Tag: celebrating the solstice

The joyful paradox of solstice

Only one of these photos was taken at exactly 15.58 and that’s the one at the bottom left. The one of the sheep was taken in the flat while we could still see the setting sun and the other two are of Green Park Station which is shamefully used as a Sainsbury’s car park most of the week, only realizing its vocation on Saturdays when the Farmers Market takes temporary possession. What a gem it would be to see it used seven days a week as a proper, continental style market with stalls, cafes and restaurants. That said, we’ve got a vested interest because our youngest son runs the pizza place at the far end – this year he won second place in the national pizza awards.

Anyway I wanted to mark the solstice on the Potwell Inn site because for us – as it must be for all growers of food – it marks the one of the four quarters of the growing year, being the astronomical beginning of winter; the shortest day; and – more to the point – the moment at which our hearts become fixed on the coming season. The paradox is simply that contrary to all common sense the solstice marks the moment at which we’re closest to the sun; we’ve got the whole winter in front of us. The reason is simple enough. We’re closest to the sun but at the same time we’re in such a position relative to it that the sun’s rays strike us at their most oblique angle; having to struggle through the atmosphere and all its pollution; and so reaches us in its most attenuated form. In high summer the sun shortcuts through it all and beams down on us (at noon) from directly above our heads but at a greater distance.

But for now, this afternoon, we could watch the sun set knowing that in a week or two the days will be perceptibly longer. It’s one of the most ancient festivals of all, and runs deep within our collective imagination; so much so that the upstart religions that arrived much later on the scene were obliged to fit themselves into the deep calendar. It’s a festival of the rebirth of the life-giving sun and was celebrated as such at a time when the UK was an infrequently visited and inhospitable corner of the European land mass where the Celts – which is a bit of a cultural construct; let’s say the stone, iron and bronze age age cultures were far richer and deeper than we give them credit for. The present psycho-geography of the earth is a palimpsest in which many older cultures are inscribed. So – cutting to the chase – the “Celts” observed the next twelve days as if the sun were standing still – and kept a yule log burning to preserve the light until the return of the daylight was perceptible.

For me the celebration of these festivals seems to be engraved somewhere in the DNA – and Christmas is one of the more recent layers of the ancient sediment; and so today we were in festival mood at the Potwell Inn. We spent the morning at the allotment, where providence had provided a new pile of wood chip alongside the enormous bunker full of autumn leaves. So paths were repaired and topped up (they need repairing every year); and looking back as we left, our patch of land finally looked ready for another season. We brought back with us root vegetables and herbs for Christmas but left the sprouting broccoli on the plants until Christmas Eve to stay fresh. There aren’t any Brussels sprouts on the plot now because such was the inexplicable weather during the season they fruited in mid summer. The broccoli did the same thing but fortunately we left the plants in the ground and they’re giving us a second crop. To be honest we haven’t yet learned how to make the best of the polytunnel, but still we have lettuce, chard, even a few radishes growing well there. Then of course we’ve all the stored squashes and masses of pickles and preserves as well as tomato sauces and passata. We’re happy!

Then this afternoon we rushed out to get milk from the direct vending machine – run by a local farm – which is when I took the photos of the station. Madame thought it was slightly weird to be racing back for 15.58 but I really wanted to toast the moment and take a photo to celebrate it – and that’s what we did. Tonight we’ll celebrate with an ultra glamorous meal of breast of lamb, rolled around homemade stuffing with bubble and squeak – which is probably completely unknown outside the UK and, since it contains sprouts may be as revolting to vegetarians as the lamb which has been a great standby in times of poverty since we were students. Oh and we toasted the solstice with a glass of wine too. Last night I fed the Christmas cake with brandy. We never eat it at Christmas and I’ve long since given up wrapping it in marzipan and icing – but on freezing January days it makes a perfect tea break on the allotment with a cup of thermos tea. On the near horizon comes the seed order and the sowing of the earliest crops. My study and the kitchen too will be filled with light from the propagators. Hopefully, if Covid permits, one of my old churches will continue the Plough Monday tradition on Zoom and the cider club will manage some form of socially distanced wassail down on the banks of the Severn.

Somehow, and in spite of the best efforts of the modern Savonarolas who hate anything they don’t understand, or can’t find it referenced in the ten pages of the Bible they still read; we sense and honour the wisdom of our ancient forebears and celebrate the solstices and equinoxes as best we can through fire and earth and rowdy carols. The sun will rise again!

The Potwell Inn prepares for the winter solstice

From one of my old notebooks that I found in the garage when we moved to Bath.

According to the meteorologists winter started almost three weeks ago but here at the Potwell Inn we pay no attention to these unnatural dates. It’s always been the solstice for us because instead of simply looking backwards at the autumn and summer – always a bit depressing, especially this year, the solstice marks the shortest day. In fact it celebrates a particular moment because at 10.00am tomorrow the North Pole is tilted as far away from the sun as it will be this year. Mid morning tomorrow the earth slowly begins tilting the other way until mid march when (and I know earth coordinates are a bit meaningless in space terms) it’s ‘upright’ – and we celebrate the vernal equinox and, as the tilt continues, exposing more of the northern hemisphere to the direct rays of the sun we hit midsummer in mid June. And then the earth starts to tilt back again and the cycle begins anew. So the good news is that tomorrow marks both a beginning and an end.

In a more nature orientated culture than ours we’d be eagerly awaiting this moment. Historically, farm work slowed down during the winter because the soil was too heavy and cold for seed sowing. The farm year kicked off with the Epiphany celebrations around 6th January and often included Plough Monday celebrations where a plough would be brought into churches along with seed corn (usually wheat, rye and barley in the UK and not maize in those days). By Plough Monday it’s usually possible to see the lengthening days and the winter pursuits like hedging and ditching gave way on the farm to sowing once more.

But grass seems to grow more or less throughout the year. In fact I remember giving our vicarage lawn a light mow one Christmas Eve, and I was reminded yesterday that grass is by no means as simple as you might at first think. I was re-reading Michael Pollan’s 2006 book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. It’s an excellent read and today I noticed a 2016 piece in the Washington Times by Pollan that celebrated the fact that the US has seen a significant growth in food awareness accompanied by increasing numbers of artisanal food producers, organic and post-organic farms and farmers markets. But it wasn’t all good news because the dominance of corn had increased in the national diet.

However it was grass that caught my eye last night, because when I first read the book I knew next to nothing about it in spite of living and working in the countryside for 25 years. Then, when we moved here and joined the Bath Natural History Society we were on a field trip one day when I told one of the leading lights that I found grass identification hard. “Oh she said” pointedly, “grasses are easy” – which challenge was more than I could resist and so I’ve spent three or four years improving my grass skills. Then, earlier this year a friend lent me a microscope and a whole new world opened up and began a new romance for me.

Why is this important? Well, in his book Michael Pollan draws attention to one central criticism of intensive farming in a way that I found irresistible. Grass, he says, harnesses and stores the power of the sun and because of its properties of self regeneration and the sheer density of its coverage and capacity to photosynthesise even during autumn and winter, it represents the nearest thing to a free lunch in the natural world. When we see a meadow, especially a traditional meadow with all its wildflowers – we’re looking at a far more efficient solar energy store than any field covered in solar panels.

Intensive farming, on the other hand, replaces all that sustainable solar energy with unsustainable oil – for driving farm machinery, transporting animals and crops over huge distances, and for manufacturing the fertilizers and chemicals which then go on to promote global heating and cause pollution environmental damage and health problems. The problem is that we humans lack a rumen, the part of a grazing animal’s stomach than can digest grass. So the only way we can access all that stored solar energy for food is by feeding the grass to a ruminant animal like a cow, and then eating it. If you add in the concept of buying locally, he food and the consumer are in the same place.

Grass fed cattle do well although they fatten slower than cattle stuffed with corn and antibiotics, The grass and its herbs provide a still unknown number of micronutrients and healing properties to the cattle’s diet and so they are better able to thrive without the panoply of wormers, drenches and other chemicals that are essential in the feedlots which, incidentally, are becoming more and more common in the UK – this isn’t an American problem. Grass fed beef is lower in health damaging cholesterol and it’s said that it tastes better too. It’s very expensive because it’s slower and less intensively farmed, and the food – that’s to say the grass -doesn’t attract the same level of subsidy. The inescapable logic is that traditional mixed farms are better than intensive farms for a host of environmental reasons but we will have to eat far less meat because the low price of meat in the supermarkets reflects an unsustainable and environmentally destructive food culture.

The question of methane is always the first thing to come up and it’s true that cows produce methane. But intensive farming produces far more methane because cowpats dropped on a low intensity pasture generate far less methane than the lakes of cattle slurry that accumulate on intensive farms and, all too frequently leak into the surrounding watercourses. A second benefit of grassland is that grass is a prodigious carbon store. No dig and low tillage systems don’t release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere at anything like the same rate. So, as Wendell Berry memorably said, by abandoning mixed farming and grass pasturage, intensive farming has taken a solution (mixed farming) and turned it into two problems: soil erosion and nutrient depletion on the one hand and massive pollution on the other, The manure that cattle leave on the pasture and which improves both soil structure and fertility becomes a lethal poison when concentrated in slurry. The land taken from pasture to grow feed grain releases carbon back into the atmosphere and can only remain productive through the use of chemicals.

And so grass is perhaps as important as are trees when it comes to carbon sequestration – and that’s great because the one thing we can grow here in the southwest of the UK is grass. Anyway I woke up the morning with my botanical whiskers all of a quiver and as we did our customary walk along the river and the canal I did a very rough and ready count of the plants we could see in flower. It’s been an odd autumn and early winter and although we’ve had a couple of frosts they’ve not amounted to much. The rain has been a much bigger problem for us. I didn’t have a pen with me so I couldn’t write them all down but from memory there were Canadian and Mexican Fleabane, a single dead nettle, groundsel, yarrow,common ragwort, one dandelion, red valerian, nipplewort, perennial sowthistle, ivy and some ivy leaved toadflax, plus (and this is a long shot) on the flood prevention scheme on North Quays where there was a lot of inappropriate wildflower re-seeding and I’m pretty sure there was a single corn marigold flowering on the spot where a very out of place clump of them grew last summer. As ever, plants don’t read the textbooks and to reverse the ethical aphorism, in field botany you can’t make an is into an ought. There were also new shoots breaking through on an old man’s beard vine, and a clump of very lush green prickly lettuce leave emerging on the river bank. Fourteen plants in flower on December 20th isn’t bad, and you could smell the strange almond perfume of the winter heliotrope all up the canal. Spring is hiding behind the bushes!

Tomorrow we’ll celebrate the solstice with a roastie and I’m wondering whether I can risk embarrassing Madame with a little candle-lit ceremony at 10.00am and then we can enjoy a solitary Christmas with a mexican meal that the children would never have let us get away with: they’re far greater traditionalists than we are! Then we’ll go for a walk amidst the hordes of similarly stranded grandparents.

Happy solstice!

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