This is a piece I wrote for another magazine some time ago, and since I’m suffering a bit from double vision after having a cataract removed yesterday I thought I’d cheat a bit and re-publish it for a much wider readership.
“I wonder if I dare stick my head over the parapet to challenge several of the principles behind the tidy-up rules so beloved of allotment sites. Words like “rubbish” and “dumping” suggest that when we use them we have a clear understanding of what they refer to. I’m afraid I think this isn’t true in some cases. We allotmenteers are often inveterate recyclers and can’t pass a wooden pallet, a shower door or a glazed window frame without dragging it back to the site because we know “it’ll come in handy one day” The trouble is – as someone once wrote of Karl Marx’s rather evolutionary theory – the glorious “one day” of the last instance never seems to dawn. I’m intrigued to know how long a potentially useful item has to linger before it finally becomes proper rubbish. Imagine sending a team of lay-assessors complete with clip-boards to mark items seen (on a scale of one to ten of course) on their “state of rubbishness”. What about two assessors who disagree completely about a cardboard covered plot in autumn – is it a bold step in recycling and sustainability, or is it just dumped rubbish? When we moved on to our allotment ten years ago we found two bicycles in an abandoned compost heap. How long does it take to compost a bicycle? Where does an unkempt looking plot belong on the scale – a little untidiness around the edges? What if the untidiness includes ragwort|? Good for Cinnabar, moths bad for horses and cattle. Thank goodness there are no farm animals on site. What if it’s got creeping thistle? Couch grass, bindweed? Oh goodness we’d have to think about that! Well, let’s have an easy one; stinging nettles. Almost exclusive food plants to peacock, red admiral, small tortoiseshell, comma, and painted lady butterflies. If we run with the theory that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, then perhaps it’s permissible to remove them as long as we make provision somewhere else.
I see a lot of rewilding schemes where packets of commercial wildflower seeds have been thrown into a verge or the corner of a plot and left to their own devices. This summer we saw the lovely intense blue of cornflowers along the riverside. I’ll guarantee they won’t be there next year because this isn’t their natural habitat. Allotment soil is often far too rich for wildflowers that evolved on poor stony soil or in distant hills. To create true wildlife habitats could take years of preparation with several transitional states. So although it might suit our love of tidiness to clear the plots of weeds; as many as ten, ever-dwindling generations of wildflowers and their associated insects would struggle to survive. If we want to clear the plots of weeds we’ll need to start providing alternative food and shelter now because we’re in the midst of a mass species extinction already.
But what shall we do with the weeds? Annual weeds grow annually, it’s not rocket science. They usually set seeds – the nuisance seedlings that come up every year and which we hoe off our beds all too regularly. It’s the perennials like couch, creeping thistle, creeping anything in fact – tormentil, buttercup, and the pernicious bindweed that are hardest to deal with. And because some of them grow from rhizomes, the tiniest piece of snapped off root will soon grow again. So the only effective way of dealing with them is to dig them out – but the couch dives deep, metres deep in the ground and once it’s established we just have to grit our teeth and dig it out. But what then? We’d be mad to put it in our compost heaps because unless they’re seriously heated, they’ll just keep growing. Hot heaps are hard work, need continuous management and require lots of green material like grass mowings to keep them going. We’ve built California cylinders on our plot but even with the addition of gallons of what we’ll call human activator, they never really get going. Normal heaps never get hot enough to kill couch or bindweed and most of us land up with cold heaps that sit there sulking and do nothing.
So what do we do? If we take them down to the recycling centre they’ll probably wind up as landfill or be quietly burned in out-of-county incinerators. If we burn them in bonfires we’re going against current efforts to reduce pollution. If we all burn our rubbish we’ll cancel out all the CO2 being saved by the 20mph limit on the other side of the fence. But if we heap them up by the fence they’ll rot down naturally – if very slowly – mixed with prunings from fruit trees and return their goodness to the soil. Those rows will provide a safe shelter for a multitude of insects, invertebrates and small mammals. They could give living and sleeping space to slow-worms and hedgehogs, field mice and such like. They could provide for birds and the other larger mammals like foxes, badgers and even deer, all of which we’ve filmed passing through on the site.
We already have a wide strip of land next to the fence at the bottom of the site. These plots are heartbreakers because they’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a slope and they’re overshadowed by trees which keep the soil beneath permanently dry and in winter deny the soil any direct sunshine. New allotmenteers come and struggle for a season and then leave, demoralized and disappointed. These unrentable plots could be a part of a deliberate plan to create a proper but small wildlife and wildflower reserve. Coupled with shelter for the small beasties we could plant swathes of nectar rich pollinator plants and join with other green spaces up and down the river to increase the viability of the green corridor which is a bit narrow in places.
Every single reputable nature agency from the RHS to the RSPB is begging us to make more provision for wildlife in our gardens by leaving much more “untidy” space for it. There’s an old business saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast and it’s especially true for gardening where many of us were brought up to think that clean, weed free plots and straight lines were nature’s way. We’re gradually coming to realize that nature actually prefers, thrives on a bit of muddle and mess and neglect. So let’s have a think before we start clearing up. That abandoned piece of corrugated iron lying on the ground might – if we lift it slowly and carefully – have a slow worm under it. The weedy looking pond might welcome frogs or toads once more as they’ve been suffering from a fungal epidemic.
As to deciding what kind of wildflowers to grow, the cheapest and most reliable system is to wait and see what comes in on its own. Plants have been managing for aeons without our help and they’ll soon drop by. We’ve had innumerable wildflowers including half a dozen real rarities – unknown locally – some of them quite plain, like Bilbao’s fleabane this year, and some rather lovely ones like the Peruvian apple, the Irish version of Fumitory not to mention the very tall Hungarian mullein up near the gate. If I could put in a plea for just one plant it would be for an isolated clump of Bocking 14 comfrey that we could cut and steep to make the best tomato fertilizer ever. I know it smells like a dead sheep in a ditch but this first cross is sterile and doesn’t spread like most other comfreys. Thanks for reading this if you stuck it out to the end!”
