Tag: broad bean pests

The hungry gap is officially over.

Today we picked the very first of our new potatoes and harvested broad beans for freezing as well as spinach. We found the first flowers on the outdoor tomatoes and the runner beans are merrily climbing up their supports. It’s hard to describe how much pleasure that gave us.
The rats have been busy

But our pleasure was tempered by the fact that first the broad beans and then the potatoes had been found by rodents – almost certainly rats – before we could harvest them. The same creature – judging by the tooth marks – had found some potatoes as well; something for which I’m grateful because it encouraged me to dig a haulm and take a look and there they were, just big enough for an early treat.

Pests have an uncanny knack of arriving at your crops one nanosecond before you do. Badgers seem to roam the allotments at night waiting until the cobs on each plot reach perfection and then take them. You can even tell what predator has done the deed. Badgers crash around and drag them down – along with any protective wire and sticks, making a terrible mess but eating all of the cobs. Deer use their height to reach over the wires and take them daintily, but rats climb the plants, damaging them as they go and swing on them (I imagine) until they rip off. Messy eaters – rats! Pigeons, squirrels and passers by all like to have a go and the prospect of harvesting 100% of the crop is vanishingly small. It’s said that badgers don’t like loose nets because they get their claws caught up in them, but the best method we’ve found it to keep the whole sweetcorn patch inside a fruit net and nail it down with as many long pegs as we can lay your hands on.

But I always think of the first potatoes as a sign of the plenty to come; the true end of the hungry gap. We’ve been harvesting individual vegetables for weeks but when there are potatoes it seems that we’ve got all we need for a good meal. Much as I love purple sprouting broccoli and asparagus I wouldn’t want to live on either of them. Variety and texture are as important in the kitchen as they are in any other creative discipline from architecture to painting.

Pickles and chutneys seem to go on and on and even improve with age.

However, plenty brings a whole new bunch of challenges and we’ve already started phase two of the kitchen year by making 12 months worth of elderflower cordial. All the books say it only keeps for a couple of months and it’s true the powerful fragrance is a fugitive pleasure, but it does keep. The very last bottle of last year’s bottling now tastes almost like honey syrup and so we’ve been using it to sweeten rhubarb. It seems a crime to pour it down the drain. Two deliveries of glass bottles and preserving jars are sitting in the corner here in my room, waiting for the first bunch of berries from the fruit cage to be turned into jams and preserves, and with the first cabbages big enough to harvest I’m going to have another go at sauerkraut after last year’s failures. Even the fermented gherkins survived the winter and as long as you’re not squeamish and don’t mind sorting through the dross to find the survivors, they still taste pretty good. Of course, pickles and chutneys seem to go on and on and even improve with age. The smoked aubergine chutney I made last summer tasted pretty raw for months, but nine months later it’s heavenly.

Broad beans

So we spent the whole afternoon scalding, chopping and freezing and it felt good. But what to do about the rats? I wonder. They’re ubiquitous and although I have no scruples about trapping them if they become too much of a nuisance – they do after all carry some pretty unpleasant diseases – I’m not going to get too fussed, after all they never eat more than a very small proportion of our produce.

I mentioned in a previous post the idea of putting a false roof on top of the two compost bins currently finishing loads of compost and leaf mould. They won’t be opened until autumn and so I thought we might get a crop off the space. So here’s a photo of the new arrangement. Hopefully the squashes will trail over the sides and down. They often get a bit out of control and spread all over the place, but we seem to manage stepping over them and finding ways around them and so we tolerate them because they taste good. They’re a bit like teenage boys (we had three of them so I know what I’m talking about) – they occupy vastly more space than you’d ever think, but when they’re gone you miss them.

Split level gardening

Friend or foe on the broad beans?

P1080750Absolutely no certainty about this 2mm critter on our broad beans, but we discovered there were quite a large number of them when Madame added another tier of twine to support the beans during Storm Hannah which is forecast to pass by tonight. I decided to take it home to photograph and while I was setting up the macro lens and focusing, a flea beetle jumped on to my hand. We’d already seen their work elsewhere on the allotment, cutting neat scallops in the leaves; so neat, in fact, that you might imagine scalloped leaves were part of the design.  So bug-hunting is beginning in earnest and this one is a puzzle since I have a great deal to be modest about in the entymology department.  Is it a cluster of eggs? we wondered. Now I really need that dissecting microscope! If you look closely at the east, northeast side of the photo you’ll see a stumpy brown protuberence and so the next guess was that it’s the hatching of the pupal stage of …… something. We’ve scoured the horticultural pest books and searched the internet too,  but nothing quite fitted.  We hazarded a guess at a big hatch of ladybird eggs, encouraged by the recent warm weather. There were also a number of ants on the plants, and ants have a remarkable relationship with blackfly (bean aphids) so best case scenario is that when the population of aphids explodes fairly soon there will be hordes of ravenous ladybird larvae waiting to take advantage of them. However when I attempted to dissect it with a scalpel and my 15X magnifier I could just about make out a number of apparently empty, hollow chambers.  I finished up not being convinced that it wasn’t some sort of multi-celled seed head.  So  I’ll just wait to see if there are any proper naturalists out there who’ll put me right – just for interest’s sake – we won’t be drenching the plants with neonicotinoids. Ever.

But whilst on the subject of insects I caught the trailer for the BBC Radio 4 programme “More or Less’  and so I dutifully tuned in only to listen to Tim Harford presenting a very poor counter-argument to the recent metastudy that identified a dramatic fall in insect populations and diversity. In essence he was arguing that bcause the metastudy only drew on research from a limited number of largely industrialised western countries, it was somehow rendered unreliable. How they must have cheered at Monsanto and Bayer! It sounded very like the arguments used by the tobacco companies when they were found out – “more research needed”, bigger studies etc etc – anything to delay.

I wondered whether to protest to the BBC but they’re so far gone in their bizarre interpretation of “balance’ it’s a waste of time even trying.  So here are some ideas Mr Harford might like to mull over. Firstly you can’t do proper surveys of the decline in insect populations in – say – the Amazon rain forest because we haven’t even identified most of them and therefore we can make no valid statements about their decline. BUT going back to the toacco argument, if research in the UK or America showed the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer in those countries, it would be a perfectly reasonable asumption that it would also affect smokers in Africa, India and China when (as they are now encouraged to do) they took up smoking on an heroic scale.

Further (I’m only just warming up) the countries where research has been properly conducted are precisely the ones where the suspected cause of the decline, that’s to say industrial intensive farming, is most heavily practised. It would be suicidally unethical to promote industrial farming in pristine areas “just to see” if the current research is correct. How much blessed evidence do we need? Mercifully, in the light of my piece yesterday, the desperation of the agrichemical industry is becoming ever more obvious. The roots of the industry are deeply implicated in the manufacture of chemical weapons during the cold war and when that ended they needed to find something equally unethical to do.

I was only thinking yesterday of a conversation I had in 1971 with a cleaner who worked at the Art School. When I initially wrote that sentence I said “elderly cleaner” but I realized he was probably the same age as I am now. He’d begun life as a farmhand and it must have been early summer because our converation centred on hay. He had recently been watching the haymaking on a nearby farm where he had worked as a boy and he said ” when I was young we took twice as much hay off that field and it was better quality too”.  It made a deep impression on me.  I was then in my twenties and he was in his early seventies.  His boyhood would have coincided with the First World War and the very beginning of intensive farming, as a generation of young farmhands went to war – many never returning. So much for progress. Our agricultural policy has been distorted by a century of inappropriate subsidies and indusrial lobbying, and I can’t remember the last time I heard a cuckoo. The two halves of that sentence are causally linked Mr Harford!

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