetable garden has straight rows, dark bare soil between them and not one flower that was not planned. It looks good. It is also drier, more fragile and noticeably quieter, because almost no insect has a reason to come by.

Ours grows in every direction at once, and that is the decision. The tomatoes hang on an old slatted fence because the fence was already standing and holds the day's warmth well into the night. Beside them stands whatever suits them. At some point we stopped thinking in beds and started thinking in neighbourhoods.

Green oxheart tomatoes ripening on a weathered slatted wooden fence in the sun
Oxheart tomatoes on the old fence. Still green. Not for much longer.
The Villa Oiva house behind a wildly overgrown flower border under a blue sky
Seen from the house the border is a green wall. Seen from inside it is a vegetable garden.
02 / The diamonds

Search and
find

Courgettes are experts at hiding. Under their own leaves they are camouflaged so well that we have to look every three days. Wait a week and you no longer harvest a courgette, you harvest a club. These two were lying on the brick edge, half under clover. The day before there was nothing to see there.

That is where the pleasure lies. In a sorted garden the harvest is settled before you close the door behind you. Here every walk is a small search, and at the end there is a basket nobody would have planned. The menu writes itself on the way back to the kitchen.

Two striped courgettes lying on a brick edge among clover in the garden
Not there yesterday. Ripe today.
Dense flower border with red amaranth, cosmos and mallow in front of the house
Amaranth, cosmos, mallow. It looks ornamental. It is a canteen for hoverflies and wild bees.

The fennel is allowed to flower. For the kitchen it would be better to cut it first, but in August those yellow umbels are the busiest place in the whole garden. Hoverflies lay their eggs beside them, and a single larva eats several hundred aphids in a fortnight. Since we started leaving the fennel standing we have managed without anything at all against aphids.

Flowering fennel with yellow umbels backlit by the sun
Fennel in flower. The seeds go into the mill in September, the fronds go into today's salad.
A dense canopy of squash and courgette leaves covering the ground completely
The canopy of the squash. Underneath, the soil stays damp even after two weeks without rain.
What this bed gave us in August
  • Beetroot since June
  • Courgettes and squash daily
  • Purple climbing beans peak season
  • Cocktail tomatoes, red and yellow daily
  • Oxheart tomatoes from September
  • Cucumbers daily
  • Chillies from now
  • Fennel in flower, seeds in September
  • Sage, thyme, rosemary all year
  • Chives and parsley all year
  • Amaranth in flower
  • Sunflower seeds for the birds
03 / The herb board

What stays
all year

Vegetables have their two or three weeks. Herbs are always there, and they are the reason a handful of ingredients still turns into a dish. Sage, thyme and rosemary come through the winter in the bed without any help from us. We cut the chives and parsley back every few days and they return stronger for it.

If you take one single thing from this piece, take this: plant herbs. They ask for little, forgive a lot, and change a dish more than any expensive ingredient can.

Freshly cut herbs on a wooden board: spring onions, thyme, sage and rosemary
Spring onions, thyme, sage, rosemary. One walk through the garden, three minutes.
Sunflowers past their bloom with bowed heads and ripe seed discs
The sunflowers are done. We leave them standing, the seeds belong to the birds now.
04 / The basket

And then the menu
is decided

One basket of tomatoes in five colours, one basket of purple beans, a handful of herbs, two courgettes and a cucumber that grew for a day too long. That does not turn into a recipe from a book. It turns into dinner.

Two wicker baskets on the grass, one with mixed tomatoes and herbs, one with purple climbing beans
Two baskets, half an hour of looking.
A pile of purple climbing beans of the Blauhilde variety on wood Wicker basket with red and yellow tomatoes, a cucumber and green chillies
Left, the purple beans that turn green in the pot. Right, the rest of dinner.
05 / The recipe

Courgette fritters with herb quark
and a warm bean and tomato salad

A dish for a Tuesday evening in August, when three courgettes are sitting on the worktop and have to go. Fritters are about as German as it gets, they work every time, and children eat them without discussion. If you are feeding guests, put a second bowl of herb quark on the table and it becomes an occasion.

Serves4
Preparation25 minutes
Cooking20 minutes
DifficultyEasy
Ingredients
For the fritters
  • 800 gcourgettes
  • 1 tspsalt, for drawing out water
  • 2spring onions, finely sliced
  • 2eggs, medium
  • 100 gplain flour
  • 3 tbspfinely chopped herbs: parsley, chives, a few thyme leaves
  • pepper, freshly grated nutmeg
  • clarified butter or rapeseed oil for frying
For the herb quark
  • 400 gquark, 20 per cent fat, or thick Greek yoghurt
  • 4 tbspmilk
  • 1 bunchchives
  • ½ bunchparsley
  • 1small garlic clove
  • 1 tsplemon juice
  • salt, pepper
For the salad
  • 300 gpurple climbing beans, or green beans
  • 400 gmixed tomatoes
  • 1 tbspwhite wine vinegar
  • 3 tbspolive oil
  • 1 tspDijon or another medium mustard
  • 1 pinchsugar
  • 2 tbspfennel fronds or dill
  • salt, pepper
Method
  1. Coarsely grate the courgettes, mix with a teaspoon of salt and leave in a sieve for 20 minutes. This is the single most important step of the recipe, courgettes are almost entirely water.
  2. Meanwhile trim the beans and boil them in salted water for 8 to 10 minutes, until tender but still with bite. Drain, refresh briefly in cold water and drain well.
  3. For the quark, stir everything until smooth, grate the garlic in finely and season generously. Chill. It tastes better after twenty minutes.
  4. Squeeze the courgettes as dry as you possibly can with your hands, in batches. Mix with the spring onions, eggs, flour and herbs, season with pepper and nutmeg.
  5. Heat the fat in a pan over medium heat. Add a heaped tablespoon of batter per fritter, flatten it, and fry for 3 to 4 minutes on each side until golden. Drain on kitchen paper and keep warm in the oven at 80 degrees Celsius.
  6. For the salad, whisk the vinegar, mustard, sugar, salt and pepper, then whisk in the oil. Cut the tomatoes into wedges and toss with the still warm beans and the dressing. Scatter the fennel fronds over.
  7. Serve the fritters with the herb quark and the salad, ideally straight away and standing up, next to the pan.
Two things about purple beans. First: they turn green when you cook them. The violet pigment is water soluble and disappears after about a minute in hot water. That is normal, not a mistake. Second, and this matters: beans must never be eaten raw. Raw green and purple beans contain phasin and are toxic. Always boil them for at least ten minutes and they are perfectly safe.
  • I.SqueezeWell squeezed courgettes give crisp fritters, wet ones give soft pancakes. There is far more water in there than you think.
  • II.Medium heatMedium heat cooks them through and browns them evenly. Better a minute longer.
  • III.VariationGrate a beetroot coarsely into the batter. The fritters turn earthier and glow from the inside.
  • IV.The next dayCold, with a fried egg on top. Better than it sounds.
06 / Why we garden this way

Order you can
taste

Companion planting means putting plants that help each other side by side. Marigolds and tomatoes. Beans, which fix nitrogen in the soil, next to heavy feeders that use it up. Herbs among the cabbage, whose scent confuses the cabbage white butterfly. None of this is a new idea. It is how gardens worked before somebody invented the straight row.

The price is a bed that looks untidy. The gain is soil that holds water, a harvest that stretches over months instead of two weeks, and no spray for years. Plus a child who knows what a beetroot smells like the moment it comes out of the ground.

When you sit at our long table, most of what reaches the plate comes from exactly this muddle. It is not a concept we invented. It is simply what grows twenty metres further on.

Frequently asked

What people ask us
about the garden

Why does your garden look so wild?

Because it is companion planted. Vegetables, herbs and flowers share the same bed instead of standing in separate rows. The flowers attract hoverflies and wild bees, the leaves shade the soil and keep it damp, and roots of different depths use the earth more fully. What looks disorganised is a deliberate decision against the straight row.

What exactly is companion planting?

It means combining plants so that they benefit each other. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil and therefore sit well beside heavy feeders such as squash. Herbs among cabbages confuse the cabbage white butterfly with their scent. Flowering umbellifers such as fennel and dill draw in the insects that eat aphids. A useful side effect is that a pest never finds a whole bed at once.

Can you eat purple beans raw?

No, never. Raw green and purple beans contain phasin, a protein that causes nausea and vomiting even in small amounts and is dangerous for children. Cooking destroys it reliably. Ten minutes in vigorously boiling water is enough. Pour the cooking water away rather than using it.

Why do purple beans turn green when cooked?

The violet colour comes from anthocyanins, water soluble plant pigments. In hot water they dissolve out within a minute, the chlorophyll underneath shows through, and the bean is green. It is entirely normal and the taste does not change. The colour would only survive if the beans were eaten raw, which for the reason above is not an option.

How do you get courgette fritters really crisp?

The only real trick is drawing out the water. Grate the courgettes, salt them, leave them for twenty minutes and then squeeze them hard with your hands. Considerably more liquid comes out than you expect. After that, fry over medium heat in plenty of clarified butter or rapeseed oil and shape the fritters thin, so they brown outside and cook through inside.

What grows in your garden in August?

Beetroot, courgettes and squash, purple climbing beans, cocktail tomatoes in red and yellow, oxheart tomatoes that only ripen in September, cucumbers, the first chillies, fennel in flower, and sage, thyme, rosemary, chives and parsley. Plus amaranth and sunflowers, which never reach the plate but without which the rest would not grow as well.

Can we visit your garden?

The garden belongs to the house and is part of every celebration, every retreat and every stay with us. A garden visit on its own cannot be booked, but anyone sitting at our table eats what grew next door. The season runs from April to October.

About the author
Christoph Neumann

Photo designer and videographer with more than 25 years of professional experience across portrait, people, editorial and corporate work, as well as architecture and interior photography. Together with his family he runs Villa Oiva, an 1895 Jugendstil villa in Brandenburg whose permaculture garden supplies the kitchen of the house. Every photograph in this piece was made in that garden in August 2026. christoph-neumann.com

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