Category: Food

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Foodie business

There’s a mirror in the lift and today I caught sight of myself as we came back from getting a few last bits of shopping before we revisit God’s Own Country (Wales of course) yet again; I just can’t keep away. I’m ashamed to say I looked completely raddled – red eyed, my hair which has turned curly makes me look like Medusa in the dim light, and a million miles from the picture of me that I keep safe in my head – like Dorian Gray without the excesses.

The red eyes are partly down to hay fever which has been shocking this year; but three heatwaves in quick succession have taken their toll on my body clock and I’m irrevocably awake every morning at around 5.00am – the same time as I can hear the allotment screaming for water in my fertile imagination. So today we were on the allotment soon after six – to give it a thorough soaking – and then we picked anything that looked edible to take with us to Wales; dug some early potatoes for lunch and came home by 7.30am. Then we cooked the aubergines we harvested a couple of days ago by roasting them and stuffing them with richly spiced lamb mince giving them a distinctly North African flavour. I cooked some stewed apple, made up two jars of fridge pickled cucumbers with our own cucumbers and dill; some fig compote and then finally sat down at 11.00 for a cup of tea. So perhaps the red-eye was also to do with being knackered.

Going away, for me at least, is extremely stressful because I’m terrified of leaving something behind. I’ve left our beds behind, even the complete set of tent poles on one occasion – so remembering to pack all our plentiful meds, every computer and charger lead we could conceivably use, not to mention two portable routers (you can’t be too careful) various laptops, phones and Madame’s tablet; books, cameras, maps, GPS unit and so on. One of our neighbours asked if we were moving out last time we took the campervan to Cornwall.

But tomorrow we’ll set out on the busiest day of the year on the M4 and M5 to travel by our much practiced secret route, on which – unless we meet a tractor, a school bus or a herd of cows gets us there in rather less time than queuing outside Newport for several hours in the blistering heat. We’ll be tired I’m sure, but nothing is better guaranteed to give me a long night’s sleep than the sound of sheep on the hill. I have a rather higher clock speed than most people which has impacted my life quite a bit. I piss people off – mostly managers and jobsworths – because I can’t keep my mouth shut when one of them says, or does something really stupid. Our sons have inherited this tendency from me and we all need these regular breaks to let ourselves slow down and cool the brains a bit. Naturally this won’t stop me from a bit of plant hunting when I think Madame isn’t looking.

This is an inherently busy time of the year because harvesting and cooking are joined at the hip, and since the harvesting always produces a surplus of something or other (courgettes?) the cooking extends into preserving, freezing and storing so yes, the days can be very long, but home grown and home prepared food is in a league of its own when it comes to nutrition and flavour. It’ll be another early start tomorrow but the other reason we need to go away is because the builders are coming back to repair and re-lay the bathroom floor after its flooding last year, and they’ll be taking out the seat of mercy for two days. Neither of us fancy trudging around Bath looking for a friendly shop or cafe several times a day. The campervan has a very serviceable loo and it’s only eight feet away! Meanwhile some photos taken on the allotment in the early morning coolness today. The sweet corn has thrown out its first silks – it’s self pollinating and the upper male flowers shower the lower female silks with pollen which is in itself a bit of a challenge for me in the confined space of the polytunnel. However it keeps the cobs out of the reach of the badgers which otherwise would eat the lot every year. It’s our own version of that old government slogan – Protect and Survive. Thank goodness ours works very well and theirs is best left untested.

How to survive a heatwave

Taken over Alveston, sitting in Helen and Alan’s garden in July 2020

I think this was one Filton pilot’s attempt to cheer us all up by making smoke trails of smileys and hearts in the sky during the post-apocalyptic gloom of Covid, and it worked. This year we’ve sweated and grumbled our way through three heatwaves and by now we’re used to coping by completely changing our daily timetable. No more lingering in bed until 10.00am – I seem to have changed my body clock so much I wonder if I’ll still be waking up at 5.00am in the winter. There’s really no alternative but to reserve the very earliest part of the day for whatever hard physical work on the allotment needs to be done. It’s not that bad – I don’t set any alarms I just wake up, make a cup of strong tea and eat my regulation five fruit shortcake biscuits – that’s breakfast (sorry Doc!) . Today we cleared the failed pea crop away and hoed the plants off at the roots to gift any remaining nitrogen nodules to the purple sprouting broccoli which follows it. Then I sharpened up the hoe – always carry a sharpener when using hoes, scythes and secateurs and learn how to use it. A sharp hoe razors off the weeds with minimum effort. Two passes of the hoe and the spring tine rake is enough to clean the bed and then I spread compost or whatever on the bed and work it in with a three tined cultivator with a long handle. These are all simple hand tools and they’re worth their weight in gold. I once attempted to rotavate the bindweed and couch grass out of a new garden and it was a complete disaster. They both regenerate and spread from the tiniest fragment of their underground roots – but I didn’t know that at the time. My friend and mentor Don Streatfield once put a piece of bindweed root into the freezer for weeks and planted it again in a pot. It grew again with undiminished enthusiasm.

So then I marked out the two beds using a line and a long builder’s tape. I know it’s a faff, and measuring the distance between plants might look over-generous today, but next winter you’ll see they needed every inch of legroom. Then we water the holes and drop the plants in, firming the soil around them and water them again, and then we net them to keep out the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars will strip the leaves down to the ribs if you let them.

The peas and the broad beans were a complete failure this year. The wet spring retarded their growth and then the succession of heatwaves pretty well finished them off. They’re typical temperate, cool loving plants and the failure isn’t just down to our poor gardening skills; farmers have lost millions of pounds worth of crops this year and I expect both will be hard even to find frozen in the supermarket. If you live in an air conditioned house and drive to an air conditioned workplace in an air conditioned car it would be hard to gain any understanding of environmental breakdown such as growers and gardeners have.

So we work until it’s too hot and then we come home. Sometimes we have a late breakfast, but our preferred timetable is to have a late lunch followed by a siesta and then just a sandwich in the evening. It’s a Spanish way of life that suits the weather perfectly and keeps the allotment going through the hard times. Today I cooked a sort of paella, flavoured with smoked paprika, chilli, garlic and tomatoes in a strong fish stock and topped with pieces of roasted pepper and monkfish fried in a hot pan. Tomorrow we’ll be making dill pickles with the miniature ridge cucumbers we gathered today. Before that I need to finish digging the bed where the broad beans came to nothing and removing the bindweed as early in the morning as possible. It’s hard work but bindweed just has to be dug out every few years. We’ve been powering through our seven water butts and the next bit of civil engineering will be to link four of them together and install much bigger guttering on the shed and the greenhouse so we don’t lose a single drop of rain.

Above is a view of Bath from the top of the hill at Sham Castle taken in July a few years ago during a very hot walk, and the balloon below has been a regular sight during fine weather spells in the past, although there are rather fewer this year , perhaps due to the cost of gas to power them. I once had a flight in a balloon that took off at exactly. the same place. There are houses all around and so we launched as fast as a high speed lift and then flew pretty well up-river for an hour or so enjoying long moments of uncanny silence punctuated by awesome roars from the burner. It was a day not unlike today and at one point we sailed above a fox crossing a field which clearly had no idea we were there. The landing was less eventful than I had been fearing the whole trip and I got home with no idea how to explain, let alone describe the experience I’d just had. Improbably, the company which owned the balloon ( I was a guest of the pilot) was based just fifty yards down the road from where we now live.

It’s an odd time we’re living through. We’re researching plants for the allotment to give ourselves the best chance of landing a decent crop, and it may turn out that broad (fava) beans and peas will have to come off the plan – something we’ll deeply regret because they’re so powerfully better than their frozen supermarket equivalents. The upside seems to be that the cucumbers, melons and squashes all love the heat and the sunshine.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed!

However long we garden, every year takes us by surprise when the crops seem almost to overwhelm us. This isn’t bragging as much as an admission of poor planning. In early spring when we’re working out what to grow we always seem to forget that the seeds and vegetables we plant out will need more space than we expect, and that to grow all that we’d like to grow when we’re looking at the seed catalogues in the winter we’d need to take on half a dozen volunteers and several acres of land. For instance the polytunnel cucumbers planted next to the fennel looked absolutely fine when we put them in but now the rowdy cucumbers are overwhelming the smaller plants so Madame had to spend an hour this morning pruning some of the exuberant growth back and whilst doing so she discovered a large cache of fruit which had hidden itself among the leaves. Sadly our peas couldn’t cope with the heatwave and, like the broad beans have lost their flowers. The broad beans were so stressed they were attacked by some kind of fungal infection. We’ve known for years that this was coming, but it’s now serious enough for us to abandon some old favourites and hope that the plant breeders are ahead of the game when it comes to drought resistance in plants. A quick look online today suggests that we shall be trying out entirely new varieties of peas next season. In fact all our cool weather plants are going to fail very soon and plant scientists are already looking closely at the DNA of likely plants . This is a subject I know nothing at all about but I’m very curious to know more.

The other problem is when the produce comes in fast, we have to cook and eat it all, and with only two mouths to feed we really don’t need ten cucumbers or five large aubergines at once. I banged hopefully on Charlie, our neighbour’s, door this morning but I discovered he’s allergic to cucumbers, and so the only answer will be to pickle as many as we can. Fortunately the dill is in full flower and those of our neighbours who were silly enough to plant horseradish are glad enough to get rid of some – “take more!” they often plead. This doesn’t really solve the problem because we have cupboards full of five year old pickles, chutneys and relishes not all of which age well. The good news is that our youngest son will cheerfully munch his way through a jar of pickle and a pound of cheese in a single late night sitting.

The heatwave continues and we’re still getting up extremely early and putting a couple of hours in before it’s too hot to work any more, but the knock on effect of that is that we need to go to bed at 9.00pm. However we don’t complain about it because early morning gardening means we get entertained by a resident song thrush who will work through his entire repertoire of phrases dozens of times without ever stopping. The battle with the weeds never eases up, but I’ve discovered that three pronged cultivators loosen their roots quickly and then I can rake most of them out or leave them in the sun to crisp up and die. Watering takes up a lot of time and although a hose would be quicker, watering by hand gets you up close and personal with the plants, and it’s always lovely to see a large pumpkin lurking in the shadows, or scrump a few strawberries, tayberries or an apple, or pull a few weeds on the way round.

Tomorrow we’re expecting the last of the builders to lay new vinyl in the bathroom and that will end an unbelievable ten year battle with our landlord to deal with our serious issues with black mould. They’ve finally connected the bathroom and kitchen extractors to the outside world and cleaned down and sealed the affected walls and repainted them. They even replaced the asbestos cupboard door in the hall which we were told not to use soon after we moved in.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours looking for a second hand book I need to use. It’s a rather academic 600 page tome which I discovered would cost over £300 to buy new or just under £100 second hand. I made some enquiries about the astonishing cost and it seems that the academic book trade is surviving but only just. A typical print run has gone from several thousand to several hundred because universities and their libraries are so financially overstretched they can’t afford to buy them. It’s a bit of a death spiral. The solution seems to be renting, and so I’ve rented the ebook for a year for thirty quid and I’m bound to say it’s a great way to read because you can search and mark-up with all the power of the computer and enlarge the size of the type to suit your own eyesight and it’s even accessible on my phone. I guess an eagle could read it but not me. I’m hoping that very soon I’ll have a better – if still underwhelming – grasp of DNA and all that stuff. I went to the doctor once with a very painful big toe. “Oh” he said breezily, “you’ve got Hallux rigidus”. No-one in my family was brought up in ancient Rome so I’m a bit rusty on the latin, but even I knew that it meant “stiff toe”. I remonstrated with him that I knew that before I walked through the door. He never tried it again. I often read appeals to get more people involved in botany, but (I speak from experience here) all too often a beginner runs into a brick wall of scientific language which – when used out of context or an appropriate setting – feels like you’re being pushed back. All the research suggests that if you can’t explain a difficult idea simply you shouldn’t be trying to teach it.

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.