Category: Food

Strawberries choose their own spot

I glanced on this subject in yesterday’s post when I was writing about the temptation to try to control nature on our allotments – encouraged, as always, by the siren voices of the agrochemical industry who want to sell us snake oil cures for every problem. So today I want to expand on a part of that argument by writing about strawberries, and more specifically about a bed of strawberries which – despite being dug up and moved – sent out scouts and moved slowly year by year until the plants found a place where they were happy and able to thrive. One of the most interesting discussions that I’m following at the moment frequently includes as a kind of “fact”, a plant’s inability to move to escape harm and to multiply. Where other life forms can make themselves look dangerous and unappetising to predators, plants are literally rooted to the ground.

Except, of course they can move, very slowly, season by season like our little strawberry patch until they find exactly the right spot. The strawberries in the photograph were initially planted out as runners in the space now filled by fruit bushes. They never did very well there so after a couple of seasons we took runners off them and discarded the mother plants so we could replant somewhere else. Over a period they’ve occupied a number of spaces chosen by us but never really thrived until they took their own destiny in hand and set off in search of strawberry nirvana. And they moved some ten feet and crossed a wood chip path (unnoticed by us) and set up shop at the western side of the polytunnel where they’ve begun to thrive. The photograph shows how they move by sending out stolons (runners) which root wherever they find a space. Earlier this year I figured out what was going on so I cleared the adjoining border of weeds, loosened the soil and fed it, pegged a couple of the runners to encourage the others and – as you see – they’re invading the empty space with enthusiasm. The narrow bed they’ve chosen is sheltered from the damaging and cold winter northeasterlies, and is well watered by rain running off the tunnel, and all we needed to do was to watch and learn while the strawberries showed us what they need.

Over the years this kind of thing has happened over and over. A patch of borage comes and goes, a buddleia dropped in from nowhere; even a rare form of Fumaria appeared from who knows where along with an Apple of Peru, Nicandra physalodes. Our asparagus bed never produced a decent crop in spite of our efforts to create a perfect environment and so we gave up and this year had a lovely crop of new potatoes from the same bed. The takeaway point of all this is that the plants know their preferences better than we do. The best way of learning how to grow food is to watch and learn from the plants themselves. Of course it’s easier and quicker to sow seeds in grow-bags and water them with plant food, but the resulting plants are often weak and vulnerable to attack by predators.

All this boils down to our 21st century obsession with speed, efficiency and above all – control. It’s as if we’re frightened of nature and her processes because we don’t really understand them. It’s an ideology that affects every aspect of our lives But in order to thrive, the needs of plants are not so very different from our own. We just need enough sunshine and rain, enough good food, enough shelter and enough basic care to see us flourish.

But there’s another component that we, as humans, need almost as much as we need the other material things – and that’s joy and wonder. Plants may not be able to move very fast, but they can respond to touch, they can shape-shift to catch the light, or respond to drought, they can attract or repel using the most complex chemical processes and they can embody the kind of beauty that feeds our need for joy. Sometimes, when I water a thirsty plant I can almost hear a grateful response, even if sometimes the thank-you takes all night to process.

An allotment or a garden isn’t just a place to grow things, it’s a place to grow us as well; even the lowliest cabbage can demonstrate the difference between thriving and failing. It’s not all plain sailing. This is the season when we have a great deal of produce stolen off the plots. Our neighbour had her entire crop of figs stolen yesterday and another lost all her broad beans. Sometimes I desperately want to believe in karma, but thieves can only take the bare husks of the beauty of growing. Ninety percent of the value of the crop is in the tending of it.

Sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

Astra inclinant, non necessitant

The Latin quotation under the photograph is translated as – “The stars dispose but do not compel”. Notwithstanding Amos Starkadder’s wonderfully funny sermon to the Quivering Brethren in the novel “Cold Comfort Farm” – “You’re all damned!” -(if you haven’t read it or seen John Schlesinger’s film you’re missing a treat); but there’s a great lesson for gardeners in the proverbial saying because the best we can ever do when we grow things is to dispose them to succeed. If you’re an organic grower then disposing your plants to grow well needs foresight, planning and patience plus a lot of compost. This morning we picked our first crop of Victoria plums from the tree we planted in 2020 the apples were quicker, but the pears are at least fattening up whilst the damsons seem to fall off too early. The pests are better at judging the moment than us. Badgers, for instance, always stole our sweetcorn the day before we were going to pick it. Nowadays we protect it by growing it in the polytunnel. The agrochemical industry wants us to believe that their products can predestine plants to succeed; that we can transcend thousands of years of human experience and spray the latest chemical (let’s call it Compel!) to dodge nature altogether. It’s a lie. There’s no other way to describe it.

I once spotted a book in an Oxfam shop called “The Half hour Gardener”, but it wasn’t so much the title as the author’s name which caught my eye. She is the daughter of a woman I once worked with and lost touch with back in the community arts days, and when we went to hear her daughter speak soon afterwards at an allotments association AGM she pretty much admitted the half-hour suggestion was a bit of a stretch. Even if it were possible you’d still fall foul of the weather regularly through a whole year of allotmenteering. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too busy, too knackered, too fed-up; the fact is, gardening is hard work. It may be true – in fact it is true – that gardening is deeply rewarding, but the reward is inevitably separated from the pain by a matter of months if not years.

Today, for instance, the temperature is in the mid twenties after weeks of dry weather punctuated by one, just a single but tremendous, thunderstorm and we’re about to enter our second heatwave in a month, and so we water. And when I say we water that means carrying dozens of watering cans each weighing twenty pounds down a rickety ankle busting path from the communal water trough to the dry beds. On a good day I could water the whole plot in about three hours but that presupposes that no-one else is watering at the same time, so on those occasions exquisitely delicate and silently mimed negotiations take place near the trough. The growls are never vocalized but we all understand the implications. Neighbours are neighbours after all and we don’t want water wars to break out.

The forecast is predicting even hotter weather on the way and I desperately need to dig over and prepare a large 5’x 12′ bed which has become infested with bindweed and we need to plant out purple sprouting broccoli there by the end of the week. We don’t generally dig, but occasionally the bindweed or couch grass migrating in from the paths need teaching a lesson and digging it out is the only way that works. The only plausible time to do it will be in the cool of the very early morning before the builders turn up to finish the work to eliminate black mould in the flat.

NB linen suit

Any dreams of shimmying through the allotment filled with delicious produce in weedless beds (wearing my linen suit and panama hat) seem to evaporate like the morning dew. Try as I will to look on the bright side at 5.00am, or mid morning when I need to walk up an icy hill to knock the snow off the nets before they break, takes a bucketful of optimism.

I’ll never forget the driving rain on the morning we dug holes to set the uprights in their anchors for the polytunnel. It was raining so hard I had to bolt the uprights in a foot of freezing muddy water which had filled the holes because they were below the water table that day. During COVID when everyone had time and energy the allotment site looked wonderful, but work and families had to come first when it ended, and it was sad to see their hard work so quickly overgrown with weeds. It demonstrated two important things about running an allotment; you might say two sides of a coin. On the one hand it takes time – quite a lot of time – to grow an allotment but on the other hand, COVID demonstrated that so many people were up for the challenge if only the time and opportunity were there.

The upside

I’m absolutely not trying to argue here that suffering is its own reward. We had enough of that in Sunday School; but that it’s worth a few wet days, tingling blue hands and cold feet to pick something delicious from a plant or tree that you nurtured through the droughts, the cold north-easterlies and the Azores highs to the day you cut it, warm from the sun, and take to the kitchen. Yesterday I sautéed the first batch of courgettes in butter and oil until they were just beginning to caramelize on the cut edges. No more than an hour from plot to pot. A few weeks ago we were scratching about for something fresh to eat on the allotment but now it’s in full flow, overflowing with gifts. The only response to it is sheer gratitude. I once thought I knew who to thank for it all, but these days I feel more comfortable offering my thanks to the Cloud of Unknowing; “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” After all, what’s a few hours of enjoyable work compared with the brightness and depth of tomato sauce made at home in the kitchen, or corn whose milk is still sweet, or borlotti – the winter banker for soups. We may be hard-up and scruffy but we live like royalty.

This is a secret!

Yesterday went well. We got up early and gave the polytunnel and some of the most vulnerable transplants a good soaking in anticipation of the forecast hot weather. The plan was to drive over to the campervan storage site and make sure that the recent torrential thunderstorm hadn’t leaked in through the roof as it did last time we were away; but the van was bone dry and the battery was fully charged by the additional solar panel. So we transferred the bedding to the car for a good airing at home and found ourselves with time to spare. We’d booked a table at a favourite country pub so I rang ahead and asked if it would be OK to arrive an hour early. It was fine by them – they’re really nice people – and so we drove over straight away in the mid-day heat, looking forward to a (zero alcohol) cold beer.

I’m hesitating to name the pub in question because I don’t do reviews or expect anyone to be influenced by the pieces I write and, in any case most of my readers don’t even live in the UK. I looked at the stats a few days ago and that day’s piece had been read by folks from about fifteen countries with the majority in the US. So while I write a bit more about food, I’ll think about giving out the name with no expectation of remuneration or even gracious thanks.

We didn’t start to travel in Europe until we were in our sixties, and it was a most liberating experience to drop into random cafés and restaurants that looked as if they might have something local on the menu at a price we could afford. We sat in a café routier once, eating lunch whilst driving down through the Cévennes. The food was good but not memorable and the real joy of it were the large butterflies feeding on the Buddleia tree behind us. They looked just like Camberwell Beauties – awesome. Near Avignon we ate often in a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere where the owner always addressed me as Monsieur Paul. Just down the road was a restaurant ferme where we all got happy drunk and played football with a melon as we walked back to the campsite accompanied by the perfume of ripening grapes and attended by fireflies. Our teenage son wrote amorous messages to the waitress and posted them on paper darts. In Uzès I ordered foie-gras in a cafe and the waiters were so delighted see an Englishman try it they came out to watch. This is a confession by the way. That was my first and last taste. Eating local delicacies can backfire too. I shared a tripe sausage with our youngest in a motorway cafe near Lyon and we gave up after a single bite! We once ate a whole enormous tureen of vegetable soup while walking the Camino – it was delicious and so simple although I’ve never been able to replicate it.

These restaurants, and we’ve stumbled across them across Europe in Spain, Italy and France haunt our memories. We once passed a restaurant in the Accademia in Venice where every table had a reserved sign. We stuck our heads around the door to book the next day and the owner instantly removed all the little signs and welcomed us in like old friends. We stayed until late drinking brandy with the boss, and he insisted that we went back the next day because his wife – a tall and slightly forbidding woman with a Venetian nose – was cooking a rabbit ragu. There was no menu, no choice and it really was beautiful.

It’s a shame that such experiences are vanishingly rare in the UK. The mid-range affordable restaurant offering lovingly and freshly cooked food is as rare as hen’s teeth. Two of our sons are professional chefs and both say that the trade can’t seem to attract young chefs trained and willing to work in such highly stressful environments. Long hours and low wages have hollowed out the labour force, and high overheads have driven standards ever lower. Too many of their managers have trained in the Gordon Ramsay charm school and both have endured bullying from well qualified MBA’s who wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. Enough!

I’ve decided to name the pub because they’ve bucked the trend and recruited a brilliant kitchen team. The pub is the Cross House in Doynton – do Google it and try it out if you’re near Bath or indeed East Bristol. Yesterday the sun was shining, the restaurant was comfortably quiet, and the kitchen worked quietly in the background (always a good sign). We started with shared scallops and a smoked haddock fishcake, followed by pan fried Sea Bass, potato rosti with a salad and a green sauce flavoured with peas and with spinach. I’ll come back to the fish. Then I had panna cotta with a faintly lavender flavour and Madame had summer pudding and then I finished up with a good treacly black espresso.

But going back to the fish, the skin was crisp – I love fish skin when it’s properly cooked and I always eat it, but there was an ingredient in the dressing that I couldn’t identify. I asked the owner and she said it was just coriander. But it wasn’t those chewy, fibrous seeds that we buy in the supermarket – it was perfumed, floral, citrus and wonderful. Eventually with a bit of forensic work on the plate we worked out that it was fresh green coriander (Cilantro) seeds, like the ones we have every year on our allotment. The ones in the photograph at the top. It was a revelatory first experience of an ingredient I’ve never cooked with. Driving home through the quiet Cotswold lanes we could have been back in one of those places in France. Obviously we stopped off at the allotment on the way home and gathered a crop of a few ounces of berries- enough to freeze and use the whole summer. Even eaten raw they taste great, but give them a little bit of heat and they develop a symphonic flavour. Wow!

I realize I’m treading on dangerous territory here; as if I’m auditioning for Pseud’s Corner so here’s a picture of me somewhere in Southern France just to seal the deal. I should say, though that just up the hill from where I’m standing we stopped off at a very run down cafe/hotel and got into a long conversation with the English owner. He brought out a local dry cured sausage to share with us, and as he told us about his (somewhat dodgy ) plans for the future a man passed us with a huge tray of freshly picked morels. We didn’t stop to enjoy them because we still had some miles uphill to walk. I should also say that the word “poseur” has two meanings in French. The first meaning describes a man who irons his jeans and the second refers to a tradesperson who sets things – say paving stones or tiles – into position. There’s even a feminine form “poseuse” . You can see the steep wall of a quarry behind me and I wonder if the poseurs in question were the workers who laid the nearby railway line from Paris to Marseille. That’s a railway journey I’d still love to make and we’d be sure to stop overnight at the Hôtel Terminus in Cahors where we had another of those meals that haunt us still.

God I’ve aged! – still wearing the same shirt today, though!

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

Well we arrived back in Bath on the Sunday before the heatwave struck, and after 2 weeks of rain in Cornwall we were just as trapped by the searing temperatures and – (ask any gardener) – under the cosh of constant watering. The only time to water in a heatwave is as early as you can bear to get up – in our case it was five am, because sleeping at all at 20C is a bit of a struggle. An early start gives you the very best of a fiercely hot summer’s day; much better than the evening when the earth is scorching. But nature doesn’t stand still just because you want a break. We left the allotment in good order but two weeks later the weeds were roaring and we had a battle on our hands.

There’s only one way to do this, and it’s to blitz the plot systematically from one bed to the next until it’s all as clear of weeds as it ever can be. If you’ve been watching Springwatch on the BBC and looking at the weary parents of fledgling birds endlessly feeding their ever more demanding family, you’ll have some idea what it feels like to clear an allotment that’s got above itself. The grass path that you should have strimmed before you went away is now three feet high in Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass, Couch and rough Meadow grass. I’m showing off a bit with the names there because Cornwall gave me a great deal of time to “do the grasses”

But doing the grasses involved a lot of work with the Olympus TG-7 camera because so much grass identification demands high quality macro photos which is far from simple in a windy situation when your subject is waving around. It’s a difficult skill to learn and demands that you step away from that comforting auto setting and get down and dirty with shutter speeds, flash values and f-numbers. Oh and I was also trying to develop a new step by step recording procedure – which I’ve bored you enough with already. Progress was slow. And that’s all I’m going to say. So with photographic experiments, learning new plants and weeding, the Potwell Inn has had to go on the back burner for a few days.

I said several weeks (weeds?) ago that the allotment had suddenly matured, and the top left photograph took me by surprise with an unexpectedly emotional reaction. I think I’d been strimming a weedy and grassy path, and it reminded me of my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns where the garden paths always gave me a sense of delight; always verdant and closely mown. And then the photo looking along the plot and beyond the polytunnel seemed as if it expressed something of that childhood wonder – the chairs, the little pond and the sheer energy of the plants and running down the path to the greenhouse with my sister to see Charlie the toad. The trees we planted in Covid year are all in fruit now, and with the hungry gap over we’re eating our own produce. I think you have to treat allotmenteering as work -but not the grinding boredom of routine, but the utterly rewarding work of knowing what needs to be done and just getting on with it. It teaches you patience and resilience – we left the broad bean crop for a couple of weeks and when we got back the whole crop had been eaten and the plants were suffering from some kind of rust. Tomorrow we’ll pull them up. Cool weather plants don’t enjoy heatwaves any more than we do.

And in what counts as a pretty low-level flash of inspiration, I discovered (on my hands and knees but not praying) how important edges are to the appearance of an allotment. Add that to another feature that only comes with time – I mean scale here – the allotment looks grown up because it’s literally grown upwards and whichever way you turn and move, new vistas open up. Neither of us wants regimented rows in the way that some of our old 1940’s allotment books showed – all rows perfectly straight – and few of us can afford to imitate Gertrude Jekyll in her archly curated informality; but just a few delineating lines and paths along with a scattering of sheds, trees, texture and colour but never forgetting an offering of plants for the pollinators – that’s a living, breathing, tactile work of art. It’s a conversation with nature.

Speaking of which, the photo below shows the tough side of nature. I’m no entomologist but my ever available phone app thinks it’s a very deceased Southern Hawker dragonfly nymph which has been killed (and this is a guess) by a zombie fungus, (probably Cordyceps) which you can see growing out of its scales. With a twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe the fungus takes over and consumes the living creature, leaving the brain until last, when the dying Dragonfly is induced to climb to a point high on a poolside plant and grip the leaf in its jaws in order better to spread its spores. Oh glory! That’s going to keep me awake!

Where’s Wally?

A vibrant patch of wildflowers and greenery by the seaside, featuring pink and white blossoms among lush foliage, with a calm sea in the background.
Coastal undergrowth on Roseland

We were sitting on a bench, resting after a bit of a hilly stretch on the coast path and I was squinting closely at a tiny fragment of leaf when a small group of walkers passed us. “What have you found?” one of them asked. “I’m just checking out this plant that I may have misidentified” “It’s Hedge Bedstraw”, one of them said. It was a friendly – we’re all in this together – kind of remark that instantly established a common bond. “I don’t think it is”- I replied – “I think it may be Heath Bedstraw because there are tiny forward-pointing prickles on the leaf. This is the kind of thin, acidic soil they grow on”. We were all set, then, for a long (and for Madame and the rest of the group) tedious hyper focused discussion when another walker standing at the back of the group said. “There’s a Hummingbird Hawkmoth!” – pointing behind us. We all stopped whatever we were thinking about and turned to where the the speaker was pointing. And there it was; I’ve never seen one before so it was a bit of a moment to see this oddly beautiful creature whose wings moved so fast they were not much more than a blur. Then there were five of us eagerly following the path of the moth as it foraged among the coastal plants, oblivious to us it seemed. Moths have had this capacity to evolve towards seemingly endless recklessly stunning forms and patterns. It’s hard not to think of some kind of artist lovingly creating them. Madame grabbed my phone from me and attempted to take some photographs but couldn’t get close; held back by thick brambles.

Our cheerful conversation continued and then we went our separate ways having – all of us – learned something new. Back at the campervan I just had to double check my already double checked identification and keyed out the piece of Bedstraw in my pocket (it’s a way of naming a plant by answering a series of either/or questions until the name pops out at the end). Yes it was Heath Bedstraw. Then I googled Hummingbird Hawkmoth and discovered that Hedge Bedstraw is one of its food plants; that’s to say it will lay its eggs on them for the hatching caterpillars to feed on. Interestingly it was hovering around clumps of the related Heath Bedstraw so maybe it’s not that fussy. One of the things I find most difficult to live with is the sheer provisionality of all wildlife records. It’s true until someone discovers that it’s not.

And that’s the trouble with this natural history malarky – it can get wildly out of control with those of us disposed towards intense attachments – let’s call them obsessions or addictions. Later, and wakeful in bed, I mentally rehearsed the various species of Bedstraw I’d seen, and where I saw them. That was fun, and there were five species spread across North Wales, Mid Wales, Pembrokeshire, Bath and Cornwall. Madame woke up and asked if I was OK? 3.00am is a bad time for those kinds of discussion – at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and we’d had a good day’s wandering about; pub lunch; a couple of excellent finds and a major step forward with the breakthrough discovery that I could load WAV audio recordings files of plant findings straight into Notebook LM which positively relishes English plant names and Latin binomials issuing gentle corrections and straightening out misunderstandings. All my previous doubts have been resolved, and I’ve got a functioning workflow at last.

I know this is problematic for some, but Notebook LM is rapidly becoming my pocket tutor and data organiser. Oh, and I also made progress with identifying some new grasses and that meant getting to grips with identification keys – PLUS our youngest moved into his new flat after being evicted by a (barely Christian) charity under one of those noxious Section 21 orders, now abolished due to abuse. We also met some heartwarmingly nice people with whom we shared many interests and the Potwell Inn human kindness index leapt up three points, something of a record. We rarely listen to the news when we’re away.

What’s happening on the allotment while we’re here? Well we gave it a deep watering, especially in the polytunnel, before we left and there are a couple of allotment neighbours who have promised to keep an eye on things. Every day we scan the weather forecast and wonder what will be happening on our patch of earth. Bath is situated in the steep sided valley of the River Avon and surrounded by the outliers of the Cotswolds, which means that rain tends to fall on the hills rather than in the valley. But then, we’ve also often had heavy showers at home and discovered that the allotment – only 800 yards away – is still dry. The most accurate forecast amounts to looking through the window. Madame retains a passion for isobars, warm and cold fronts and all the rest which she gained at the research station where it really mattered, and thousands of trees could lose their blossoms to a sudden frost.

We even have some allotment planning software on my laptop and we’ve spent one rainy morning here bringing it up to date. Does that make us into a couple of old saddo’s ? Ask us that when we’re eating just-picked peas that make the frozen ones taste like bin waste; and ask us again when you taste one of our tomatoes just harvested and hot from the sun, or sweetcorn from the polytunnel that would make a badger faint with pleasure. As with every other human pursuit, the more we practice, the harder we work, the happier we get; so thanks for asking ….. we’re not saddo’s!

It rains every day in Cornwall and today is no exception and so I’m writing and Madame is reading a biography of the artist Gustav Klimt and reading aloud to me the bits she finds most interesting. I’m a man, so that’s the closest I can get to multi-tasking.

Our allotment just grew up

A wooden raised garden bed filled with dark soil, surrounded by plants and trees in a garden setting.
The final set of four raised beds

The ambiguity in that title was entirely deliberate. It was some time last year when we were standing on the allotment and I said to Madame – “It suddenly looks as if it has matured”. Whatever it is – possibly the fruit trees which have really got their roots down, but also the fact that all the wooden structures are greyed and in some cases needing replacing; the polytunnel is theoretically due a new skin which we can’t really afford, and somehow when you add it all up it looks as if it’s been around the block a few times and decided to settle down to middle-age.

Of course, looked at through the eyes of love (how else should you look at ten years of your gardening life?) – it’s what the scholars call a palimpsest. Back in the day when writing was an expensive luxury, the materials were used more than once and traces of a previous, older message, letter or even book could be discovered lurking faintly under the younger. It’s exactly the same for our grown-up allotment. Every bed, and almost every other structure is just the latest version of an older one; complete with previous soil level, old screws and joints betraying their previous history. Beds have been re-purposed and re-designated over the years and the soil improved with tons of compost and leaf mould. Where once there was a difficult mix of clay and loam, there’s a much more fertile, sweeter smelling and friable soil. Despite all our efforts to find the best place to grow strawberries they migrated without any intervention from us to a spot in the lee of the polytunnel where they’re completely happy. Who says that plants can’t talk!

The latest batch of four raised beds are actually the top of four deep compost bins that I sawed in half horizontally a few weeks ago because they’d become an unofficial dump. They’ll be replaced by a single California Cylinder made from two concentric rings of sheep wire filled with cardboard and with a rough and ready chimney driven through the middle. It’s an idea we got (I think) from Lawrence Hills and it works a treat and heats up fast with the help of what he called “human activator” and you can work that one out for yourselves. An alternative activator is comfrey liquid but be warned, it really stinks.

Recycling of old materials isn’t just virtuous, it’s cheap. The eight beds I’ve just finished cost the price of a few new screws and some additional topsoil and compost for the new growing layer. I saved all the original topsoil in bags – they were hellishly heavy – and filled the resulting holes with fresh vegetable waste, cardboard and wood chip, then I put the original topsoil back on top and augmented it. The good soil is now 18″ deep and will be perfect for growing show-off carrots and parsnips.

The only constant factor in an allotment seems to be the unexpected. Last year’s pepper plants bought from a garden centre turned out to be Scotch Bonnets. We now have a lifetime supply of dried chillies. Each season is spent in negotiation with the weather, and with climate change advancing rapidly the old certainties and folk rhythms are becoming redundant. This year, for instance May and June swapped places whilst April showers were in short supply, and all we can do is ride with the volatility of the weather.

And so we soldier on. The allotment is less tidy and yet more interesting as the years go on. Plants come and go – last autumn the Tayberry got a savage pruning and this year the blackberry has stopped sulking after two transplantings and is, at last, showing the will to live. When we first moved on to it as an unkempt field we thought of the plot as a blank canvas on which we could do as we pleased. In the fullness of time we’ve realized that we can only do as it pleases – which turns out to be a much happier experience. The asparagus bed went the way of all flesh and now hosts a crop of new potatoes. The approach we adopt is a form of informed imagining in which we propose an idea, dispose the place in which we want to grow it by preparing the ground and selecting the spot and then leave it to nature to say yea or nay. Some we win and some we lose and that’s OK too. Allotments, like their tenants have previous history. Ours was probably once part of a Roman vineyard and then a nursery and has probably been in some kind of cultivation for a couple of millennia. Going back even further the origin of our soil is alluvial clay and loam formed by the ebb and flow of the river as it cut its valley through the soft oolitic limestone. We dig up fragments of clay pipes abandoned by the Georgian gardeners and some time in the future some hapless archaeologist could puzzle over the multitude of sea shells that stowed away in the bags of seaweed we once brought back from Lleyn to feed the asparagus. We may think that we live in the moment but as gardeners we only thrive within and upon the past. Some of the plants we grow we choose, and some that grow just happened in on the wind, dropped by a bird or attached to a car tyre. All gardeners have to learn to rule kindly and lightly over their kingdoms. We may think of ourselves as owners of our plots but in truth they own us and we can do nothing except by their permission. As butterflies and migrant birds cross the channel sans passports and permits so too do seeds, insects, plant diseases and all of the thousand things that charm us and taunt us. Most of the troubles of the world are due to people who misguidedly believe in control. We bend with the wind if we want to grow crops while growing ourselves comes free but not cheap.

A few good things that gardening brings us without going full guru.

A close-up of a cluster of hollow plant stems, showcasing their circular openings and colourful outer layers, surrounded by green foliage and a garden backdrop.
This is a home made insect hotel made from Angelica stalks. No takers!

Instinctively; the statement that Being in Nature and gardening is good for us is a no-brainer. You’ll notice the grace bestowing capital B on Being. But that doesn’t stop me from asking “Where’s the evidence Dave? – especially since time in the bosom of nature is now available on prescription on the NHS. We can say that all too many new gardeners end up in A&E with fork through boot syndrome, or infected thorns; back trouble and even coronaries; so, like sleep remedies and strong painkillers, nature and gardening are probably approached cautiously being both addictive and potentially lethal.

However – and you knew that was coming – and speaking entirely for myself; controlled immersion seems to have some great side effects. I’m absolutely not trying to be an influencer here I’m simply saying how it works for me and if that’s an encouragement to anyone I’m delighted as long as you don’t overdo it. Thirty years ago I found a lovely and inspirational book about fitness for the over fifties and got my first gym subscription. I absolutely loved it, especially as I discovered that however sweaty and painful it got – it made me feel better. But our bodies and brains get older, slower and less reliable as time goes on and now, with 80 just a few months away Madame and I have a large allotment which involves a fair amount of lifting, carrying, digging and banging in posts all or any of which have exact equivalents in the gym. For what it’s worth, after a long fallow year with various complaints now fixed by the glorious NHS, the allotment has increased my strength and stamina and radically improved the arthritis – especially in my hands. The other unexpected side effect is that constantly negotiating narrow paths and beds whilst harvesting, hoeing and weeding have improved my balance. Gardening has made me feel well, and that soaks into my mood. Having plants to care for and particularly having agency in planning it, really is good for the soul – whatever that might be! And of course the allotment produces food; fresh lovely food uncontaminated by any chemicals at all and in all kinds of ways; once again the cooking and eating makes us feel good. So ten out of ten for doctor allotment. On a day like today with the sun on my back there’s no better medicine than preparing a patch of warm earth where we’ll grow winter squashes and a giant pumpkin for the grandchildren at hallowe’en .

The other work; reading, researching and recording the plants especially the waifs, strays and sturdy beggars that eke out an urban living between cracks in the pavement, keeps the brain active, curious and grateful for the sheer diversity of nature in cities. My childhood was spent playing on bombsites and derelict houses, old coalmines and abandoned brickworks so these plants were my first hefting. My second hefting took place in the very centre of this deindustrialized neighbourhood – on Rodway Hill, where I went to school and I explored an entirely different environment on the tiny cap of old red sandstone which, I now know, hosted a rare patch of lowland acid heath – the name of which I only discovered a few months ago. I was so delighted to discover that the harebells were diagnostic of habitats I grew to love in other places without ever knowing the reason they were related by an accident of geology. Yes, wild places are good for us as long as we allow ourselves time to wonder why they are as they are.

The key to it all is complete engagement with the wild and the reward is those flow moments when the world stands still and we escape our restless minds and let the earth do the talking. Whatever it is – this strange capacity of nature to bring us to our senses – it’s relational. Rather like falling in love we have to relinquish ourselves, step aside from our neediness and make space for the other. And that’s as far as I’m prepared to go down the narrow path to spirituality. True flourishing is so much deeper than simply doing well for ourselves. All of Aristotle’s virtues are learned and practiced through relationships and our biggest mistake is to believe that money and success can be a substitute for real happiness. That we can somehow shortcut around the messy and difficult business of relationships and avoid thinking at all about our place in nature. We are in nature, we are of nature and like the earth herself we are vulnerable and needy. If that thought troubles anyone I’n sorry; but if you find it comforting then you’re halfway there already!

25th May 2010

Scenic countryside with lush green fields, grazing cows, and rolling hills in the background.

So it’s sixteen years since Andrew and I reached the highest point on the Aubrac Hills in Southern France. We’d – well I’d – failed to realize during the planning, that following a river can be a bit of a nightmare because every tributary makes its own valley and the line on a map becomes a relentless combination of long downhill valley-sides and punishing climbs to the crest of the next. We’d also failed to realize that the Camino has been monetized like everything else and was crowded with trippers who filled the cafes restaurants and refuges while we were carrying our rucksacks and all our possessions and often struggled to find somewhere to sleep, We did a lot of trespassing!

A winding dirt path through green vegetation, leading to a panoramic view of rolling hills and valleys under a clear blue sky.

But the hard work was redeemed by the wonderful scenery, the wildflowers (spring comes late in these high places) and a chance encounter with the transhumance – the seasonal festival that accompanies the movement of the cattle from their winter quarters in the valleys to the high pastures. If you look closely at the photograph you’ll see the cattle and their horns decorated with flags. We heard the clanging of bells and the sounds of celebration from miles away. Festivals in France have deep, deep roots and with many of the local villages quite isolated, the chance of a gigantic piss-up feels like all their market days in one. We watched from a distance and camped outside the towns where the riotous fun seemed to go on all night. The maximum height of the Aubracs in the Massif Central is around 3000 feet but I think we must have climbed it half a dozen times before we finally dropped down to Cahors. Somewhere up there I overheard a conversation between a couple of immaculately turned-out women from Nice when they spoke in tones of horror about a couple of elderly farmers we’d seen . “La France profonde!” one of them said.

As it happens I like La France profonde for exactly the same reason I love Wales. The culture is often a bit obscure to outsiders but its very isolation has protected it from withering away, and even ceaseless promotion by the tourist boards can’t seem to erode the central power with which it feeds a deep connection with the past, present and even the future. It ain’t cute, that’s for sure, but it’s the cultural matrix that frames life in a harsh place.

25th May 2026 – the same canicule, but a couple of decades later

Here in Bath we grow some, at least, of our own food in the centre of a Roman city which feels – today in the unseasonable heat- increasingly like Avignon. We shall call it Sulis en Provence and – like them – lay down our tools some time in July and spend the next six weeks in idling, chasing bulls down the streets trying to catch them by the tail, wearing white T shirts stained with red dye as a form of simulated bravery and getting very drunk whilst eyeing up the adoring girls and presumably boys as well. We should join the festivities and play football with the plentiful melons by the light of thousands of fireflies and breathe in the wine infused night air as if we might live forever whilst the gammon faced elders scream abuse into the internet because they couldn’t find anywhere to park their Range Rovers on the pavement. Ladies and gentlemen – at the risk of being thrown into prison by Sir Keir and the Brigade of Goons I’ll quote Eldridge Cleaver – “If you’re not part of the solution you must be part of the problem”. Interestingly when I verified that quotation on Google Gemini I got a little homily on the middle ground . Sadly the middle ground is on fire. The time for discussion, committees and forward planning seems to have passed us by.

In any case, we’re keeping a Provenĉal timetable here at the Potwell Inn. Rising at five followed by two or three hours on the allotment – mostly watering at the moment – and then breakfast followed by cooking, preserving and bottling as required and then writing; after which it’s eating and telly, avoiding the poisonous news and early to bed. Nil Carborundum is our motto. I’m celebrating my inner peasant.

Finally some photos of various places in France including a small chapel just beyond Le Puy en Velay, A park in Uzes near the Roman aqueduct to Nîmes, The Musketeers outside the cathedral in Albi and below that, the fortified Cathedral. Then there’s a scorpion that came to play, the bridge at Cahors, a street corner in Nîmes – that’s from memory; the beach at Collure, and a couple more from Uzès.

It’s said that figs prefer stony ground and produce more fruit when you prune their roots. Maybe that’s it. The aqueduct that crosses the Pont du Gard and goes through Uzès and on to Nîmes was sealed with the juice of figs. Maybe if I think of myself as a kind of fig, that story makes me feel better because some good comes out of the pain and – as Jung said – we’re most creative where we’re scarred. Perhaps spiritual energy really does flow like water in a thirsty place. I had my roots pruned on 20th June 2016. My European passport has since expired and I didn’t bother to renew it. I was rendered a stranger in a place I once felt at home and it was my own folk that did it.

It’s a mess – but a holy mess!

A small pond surrounded by tall green grass and clusters of yellow and white irises in a garden setting.
If you look closely enough you can see a tiny patch of pale blue painted plaster where St Francis keeps an eye out for frog spawn

I know there are all manner of gardening styles, from Gertrude Jekyll’s gingham and lace to Beth Chatto and all the way to the regimental ranks of RHS Wisley. Our allotment neighbour Pete is definitely Midlands in style and we are – frankly – untidy. Some plants blow in on a gardening wind and some settle down. We don’t have weeds but we certainly have some pestilential visitors like couch and bindweed, who outstay their welcome. Other visitors are harder to evict – we have a longstanding relationship with some Tall ramping Fumitory, Fumaria bastardii whose nearest relative seems to grow in a quarry thirty miles down the road and came over from Ireland at some time in the past. A proper traveller you might say. Ours is a polymorphous, polyglot and pollyanna plot with attitude.

Madame is the seed sower and nurturer and I am the surly under-gardener who nails things together muttering dark threats, and does all the heavy work; which is OK because I like the civil engineering bit. My present project is turning four underused compost bins into eight raised beds using as much free material as possible. When I sawed it horizontally in half – as you can imagine – it became a bit floppy and so old screws were removed with my worn-out driver set and new ones driven in with the wrong heads because the others were all worn out from previous bad choices. My arms were consequently purple with bruises due to the blood thinners I take. What with the constant dripping nose from hay-fever and the ugly arms and the cursing, our neighbours gave me a wide berth. They think, maybe, that old-age is something you catch from people like me. I say my language is a homage to my maternal grandfather who taught me almost everything I know about swearing. You’ve no idea how much pleasure I get from celebrating my disused vicar status by creative cursing.

The trick to recycling old topsoil into new beds is to work out a way of minimising the distance each shovelful has to travel – so bed one which can’t be lowered because of the damson tree roots – gets the soil from bed 2 with some composted manure for good luck. Bed 2 then stays empty until some wood chip can be sourced when it will be topped up with the soil from bed three which I stored in old compost bags. That leaves bed four to be filled with much more expensive nursery-bought topsoil and compost. The upside is that beds are much easier to work and much deeper so we can grow longer carrots and parsnips and we haven’t bought a single plank or post.

So its been a good week on the whole, without paying too much attention to the elections. The fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the artists’studios of which we’re almost the last surviving founder members were such fun we returned there for the May holiday open studios. I was having a rather difficult conversation with a disarmingly lovely young welcomer and fiddling with my pixel watch nervously when I managed somehow to turn on a podcast which was sent straight to my hearing aids. Our conversation became bewildering and she must have thought I was quite demented. Madame had another such conversation with a rather deaf man when she was talking about Vermeer who did many of his paintings in pairs and he mistakenly thought that she was saying something about him painting pears. As I’m sure Sam Weller says in Pickwick Papers – ‘collapse of stout party!‘ There’s nothing funnier than a cross-purpose conversation with a complete stranger.

On Sunday, after a family meal our youngest son – who’s a chef – brought around the experimental sourdough pizza dough he’s been working on with my 20 years old starter. As we chatted he said that he’s got three of my favourite family favourites onto the menu at the restaurant. I felt absurdly proud. They’re not really mine at all but dishes I picked up over sixty years and worked up for fun. Some I’d eaten on our travels, and some came from books, all inflected with the local availability of ingredients.

He’s being evicted by his landlord (a so-called Christian charity on a Section 21 no-fault notice. As the evictions deadline has approached over the last weeks we’ve seen any amount of furniture stacked on the pavement outside their empty flats. This so-called charity has turned out thirty people from their properties in order to sell them off, under the pretext of rediscovering their original charitable aims; so it’s all perfectly legal and they make it sound as if it’s some kind of moral obligation to turf people out of their homes. Isn’t it just a bit puzzling how much suffering is caused by ultra respectable people who wear suits to work and worship the gods of commerce and profit? I think of Dante’s vestibule of hell; the place where the uncommitted, those who refuse to take sides on moral issues, those who just don’t give a shit are sent to continue their pointless existence in an eternity of suffering.

But that’s enough. Let’s get back to the allotment and finish this rather anguished piece with a couple of photos that say something about our messy manifesto. We found our first ripe strawberry today, lurking under its water-cooler micro-greenhouse. The two water butts are going to be plumbed into a row of four and could even be purposed to circulate lukewarm water beneath the greenhouse in winter, powered by a solar panel and a recycled radiator in a system we say years ago in the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. Until today, the latest frost we’d ever experienced on the plot was on May 6th but we had a frost yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow, so- 11th, 12th and 13th May. Luckily we’d covered anything tender with fleece, but our neighbours potatoes were all frost nipped and damaged. They’ll recover but it will take them a while.

Meet the Cranesbill Trio

I used to work as a community artist on a large satellite housing estate on the North West of Bristol. This wasn’t of those six month temporary contacts, I was there for ten years nd I got to know a lot of lovely people I’d never otherwise have met; like the stripper who caught the same late bus as me into Bristol to work, and often had to walk home alone, and told me she never felt safe until she’d re-entered the estate. I loved overhearing conversations on the buses because I learned so much – and one day I heard a comment on another community leader which has never left me. “That Jack B” said one passenger to her neighbour – “He can’t tell shit from pudding!” The estate was one of those places where everyone was related in some way to dozens of others. You quickly learned not to express any opinion about anyone without checking carefully whose cousin they were. Anyway, I’ve been profoundly glad of that phrase over the years and today I especially commend it to those of us who are feeling a bit down at the success of election candidates whose tastes and opinions are wildly weird. If you’re hoping for a tasty meal never order the pudding on the say-so of a waiter who might be called Jack B, because it will probably turn out to be – well, need I say it?

So in order to escape from all that I was casting about for a cheerful story and as I wrote about the cousin challenge in the first paragraph, I remembered that yesterday whilst preoccupied about raised beds on the allotment, I spotted three botanical cousins just above our plot; Herb Robert, Geranium Robertianum, Hedgerow Crane’s-bill, Geranium pyrenaicum, and Cut-leaved Cranes-bill, Geranium dissectum all within ten feet of each other and – as far as it’s ever possible to know – growing wild. I wish I could say I’d stridden forth, vasculum across my shoulder and a copy of Stace IV in my poachers’ bag in search of them, but I was leaning on my spade gasping for breath after shovelling a mixture of compost, manure and topsoil into the four beds. Most good spots like that happen when – for whatever cause – I’m standing still. Please don’t run away with the idea that any of these geraniums are rare because they’re not. It’s just a lovely coincidence to see them together because the differences aren’t that great until you know what to look for and then it’s easy. Like the residents on the estate they are related but quite separate species and their antecedent connection, whether lawful or one-nighters are lost in the mists of thyme. Harm one and you offend them all.

Wooden raised garden beds filled with dark soil, positioned beside a greenhouse.
The cause of the pause – approximately 3000 kg of home-mixed topsoil.

It would be easy to mistake the total weight of four raised beds of soil. Once I’d added some strengthening posts, and mixed together the components it came to around 3 metric tonnes in weight and because I mixed them in situ it meant an awful lot of leaning and turning. Not to worry, though I’ve finished half of them now and the other four – which is to say the top sections of the dismantled compost bins – will have to wait until it’s time to plant up in the the autumn. My back will probably have recovered by then.

We’ve been very focused on the allotment this week because now is the time where – if you sit back and relax – you will discover the extraordinary energy of plants in the spring. Our plots are infested with bindweed, and we run a general (but not religious) policy of not deep digging but working just the top 3 or 4 inches of the soil with hoes and a three or four pronged cultivator. Bindweed spreads by way of underground rhizomes – thick and white and known as devils guts. It’s worth saying that, unlike those who spray them, they’re immune to glyphosate and other chemicals and so the only way to control them is to hoe the tops off regularly and pull out every bit of root as you find it in order to starve them. There are jobs you can leave for another day, but bindweed must be pulled up on sight! I’ll put some photos of the current state of the allotment on at the end.

Meanwhile I struggle but mostly succeed in finding time to read because things are changing so fast in our understanding of the earth and our role in its destruction. At the moment I’m reading Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears” in which he explores ways of understanding consciousness in plants and is absolutely fascinating, as are all of his other books. The parallel read is Mary Midgley’s philosophical book “Beast and Man” first published in 1978 which explores the roots of human nature and which overlaps slightly when it comes to the higher animals. She’s the most lucid philosopher I’ve read, and avoids technical language as a matter of principle. One stand-out insight from Pollan’s chapter on sentience is his sudden exclamation – “So that’s what a theory of consciousness is going to generate – Art!” Writing, reading, gardening, botanising, cooking are the key to flourishing for me. You can keep your profits and huge bonuses because I know better than most that there are no pockets in a shroud.

And so – a few more photos of our magical allotment that turns sunshine plus water into food and releases oxygen as it does so.