My mobile frequently sets up reminders of photos taken last year or further back. So after enjoying the unseasonably warm and sunny weather of the past few days this picture from March 2nd 2018 is a stern reminder that despite all signs to the contrary, spring – real spring – pays no attention to meteorologists and their neat labelling.
I get the same feeling listening to the news. The broadcast media seem to have decided, contrary to all common sense, that Covid Winter is now over and we can all sing the national anthem and get back to the good old days. Neither proposition is true., but we’re suckers for good news and we buy it in much the same way that we buy lottery tickets. “Hush”, we say to our cautious inner voices and hand over our fivers; so summoning my best schadenfreude, I will comfort the allotmenteers who lose their tender plants to a late frost because we’ve all done it. Shakespeare is such a good judge of character and I remind myself that falling for my own delusions is – ‘th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’; or, as a kindly funeral director said to a friend who almost slipped into an open grave and had to be grabbed by the arm while he was saying the commendation – “wait your turn, Sir – wait your turn!” Both spring and normal life will come in their own time, and meanwhile we are best advised to take reasonable precautions in both. For us today that meant feeling deeply uncomfortable in a long queue at the garden centre and then putting protective screens and fleece over all those plants that need shelter from the next three days of cold East winds.
Windscreens can be a bit complicated. We’re lucky on our plot that we’re protected from the prevailing wind by a line of tall leylandii trees. For east and northeast winds there’s no protection at all and so we’ve got a collection of nets, screens and meshes that can be pressed into service. Counterintuitively, solid screens can be less helpful than those that just slow the wind down. In extreme gusts, solid screens can crash down and crush the plants they’re supposed to be protecting. They can also create damaging eddies – think of a wave curling over a breakwater and crashing downwards on the sand, so mesh is often more effective. Screens offer protection to about four times their height, and in some situations where prevailing winds frequently cause damage, it might be better to think about a hedge. We’ll see whether today’s efforts help us. Last year’s late frost decimated potato haulms all over the allotments but we covered ours with fleece cloches and although some leaves touching the fleece were damaged, the crop was saved. At this time of the year the weather forecasts are the most important part of our daily plans.
The good news was that I managed to get two more 250 litre (50 gallon) water butts to bring our total storage up to 1750 litres. People may think we’re mad, but the time to prepare for a drought is when it’s raining. We’ll harvest water from the row of compost bins and possibly from the polytunnel roof as well. I have a cunning plan to use a bilge pump to fill our watering cans from the stored water. The barrels are going to be half buried in the ground to line up with the gutters. The only certainty during this oncoming and accelerating climate crisis is that weather is going to become more extreme and so we need to equip ourselves for extreme cold, long periods of drought, and ever more damaging storms.
Of course, if we do nothing to end our abuse of the earth, then there will be no effective precautions against collapse, so we don’t just need to store water and build fences, we need to minimise the lifestyles and excessive consumption that are causing it.
I do know – before anyone (Rose) points it out – that Shakespeare’s sonnet, (129) which I’m abusing just a bit is not about gardening, but lust. However at my age, gardening does very nicely most of the time, thank you.
