We walk into the supermarket or log on to Amazon and it’s all there; the cornucopia, the works – everything the contented human being could possibly want. Except in times of scarcity, after snow or flood or during an epidemic when the shelves are empty and then we’re angry.
Yesterday we had a light frost. We walked down the steep slope to the allotment and the sun – we are almost at the winter solstice – transits behind a row of trees low in the sky – was unable to warm the soil on any of our plot. The overnight temperature according to the trailcam was 2C.
Our culture directs our instincts to want to take control. We have come to believe that each of us – apart from losers who don’t count – is some kind of tabula rasa on which we are free to inscribe whatever we want; fulfillment, creativity, success; even new and more attractive silicone lips. If you can be bothered you can easily test my hypothesis by counting how many times the word control crops up in an evening’s TV ads. Without adequate control, we are all smelly, leaky and horribly unattractive, betrayed by our unforgivable lack of the Big C which is always available – at a price – from a retailer near you.
The sad truth of course is that by the time you’ve been programmed to aspire harder and show the world who you really are it’s too late. You’ve already lost who you really are to the expensively curated simulacrum who gloats back at you in the mirror and demands more, more, and yet more.
If allotmenteering is even remotely therapeutic, as is universally claimed but rarely actually tested; it’s closer to psychoanalytic psychotherapy than that it is to happy days in the sunshine. We are not blank canvases and neither is the earth. Just as we have no retrospective agency with our appearance or with our childhood and past history, neither has the earth. The question we have to take to each session is – “why am I as I am?” “Why do I need to take control all the time?” and for any allotmenteer, and I know this may sound ridiculous, “why do I have such a complicated relationship with this patch of earth?” Why do weeds upset me so much? Why do I have this boundless fear of rats but not – let’s say – hedgehogs? Why did I feel I had to destroy anything that occupied my [?] allotment when I moved on to it. Why am I so obsessively protective of its boundaries? Why do I want so much to kill pests. What is it about badgers that I like most of the time, until they eat my sweetcorn?
If you look at the photograph at the top of this post, you may recognise one of the the tracks up the Blackdown ridge on Mendip. If by some mischance you were to inherit this lovely patch of earth you could decide to grow almost anything. You could decide but you wouldn’t succeed because this land has history; millions of years of it. Once upon a time it was at the bottom of the sea but now it’s at the top of a range of hills. The point where I stood when I took the photograph is above a deep layer of carboniferous limestone, and likely way under your feet there are still undiscovered cave systems. Rod’s pot, Read’s cavern are entered just beyond and below the horizon. Walk on half a mile and (unless you know your plants) you’d never know that you are standing on a cap of acidic sandstone. What will grow on one substrate won’t grow on the other so none of your controlling instincts will prevail. You’ll just have to go with the soil.
Our allotment is on the kind of soil called “clay loam” – we easily checked that with open source maps. This soil – when it’s in its natural state – will bind together in a ball due to its clay content. It’s naturally quite fertile but it can be hard to work when it’s dried out and you shouldn’t trample all over it when it’s wet. This immediately suggests working the allotment in beds, sufficiently narrow to reach from both sides. We also built deep paths filled with wood chip to drain away surplus water. We even tested the soil for pH – it was somewhere near the middle between acid and alkaline. Vegetables have strong preferences regarding soil types and where they prefer to grow. It sounds complicated but the point is that you can’t raze it flat and then flip through the seed catalogues hoping to grow anything you fancy. You have to negotiate if you don’t want to fail. We’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a steep slope; that’s a problem. On the other hand we’re sheltered from the prevailing South-westerly winds by a row of trees. The plots at the top get a lot more sunshine but their sheds regularly blow down. We have to carry everything down a narrow path to our plot, but we’re pretty well out of sight from the main track which makes it so much easier for compost deliveries and thieves. Control is a fantasy when it comes to growing on an allotment. We can’t order the weather, put up notices to forbid allium leaf miner or asparagus beetle, or plan surpluses of apples which might, like this season, bless us and in others fail to appear or suffer from codling moth.
What goes on invisibly and under the surface of the soil is almost miraculous. Some thuggish plants will even resort to subterranean poisoning to get their own way while tiny nematodes and the smallest slugs can chomp away at the roots of your vegetables: …. “And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum!” 95% of plants apparently have fungal relationships; none of these are visible to us, but their invisibility can’t make them invulnerable to the onslaught of chemicals we use to assert our control over pests and diseases, and I saw in the newspaper today that climate change and global heating are dramatically increasing the spread of pests and diseases, not to mention extreme weather events; storms and heatwaves. Fungicides and pesticides with artificial fertilisers have wrought havoc with the soil structure and depth. The earth is not a blank canvas and we can’t do as we please to it without compromising our own existence.
I recall a couple of farming proverbs that we’d do well to pay attention to:
Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, farm as if you’re going to live forever
The farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer
If allotmenteering is therapeutic at all it’s in the way that it teaches us a kind of humility – the root of the word refers to humus the condition of the earth, the soil. Don’t try to control; accept, even embrace failure and success as two sides of the same coin. The urge to subdue, to dominate and to control isn’t new, it goes back to the creation myths of the Old Testament as does the subjugation of Eve to Adam. We reject the second of those myths and we should equally turn away from the first.
Have you ever noticed that gardeners are often really nice people? Is it the therapy of crumbling the earth between your fingers, watching a robin feed on grubs you’ve just exposed and watching the clouds for rain ? or is it perhaps the botox injections? Hmm – that’s a tough one!
