Maybe I spoke too soon. I was so pleased that the original sourdough starter hadn’t actually died, I implied – OK bragged – that it was indestructible. However, when I added a feed of dark rye flour to the original batch I also scraped off a few tiny flakes of starter that had dried out (maybe 1/2 gram)and were stuck to the rim of the old fermentation jar, then dropped them into a jam jar with some tepid water and a tablespoon of dark rye flour and left them both on one side overnight.
In the morning the old faithful had thrown a few sulky bubbles but otherwise nothing; however the homeopathic flakes in the jam jar had bubbled up all over the worktop and when I unscrewed the lid there was a healthy hiss. It was so eager to make bread I transferred it into some luxury Tupperware accommodation, fed it again since when it’s been growling at me from above the stove. Tonight I shall make a batter with some leftover organic flour; but I’ve ordered a trial batch of Shipton Mill organic Maris Widgeon flour and I’ll start experimenting with that when it arrives. Baking is such a joyful activity and it annoys me that many so-called experts make it sound difficult. It really isn’t. Sure, the whole process takes maybe 36 hours but of that it takes 10 minutes to make the batter, maybe 20 minutes to weigh out the ingredients and knead, and 35 minutes to bake. Aside from that you can do something useful; make lists, identify plants fill databases and write blogs. What’s not to like?
Oh and sorry – the English insult “barmy” derives from the excited way the yeast bubbles out of its container – the barm pot. There’s one on my stove.
As it turned out, my brilliant idea of a trip on the canal was a lot more testing than I’d remembered from previous expeditions long ago. The boat – at 65 feet was hard work; like steering a blind carthorse through a minefield. Directions needed to be figured out long before they were undertaken because narrow boats don’t do anything quickly and steering from the unprotected deck in the persistent rain and wind made me feel like Socrates must have felt as the impact of the Hemlock spread through his body. My hands and feet became more and more painful and even regular offerings of Dundee cake and hot tea failed to move the dial.
The canal has become a kind of linear favela. An improvised substitute for non-existent affordable housing, untreated mental health and addiction problems and unemployment amongst young people. Yes of course there are posh well-found boats for second homers and even airBnB offers (check out the combination locks) and there are numerous canal holiday companies but an uneasy truce between the stakeholders looks and feels highly unstable. Then, recently, the number of permanently berthed wide-beam boats has exploded and can make life very difficult when negotiating a sharp bend. Even finding a mooring spot near any of the villages, towns or road bridges is a nightmare. You can tell the struggling boaters from the piled high wet logs, one wheeled bikes and scrap metal piled on the roof. It’s a sad reflection of a betrayed generation left to rot by governments who don’t give a shit.
The last day was by far the coldest and although the sun eventually broke through and dispersed the mist, I was on my knees as we pulled back into the boatyard. I’m getting a bit old for this malarkey. Our joy was complete when, after we’d loaded up the car, we discovered the battery was beyond flat; rather – dead. Luckily one of the engineers (we’d seen so much of them trying to fix the heating during the trip that they felt like friends) saved the day with a portable lithium battery.
But there’s always a plus side, and this photo taken in a quiet stretch between Avoncliff and Dundas shows the beauty of the autumn trees. The lone fisherman, by the way, gave us a short seminar on how boaters should pass to preserve harmony. He said that many boats tried to pull over to the opposite (shallow) side instead of holding to the middle – thereby stirring up the mud and ruining the fishing altogether.
I’ve always had difficulties with this season. The dying of the light drains the joy out of me and I seem to lose all motivation. But every year – I ought to know this by now – there’s a kind of Kübler Ross moment of acceptance and – as if a switch has been thrown – I feel OK again. I woke up at 5.00am on Sunday and paid an outstanding bill and then fetched my sourdough starter from its hiding place in the kitchen; unscrewed the lid gingerly and sniffed, expecting the worst. It was fine and a lightning bolt of optimism shot through me. Back during lockdown when everyone was making sourdough, the internet forums were full of newcomers suffering from starter anxiety and wondering whether it was even possible to take a break from feeding the ever demanding baby. Yeasts, I should say, are lovely, useful and tiny organisms and are rather harder to kill than Bindweed. I often neglect my starter shamefully – I’ve had it for well over a decade – and it still comes back and fills the kitchen with a delightful apple fragrance. Interestingly, no-one I’ve given it to has managed to keep it alive for any length of time. Has it micro-evolved to the exact conditions of the Potwell Inn kitchen? We’ll be off to the mill this week to get some decent organic flour and all will be well and all manner of things will be well once more.
So I made my peace with winter and spent most of yesterday walking (in my head) on the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria where it joins the Irish Sea.
We were here in late August 2019 and I took a few photos of flowers I didn’t recognize. Five years later and my plan to organise retrospectively some of the 13,000 photos into a botanical database brought me back again in memory to this beautiful and bleak area, just south of Sellafield. The initial plan was to add Sneezewort to the file, but then I noticed another bunch of photos with nothing but a date and location in the EXIF data. First impression was that they were all pictures of Samphire except that when I looked properly it was clear that they were all three of them different plants and that none of them was Samphire. I should add that there was an abundance of Samphire around but that the proximity to Sellafield would make the eating of anything found on the seashore pretty dangerous! Anyway, in a very contented few hours I’d nailed all three and added them to the database; all of them shoreline and estuary specialists.
It’s true to say that I don’t really like this time of year very much. The botanical fairground has packed up and gone, and I’m left standing in the midst of the yellow grass and the mud wondering if there will be another one next year. Of course – short of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), doing a quick U turn – there will probably be an improbably wet/cold, dry/warm/generally unpredictable winter followed by another floral circus some time between february and April. Plants seem to be much more adaptable than humans because we spend so much time wittering on about difficult ideas like normal we can’t see what’s happening in front of our eyes, and I for one have no idea how to run a successful allotment in somewhere as cold as St Petersburg – after a spell in Babylon with Deacon Starmer and the funeral band in charge.
So in times of botanical dearth I turn to cooking, drying and preserving. On the stove at this moment is a large batch of ragu – enough for a dozen meals – and a gallon of stock reducing down. It’s a very homely smell and it’ll all go into the freezer against those days when we really can’t be arsed to cook. Good stock is the pixie dust of the kitchen. In the left hand jar photographed at the top is half of a large crop of Habanero chillies, dried in the oven ; an entirely unexpected gift, as it happens, because the nursery label said they were going to grow up as sweet peppers but obviously weren’t. So this summer we were pepperless and this winter we will have to cook Mexican if we’re not going to waste them. They did smell rather beautiful as they dried – even if they made my eyes water! Alongside them is the usual crop of surplus tomatoes, reduced and turned into sauces and passata. The crusty looking layer is butter from our favourite Hazan number one sauce which, with a lump of chopped chorizo and some of the (small) crop of Borlotti makes a decent ribsticker meal on a cold day.
We’ve got a couple more outings to look forward to; a trip up the Kennet and Avon canal in a narrow boat and a long weekend in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) with our friends Kate and Nick and perhaps one last adventure in the campervan before Christmas – probably on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal. But the flowers just aren’t there any more and there’s nothing much to report on the allotment (another load of wood chip today – etc), so given that I’ve taken Trappist vows not to spend my time grumbling about the state of the world I’ve very little to get my creative juices flowing.
I know, I really do know, that this time next week I’ll be enthusiastically photographing fungi and going through my endless list of unidentified fern photos ready for next season; and perhaps it’s because Madame and I have crammed a whole years worth of vaccinations, dentist appointments, X rays, cardo assessments, scans and physio stuff, that we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by our vulnerability; but, to be honest, I’m feeling fitter than I have done for a year or more. The Cardiology department of the Royal United Hospital is on the third floor, up six flights of stairs, and I can now climb then without collapsing halfway. There’s a notice at the top that says “if you can read this you don’t need us!”– (that’s a joke, they’ve been great).
Madame had an unusual conversation with an old parishioner in the week. He must have seen or heard about this blog because he mentioned that we knew we were now running a pub (presumably the Potwell Inn) and living in a council estate. Wrong on both counts I’m afraid. There are no longer any council estates because all the council houses have been sold off – making a cultural stereotype redundant at the same time; and the Potwell Inn isn’t a pub, it’s a metaphor stolen from an HG Wells comic novel called “A History of Mr Polly”. I think I was banned from posting on Facebook because an artificially intelligent (stupid) algorithm decided I am a business. I wish! Anyway Chris – rest assured that we are fine and living near to some Georgian terraces in a cold concrete building with damp and black mould and this is not a pub but an HMO with a lively drug subculture outside on the green; always entertaining. The river outside is pretty but often quite smelly. We’ve always suspected that it’s got sewerage in it – largely due to the frothy schooners that float down from Pulteney Weir when the river floods. But a couple of days ago our friend Charlie posted a copy of a video sent to him by a scientist friend across the way, clearly showing a dense brown slick pouring from what is supposed to be a stormwater outfall. Worse still, the swans seemed to be swimming in it – I’ll never kiss another swan.
So just to cheer up gardeners and allotmenteers everywhere I’ll finish with a photo of everyone’s very favourite plant. Please welcome the Large Bindweed- cousin to the Hedge Bindweed, the Field Bindweed, the Sea Bindweed and the Hairy Bindweed. We used to have a couple of families like that in one of my parishes.
It’s a Mullein – can’t officially say which one until it’s been verified, but our local Country Recorder says that if I’m right it would be a great find.
I’m indebted to Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s marvellous book “Alien Plants” for much of the historical perspective in what follows.
I don’t suppose anyone knows what a Lamp Boy did, getting on for a century ago; but back in the age of steam it was what we now call a gateway job into being a railway worker. Much of the menial and repetitive work on the railway was done by young people who would, today, be described as children. My dad – born in 1916, left school at 14 and among his first jobs he was a lamp boy. After a series of disastrous railway accidents; safety measures became part of the life-blood of the industry. I remember my Dad sitting at the dining table memorising every signal between Bristol and London or Derby (he changed regions several times). So polishing the lamps and lenses, replenishing the oil and trimming the wicks of the red and white lamps that were mounted front and rear of every train and all the points and signals across the country was the beginning of many a career on the railways; a high status job back in the day.
But of course there were plenty of other menial jobs that occupied young men and kept the country in profit in all our colonial pomp. International trade brought ships and their cargoes from around the world and sailors needed feeding. Most cargo ships carried supplies of food “on the hoof” as it were. Cattle, chickens and such like were often kept on ships and slaughtered to feed crews (or perhaps just the officers) on long journeys. The ships were loaded with fodder before they left and by the time they returned across the oceans they needed to be restocked with grain, hay and straw which, in those days before farm machinery, carried their burden of weed seeds back from abroad. When these ships docked – in Bristol, for instance, they were unloaded and then the holds were swept and all the manure was removed to the dockside where it would be sold off to local farms. The cargo would be loaded onto wagons or railway trucks and narrow boats for transportation to further places. The dockside, canal and railway sidings were a happy hunting ground for botanists like James White. These days we still find unexpected plants which are spread by passing lorries on roadside verges which, it seems, are especially attractive to salt-loving stowaways.
So drawing all those threads together we have James White publishing his invaluable 1912 book “The Bristol Flora” after hunting for all those casuals in the places they were spilled or blown; and one of the biggest railway sidings in Bristol was at St Phillips Marsh where my Dad polished his first lamps before a long career with the Great Western and London Midland and Scottish – still separate companies in those days. For all I know, he may have stepped over my plant or one of its nine cousins as he crossed the lines at work as a child. He once told me about a mass migration of rats from the stables when he said they were so many it felt like a moving sea. Freight trains were loaded at the dockside and passed through the sidings which were almost alongside the Feeder Canal which connected via a navigation section along the River Avon, into the Kennet and Avon canal flowing east towards London past our flat and just up the road from where the plant, mentioned by White, is (possibly) now growing over a century later.
So is my solitary plant a sighting or a history lesson? I like to think it’s both. Even so-called scientific disciplines are set within a broader culture
If you were to do a word search on this blog for “canal” (please feel free, it’s great fun) you would find many mentions of the Kennet and Avon because it’s now a significant part of the life of the Potwell Inn. We walk one section of the bank at least once a week and it never fails to deliver plants that I’ve not seen before. Some of them are medicinal herbs, probably planted by boaters in the past, who had little access to medical care. There is the usual brigade of thugs, vagabonds and chancers brought in by the wind, by birds, on the tyres of push bikes and the boots of generations of walkers. Some of them flower a couple of times and move on, or die in an unsuitable environment. Some set up permanent residence and some – Himalayan Balsam for instance – think to themselves whoopee! and raise families of thousands and tens of thousands. Lazy fly tipping by overtidy gardeners has led to Elijah’s revenge and we are whipped with scorpions. Then there are obvious garden escapes and plenty of native plants that just are – in all their beauty.
Then of course plants associate with insects and many other forms of wildlife and what we get – passing intact through many industrial, post-industrial and suburban areas are linear nature reserves of real significance. Abandoned railway lines; derelict docksides; old gasworks (too expensive to develop); post industrial sites polluted with heavy metals and land rendered unusable through flooding – they’re not pretty but in this age of industrial farming they probably furnish many of the richest wildlife habitats we can enjoy. Forget the SUV – you can probably walk out of your front door and abandon yourself to the wild in a walk of a couple of miles.
Cuckoo – like dog or horse gets pressed into service in quite a number of flower names. I particularly like “Cuckoo Pint” – Arum maculatum – a spectacularly well hung (sorry) allusion to the presence of cuckoos in nests they oughtn’t be in – if you catch my drift. Among other folk names for the same plant we get Parson in his pulpit and also Lords and Ladies. Geoffrey Grigson lists a couple of dozen names – nearly all of them both vulgar and funny. In my innocence I always wondered where pint as in beer came from; but it’s actually a reference to a pintle, a long bolt that holds a boat’s rudder in place – need I go on? So perhaps the plant name should be Cuckoo Pint as in pin rather than in eye except I’ve never once heard it pronounced so. Anyway, there’s an exception to every rule and so the Cuckoo Flower is named after the fact that it appears at the same time as the Cuckoo is laying its eggs in a Reed Warbler’s nest. Sadly the last time I heard a cuckoo was several years ago on our friends smallholding near Brecon.
Much enlarged photo x10
So taking up the theme, I have to say that I’m rather addicted to plants that show up in the wrong place. Once you’ve got your eye in, they stand out like a sore thumb and when I don’t recognise them – that’s to say almost always – I feel obliged to find out what they’re called and even, if they’re a bit rare, record them. Twice this week my eye lit upon an unexpected plant on the canal – one is called Beggarticks which was a little upstream of a new (to me) Mullein which I think will turn out to be Hungarian Mullein, Verbascum speciosum. Both of these are neophytes – newcomers – which have entered the UK during the last century on boats, or at least in ballast or escaping from wool shoddy carried by boats. Most floras don’t even mention these floral boat people, and it has to be said they’re quite hard to identify without a hand lens or a macro photo.
But they’re not all incomers. I also encountered a Fool’s Parsley plant growing through a weed control mat on a length of landscaped riverbank. It’s related to Hemlock and consequently rather poisonous, so I’m sure it wasn’t part of the designer’s plan but then, nature doesn’t read planning regulations – she makes her own rules.
How these plants got to where they’re now growing is a mystery; but it occurs to me that they may have been carried up the canal from Bristol on the shoes of narrowboaters. Most plants will stowaway given half a chance, but some, like Giant Hogweed, Russian Vine and Himalayan Balsam get thrown out of gardens when their owners realize what thugs they really are. Unfortunately, unlike teenagers, they don’t grow out of it and carry on terrorising towpaths and riverbanks the length and breadth of the country. Other strangers have replaced wool shoddy and ballast by commandeering birdseed as a means of transport, and among the upcoming means of getting about some are seeking pastures new by way of wildflower mixes. There’s no let-up for the prospective Cuckoo hunter. Apple of Peru – Nicandra physalodes– regularly pops up on the allotment.
Today was/is Harvest Festival day for the Potwell Inn. We cleared the polytunnel of tomatoes, aubergines and accidentally grown Scotch Bonnet chillies, and feasted on sweetcorn which has escaped the badgers this year by being locked inside the tunnel. Now there’s a mountain of pickling and preserving to climb, and we’ve plenty of Squashes to last the winter. It does seem odd that today is the first day of meteorological autumn when we’ve barely seen the summer, but climate damage is the cause of all this and lying in bed with the windows open at night reveals that more planes are flying over Bath than buses drive up the A4. I should think there’s a plane overhead coming in to land or taking off every ten minutes. The Local Council are doing their best – against some strong and synthetic opposition by people who don’t even live here – but it all seems a bit pointless when the pollution by aeroplanes is deemed too economically important to curb.
Inside the polytunnel – as seen by Rousseau – the plants on the right are not Cannabis as our neighbour thought, but African Marigolds (Tagetes erecta) to deter whiteflies.
Completely fake AI generated photo of Ghost Orchid on the pavement – made by Google Gemini. That’s why it’s dangerous!
In my last post I was extolling the virtues of exploring the local plants before setting off to search the country after the rarities, and I cracked a poorly judged joke about not going to see even a Ghost Orchid unless it was growing in a crack in the pavement outside the flat. I must have thought I was on safe ground because no-one has seen a Ghost orchid in the UK since 2009. Then, suddenly today, an emailed newsletter from the BSBI announced that it had been seen once more at what will remain an undisclosed location. You’d think that rogue hunters would leave such a rarity alone but sadly not. Back in my home parish of Littleton, someone dug up a whole group of much more common orchids and spirited them away. Just for the record, orchids rely on a highly specific relationship with particular fungal networks and so digging them up is a lost cause. Anyway – lest I sound more pompous than I (hope I) really am, I’m not the trainspotter type and although I’m very happy that the discovery has been made, and even happier for the lucky finder who’s obviously put many search hours in; I’m quite satisfied with a photo.
I should also admit that I break my own rules all the time because we spend many weeks camping in Cornwall, West Wales, North and Central Wales as well as here in Bath and on Mendip. We’ve been going to all those places for so long that while we’re there they all feel like home and I’ve got long lists of plants for all of them.
Yesterday, to add even more unwanted texture to a difficult week, one of my teeth dropped out as a kind of tribute to National Health dentistry. I watch the news and read the papers and I detect a kind of Panglossian optimism in the air now we’ve got a Labour government. I’m afraid I don’t buy it.
We grow our tomatoes in the polytunnel on grafted rootstocks and with blight resistant varieties. It’s by no means cheap, but we haven’t lost a crop to blight in years, and having grown both from seed and from grafted rootstocks, the commercial ones, bought from a local nursery (so we can see what we’re getting) have a much higher yield and more than pay for themselves as long as we water them consistently and feed them with an organic seaweed based fertilizer. They ripen over a period which gives us plentiful fresh tomatoes in the kitchen but any surplus is quickly preserved. Freezing is very energy intensive, so we rely on reusable glass preserving jars with new metal tops every year so they seal perfectly. Our collection of Italian jars and bottles has been in continuous use for nearly ten years now. After several years of pushing the pulp through a sieve – which is very slow – we bought a cheap hand cranked passata machine which will easily mill six pounds of tomatoes in ten minutes, neatly removing skins and seeds which we don’t put into the compost any more because then we land up with hundreds of tomato seedlings!
The passata machine and the pulp. The pale yellow lumps are butter.
Depending on which part of the cycle the little spring loaded paddles have been assembled in against the sieve, the first few turns of the handle yield hesitant and irregular clickings. But as soon as the hopper is filled with peeled and chopped tomatoes and the process speeds up, it sounds to me something like “Lets think! Let’s think!” Each hopper goes through the machine five times, recovering first the juice and later the thicker pulp. Finally the skins go through because there’s a surprising amount of pulp still on the skins. At the end I have a deep pan half filled with passata and a shallow enamel dish filled with almost dry seeds and skin. It’s high summer and one of those grounding kitchen rituals which mark the transition of the seasons, just as marmalade making marks the end of winter and Christmas pudding, the beginning of it.
This kind of sauce making reduces our almost unmanageable crop of tomatoes to around a quarter of their original weight and prepares them for storage so they last more than a year. We make several kinds of sauce, but this one – which we simply call Hazan number one comes from Marcella Hazan’s marvellous book “The Essentials of Classic Italian cooking”. We also make straight passata and roasted tomato sauce from Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Handbook “Preserves”. Then there’s tomato ketchup from a 1950’s HMSO book and, if there are any leftover green tomatoes we make chutney from my Mum’s old cookbook. Nothing gets wasted at the Potwell Inn apart from (very occasionally) the Landlord.
Meanwhile Madame has been continuing with her years-long search for a ratatouille recipe that I’ll actually like. I was put off ‘rat’ by over-exposure to it on camping trips in the past, when it always tasted of methylated spirits from the Trangia Stove. However, because we’ve got all the fresh ingredients coming off the allotment at the moment, she has been experimenting from a whole pile of recipes and yesterday’s came from Delia Smith, but shares its DNA with a much earlier one by Jane Grigson. The whole aim is to create a dish that doesn’t look like pavement vomit. Simply boiling up all the ingredients into a wet and slimy sludge should be enough to get you a stiff fine for vandalism. Anyway, Madame’s latest iteration last night looks and tastes like the best yet.
But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle.
I love this kind of seasonal cooking (and eating), and I learned about kitchen thrift from my mother and grandmother who understood food shortages from the experience of two world wars. But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle. These seasonal earthings are incredibly important to both of us and at these times we work as a team in the kitchen. I suppose – if you suffer from the burden of believing that there are better or more important things to do with your time than press tomatoes through a sieve or make your own Hollandaise sauce – then you’ll miss the meditative thoughtfulness that repetitive kitchen work brings. The meditation strengthens the link between growing the plant, preparing the food and eating together.
Growing food, cooking and eating together are fundamental to thriving; much more – dare I say – than commodified health and conspicuous consumption. Pouring damson jam into pots brings the trees and their fruits to the table in the depths of winter. Making a wish over the Christmas pudding mixture is – at its very least – a wish for a peaceful future. Beating a mayonnaise or mashing potatoes will give a few minutes respite from endless bad news about riots and hatred. Baking bread means committing 24 hours to something of more moment than gossip.
My thoughts – as I crank the handle of the passata machine – are the spiritual equivalent of Mother Julian’s prayer that – “all will be well and all manner of things will be well.” The seasons, the moon and the tides wax and wane without regard for our existential angst. Whilst anyone with a grain of common sense will understand that we really cannot be anything we want to be, because our lives are a continual negotiation with nature and circumstance; we can still thrive by immersing ourselves in the flow moments when we know what it means to be human rather than spend anxious lives doom scrolling on our mobiles. Maybe the wooden spoon should be promoted to first prize?
The bindweed in the background should remind any gardener that the devil is always lurking in the background, waiting for an opportune moment
[Interestingly, there’s an AI tool built in to WordPress which I seem to have turned on accidentally, and which persistently interrupts and chides me for long or difficult words! I credit my readers with more intelligence than that!!]
This tree was on the allotment when we took it on – an old neglected espalier apple which Madame has retrained (restrained maybe). And yes those curled leaves are concealing Codling Moth.
If you’ve never read Michael Pollan’s excellent book “The Botany of Desire” then if you ever intend to grow apples you should go and get it right now. There’s a section in the book devoted to apples and among the fascinating facts and legends there’s mention of the fact that as the settlers crossed America and staked their claim on parcels of land, there was a legal requirement for them to plant apple trees in order to demonstrate their long-term commitment to the land.
Trees, of any kind, are a long term investment – for instance I marvel at some of the arboreta in the great estates of the eighteenth century where the landowners would have known they would never see the mature fruits of their planting. On any allotment site you’ll see many different styles of plot. Many will be cleared as annual plants mature and will spend the remaining parts of the season or year under cover. In a culture that lives for the moment, the idea of a long-term plan for an allotment might seem fanciful. Who knows when the landowner or the local authority will see it as a cash cow and flog it off to a developer.
But somewhere between the bland assumptions of a Humphrey Repton, for instance, that it was perfectly sensible to plant for future centuries, and the panicked sense of catastrophe of a 21st century environmental campaigner there’s still a case to be made for a commitment to slow growing perennials like fruit trees.
We’ve now planted two short (five trees) rows of apples, plums, damsons and pears – one row six years ago and the other three. It’s hardly an orchard and, until this year, we’ve barely picked an edible fruit but this year the first row of five apple trees has had an excellent set of fruit which should, if we planned it right, give us a few fresh dessert apples until October. The second row has given us a few Victoria plums and a decent crop of Bramleys – while we have to wait for any Damsons (could take years) and Conference pears. You’ve no idea how much pleasure it’s given to watch them grow from whips to cordon trees on MM106 or similar rootstocks. That’s a local authority rule, by the way, standard trees tend to swamp the allotments as they grow ever taller. One of our neighbours bought some standard apples cheaply off the supermarket and is only just learning the error of his ways. You can hear them growling at night!
Sadly, though, the deer are back on the site and nibbling away – especially the lower leaves and flowers of runner beans which are only just picking up speed after a very slow start. However the delayed gratification of the fruit trees has brought a whole new dimension to the allotment. Somehow it feels more mature, more long-term and more sense of anticipation of seasons to come. I remember our keen expectation of the greengages on our grandparents’ smallholding. I don’t think they were ever great croppers, but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up for in sweetness and flavour.
In the midst of the first and possibly the only heatwave of the summer we’ve been getting up very early and grabbing a couple of the cooler hours before we’re driven back behind the shutters in the flat. Our project has been to demolish the fruit cage which – given what I’ve just written – may sound counterintuitive but we’ve lived and learned a lot about weeds and in particular Bindweed (Devil’s Guts in one local name). Looking at the allotment earlier this year we realized that Bindweed just loves climbing up fences or nets. That raises two issues. Firstly you can’t strim or burn the young shoots off without destroying the cages and secondly cages are just as good at keeping allotmenteers out as they are at keeping out squirrels, birds and other roving pests. So we’ve taken away their climbing frames, let a lot of light in and given ourselves space to move around for pruning, watering, feeding and picking as well as dragging the long bindweed roots out whenever we see them. We shall see ….. I think we were rather affected by a protectionist frame of mind when we started out, but we’ve come to see the truth of that old saying – ‘the best fertilizer is the farmer’s boot.’ Wherever there’s a too narrow path or an inaccessible bed , or even perhaps a row of stakes the purpose of which you can’t quite remember, that’s where the weeds will flourish because you’re not constantly walking past and yanking them out. If you’re constrained by a fence or a low net you’ll avoid hoeing and the associated backache and go somewhere easier. At the risk of sounding extremely bossy you should avoid dumping full buckets of anything on a narrow path because if it stays there for even a week it will claim squatter’s rights and you’ll be tripping over it for a whole season – oh and when you finally tip the water off the rotting weeds it will go over your feet and it will stink. Trust me – I’ve done it all. By all means let a thousand weeds grow for the pollinators because nature abhors a vacuum, but let that be a matter of deliberate choice and make sure you know what’s in that cloud of parachute seeds passing you. Willowherb is a monstrously successful coloniser!
Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!
That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.
Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.
With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.
Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.
While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.
Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!
Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.
City centre life is something of a competition between optimism and pessimism much of the time. Even in this impossible summer season the vegetables still grow and ripen; our best ever crop of Alderman peas – they grow vigorously to six feet and more and this year, for unknown reasons, we’ve escaped the usual infestation of pea moth. The pods are full of large, sweet, delicious peas of a quality that make you wonder if the frozen supermarket peas are even the same vegetable. The polytunnel tomatoes (Crimson Crush) are their usual vigorous and blight resistant selves, in fact the maincrop potatoes (Sarpo Mira) are also blight resistant and so we haven’t seen the ruination of the whole crop since we started growing them. We’re holding our nerve this year and growing all our sweetcorn in the tunnel – last year I transplanted them outside when they were 2′ tall and they too gave us a lovely crop because the badgers, squirrels and rats left them alone. The courgettes still try and rampage all over the allotment, but we’re ruthless with them. The only surprise is that pollintions have been generally good notwithstanding the desperate shortage of pollinators. We can’t claim any credit for the blackberries aside from training them along the boundary fence to deter night-time visitors. Unlike most garden cultivars the fruits taste great but the thorns are long and sharp enough to snag a rhinoceros.
That’s all on the plus side, but more negatively we have to cope with the usual inner city challenges thick and humid air; of night time overflights to Bristol Airport; constant ambulances and police cars driving past with warning sirens blasting; juvenile seagulls – temporarily grounded by their inability to fly back to their nests screeching for food from 4.00am, kitchen waste strewn across the pavements by urban gulls and foxes, noisy hen parties in the airBnb opposite with occasional glimpses of male strippers doing their thing, and then the ubiquitous semi conscious junkies, dealers, drunks and out of control dogs crapping unobserved by their owners who make sure they’re deeply absorbed by important business on the mobile rather than doggy business on the grass. Then, yesterday afternoon a squadron of jackhammers, bulldozers and heavy lorries started breaking up the foundations of the old Homebase site ready for another completely unnecessary block of overpriced and under spec flats. Promises to build doctors surgeries, primary schools and community facilities alongside low cost housing will be broken as always with the payment of a small fine to the local authority. The snagging for the redevelopment opposite has continued for years with missing damp courses, missing fire safety precautions, crumbling lintels, lime green slime mould on the faux Bath Stone walls, windows improperly installed or not fixed at all, and, (following a conversation today with a very upset owner) meaningless insurance. He couldn’t talk about it because it just made him emotional and depressed. Any word of protest will result in angry responses from landlords and Airbnb owners who would prefer you not to know that this is not quite the Paradise Regained promised by the publicity. Naturally, for a student of life like me, it’s a marvellous field for research and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else! The weeds are fabulous.
My interest in Geoffrey Grigson (The Englishman’s Flora) has continued and I wanted to find out why exactly he’d managed to fall out with quite so many people. As someone who has regularly been told that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met I thought he might have something I could learn to improve my technique. However it seems we are simply inveterate bubble poppers and can’t help ourselves when we’re confronted by mediocrity and dishonesty. His collected newspaper reviews* are tough going – far too prolix and dripping with anger aimed at other writers who are now (decades later) absolutely unknown – so they seem like a drastic waste of emotional energy. Far better to go for a walk and try to identify that tall Dandelion looking thing on the pavement outside. Most of the spanners, fruitcakes and halfwits will lose their reputations purely through the attrition of time. I’m aiming to disappear long before I’m dead, but the prospect of cluttering up the memory of a computer in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the Potwell Inn blog for all eternity amuses me, as I shall be asleep under a rock in a troutstream somewhere having completed my million words.
But hey, The Englishman’s Flora in spite of it’s Grandiose “The” in the title, rather than a more modest “An”; and its inappropriately sexist attitude to non male botanists is a really interesting and useful book that attempts (against all the odds) to unite the great ship of field botany with the other great ships of folk medicine, regional and local names and even witchcraft; all of which are heading off in different directions. It’s a book that hasn’t yet fallen for the daft idea that the pruinose texture of a Sloe in the autumn can be completely or even adequately described by a DNA string. Who’d have thought that there’s a member of the Stonecrop family called “Roseroot” which lives high in the mountains and whose roots smell of – obviously roses. Who’d have guessed that the odd looking Pineapple Weed, which lives in farm gateways where it’s guaranteed a regular hammering, actually smells just like a pineapple when you squeeze its flowerhead. For me this is not at all evidence of the hand of God, but of the awe inspiring, wasteful and aesthetically dazzling creativity of evolving nature.
