Potatoes, broad beans, tayberries and strawberries
At this time of year it’s hard not to be wide awake at 5.00am, and more particularly this year because the timetable on the allotment has been condensed by about a month. A late, wet spring and a mild winter have challenged our ingenuity, so when to sow and plant have become more of a gamble than ever. The plants, on the other hand, are able to compensate for their straightened circumstances and race to complete their cycle of growth. “Time is short” – they seem to think – “Let’s get on with it!”; and I know that talking to your vegetables is thought to be a sign of madness, but they talk to us all the time and it’s downright churlish not to at least acknowledge what they’re saying. At best we are intelligent companions to our allotment plots. We sow and hoe; feed and water, and try to protect them from beasties and east winds as best we can.
It can feel like endless hard labour; hitched like a trailer to the back of a runaway season. The Potwell Inn may seem like a dream life, furnished with warm evenings and cool wine; perfumed by nectar – but it ain’t nothing of the sort. Tasks pile up and all we can do is take the most urgent from the top of the pile while the bindweed shoulders its way across from the abandoned allotment next door. More like a guerilla war against entropy – made far more difficult by knuckle dragging politicians and their sweet talking lobbyists as they bury their tiny brains in the sand and pretend that nothing is going on. But there is always pleasure to be got from drawing on sixty years of experience. Picking just the right tool from the chaotic shed; the draw hoe that will slice the weeds off at the ground if we keep it sharp, the cultivating tool for working compost and pelleted organic fertilizer into the surface; the indispensable ridging tool which gets used just once a year. Hand tools aren’t just useful, they become companions.
The compensations are still there to be snatched out of harm’s way. Our new potatoes came on last week, and they are so sweet I’d pay a tenner for a plateful with a big knob of butter. We grow a first early called Red Duke of York and in early season they’re better even than the Arran Pilots that my father and grandfather swore by. Broad (Fava) beans have done well this year and, again, we eat half of them uncooked- straight off the plants – as we do the strawberries and tayberries. We revert to the prehistoric practise of foraging our patch of earth in spring and then freeze and store; make jams and pickles and sauces in the autumn. Our neighbours probably see our plot as a disgracefully unkempt and weedy riot, but the insects, bees and pollinators; the dragonflies and damselflies and hoverflies wouldn’t agree as they work the clumps of catmint and marjoram. On a good day you can hear them even above the continuous noise of the passing traffic and the ambulances ferrying the casualties of modern life to the hospital.
But then, of necessity, there’s much more than just allotmenteering to contend with. There’s cooking and eating; cleaning painting and decorating, shopping and baking before a moment can be found for a bit of botanising, let alone writing. Did I even mention arthritic hands and knees? – the unwanted honours of getting old. The average summer day begins appallingly early as light floods into the bedroom; the hours race by and by five o’clock in the afternoon and against all common sense we break open a bottle of vinous sedative and talk about love, and children (harder than herding cats) and plan campervan trips. In between times there are always new skills to learn, new accomplishments to strive for. There are no mountains to climb and no dull cruises to endure because our bucket lists are full of the mundane and the ordinary which – given a good light and a fair wind – can sparkle like a teenage dream.
So it’s now eight am and I’m off to the kitchen to make strong coffee and wake Madame. The day begins.
Most non – gardeners would probably imagine that a hungry gap in the allotment year would come some time in the darkest part of winter; but it doesn’t. It comes around now -late spring and early summer when seeds are sown, plants raised and pricked out, but when there’s nothing much to eat. The potatoes were planted a month ago and are growing well; the tomatoes, aubergines and peppers in the polytunnel are all growing strongly but it’ll be some time before we can taste the fruits of our labours. Apart from overwintered Swiss Chard and a bit of spinach which are both looking a bit knackered by now but still taste good; and a few stored Crown Prince squashes, the first signs of the food year where we live is an early picking of strawberries and some broad beans from the polytunnel.
I wrote about growing broad beans in the tunnel a few years ago, and was a bit put off by a friend’s letter saying that if the flowering plants get too hot they would not set pods. That’s a good point, particularly after a succession of very hot early spring weather in previous years; but on the other hand, there’s a large element of gambling in gardening and this year we decided to risk a couple of dozen plants to the global climate emergency, and it looks as if our gamble has paid off, after a cool and wet spring. To be sure we planted successional broad beans outside, beginning with a November sowing, and they are all thriving obligingly and at different stages of growth but we had our first picking of tunnel grown beans today.
Our polytunnel container strawberries were doing well when we left to go to Cornwall for two weeks, but the watering arrangements seem to have broken down and we lost a few plants to drought; so we’ve been busy weeding and watering to try to rescue as many as we can.
Two weeks away has also given the bindweed a good start in the annual battle, but we’re as stubborn as hell, and although we never beat it, we certainly give it a headache. We’ve a half decent fruit set; the transplanted Blackberry is slowly recovering and the Tayberry is a mass of green fruit. Tayberry jelly is even more fragrant and beautiful than bramble jelly, but I didn’t boil last year’s batch quite long enough to set it well. Possibly it needs a bit of pectin. I think it would make a splendid ice cream – just as damson does.
Yesterday we took ourselves off to Bradford on Avon to meet some old friends for lunch. We always catch the train to our lunches so we can have a glass (or two) of wine. They took us to see a beautifully restored Saxon church dedicated to St Laurence. I suspect if you look at the photo below you’ll notice that there may have been a much bigger church there at some point – you can still see an old roof line and the imprint of what may once have been a clerestory. It’s a glorious jumble of original, later and restored stonework that offered the traditional steel offertory box set into the wall as well as a bank card reader for 21st century visitors. In places the stone floor and steps were polished by centuries of pilgrim feet. There was also what looked like an original Saxon font and possibly the faint remains of medieval painting. As we crossed back over the old bridge, now being hammered by continuous traffic, we were looking to see if the otters which had been spotted recently by our friends would put in an appearance, but I should think they are largely nocturnal. I absolutely love trains. My dad was a railwayman and we lived next to the railway line which once ran almost past our current front door. The river Avon which runs past our flat and also through the middle of Bradford on Avon flows through Melksham and then mysteriously turns north in the direction of Malmesbury. See how nature makes its own mind up about where rivers should flow.
Lunch was good, and the twelve minute train journey back home flew past twice as quickly as a boring and congested car journey.
Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X Oxonianum. The markings remind me of Henbane – another (poisonous) stunner.
I don’t really get the idea that nature is an unending struggle for survival – red in tooth and claw – and all that violent guff which gets pressed into service to provide an ideological scaffolding for behaving in greedy and vile ways – as if Tennyson were a fan of the dark satanic mills. This isn’t a sudden insight brought on by a dose of Cornish spring (although life feels a lot better when the sun shines). We’ve had five days wandering the footpaths and hedgerows of the Roseland peninsula; photographing and recording plants as we go, and this time I was paying particular attention to the succession of plants; especially the carrot family, the Apiaceae, as they emerge one by one in the spring.
I remember the first time I tried to get to grips with this family of lookalikes. I’d noticed the plant known as Alexanders – almost always the first to emerge with its shiny celery-like leaves and an umbrella-like flower head of creamy yellow-white. I’d just bought my very first flower book, published by Warnes, and I went about finding my plant in the traditional beginners’ mode; turning the pages one by one until I found an illustration that looked right. So far so good, but fired with enthusiasm I went on to look at the others in the same family and when I came across some fine drawings of the seeds (alarmingly similar) which were the ultimate key to naming them all; I sighed, shut the book and didn’t open those pages again for years.
Six decades later I know a little bit more (not that much!) and it’s all very interesting, because there’s a distinct succession of these plants every year. Alexanders is usually first to appear as a handsome plant, but soon starts to yellow off and look very tatty. Then comes Cow Parsley – an unfortunate name for such a dazzlingly white and beautiful plant with lace-like leaves; shortly followed by Hogweed and all the others, and yes – it’s quite hard to tell some of them apart because they rarely grow side by side simultaneously. They go on mucking me about, popping out for their brief lives one by one until October and then there’s only the seeds to identify, and they are so beautiful when you look at them through a hand lens; ridged and horned as if carved by a miniaturist sculptor. They emerge, flourish, flower and die but I’ve never ever heard a Hogweed beating up a Cow parsley plant in the dead of night while no-one’s supposed to be about. I’ve never seen a Pignut abuse a Wild Carrot or cheat a Sanicle of its inheritance nor a Hemlock Water Dropwort leave its stream to poison some Rock Samphire and spoil a forager’s day. I just can’t see any evidence that there’s a battle for survival going on out there unless it’s to develop some resistance to chemicals.
The plants – not just the Carrot family – seem to have evolved a scheme to allow all of them to flourish and complete their life cycle in relative peace apart from the predation of cows, hogs and numerous small bites from insects. They grow to different heights; the later ones being generally taller than the early ones and pop their clogs before they become a burden to their neighbours – and I’ve never heard any moaning about the brevity of life from the depths of a hedge or a ditch. By and large they seem enviably contented, if that’s not a category error. We humans like to whinge about the way our happiness has been stolen (always someone else’s fault) when in fact we’ve hidden it because we don’t want to own it. Before long, the safe place where we concealed it is forgotten and we can relish the tragedy of our lives over a couple of bottles of cheap wine. Plants don’t do that.
I have the great fortune of meeting a teacher who’s thought deeply about this and whose work crosses many borders that are patrolled by legions of gatekeepers – a brave soul. He explains the fruits of his labours as “Natural Inclusion” – as against Natural Selection in its purest and darkest form. You can Google the phrase and you’ll see who he is in much more detail, his name’s Alan and he’s a great teacher. He uses scientific conceptual language, but he also uses poetry and painting to express his ideas.
Basically, and dangerously simplifying, with a little help from Google Gemini here’s a very concise summary of an important antidote to lazy evolutionary thinking that plonks us down in the middle of a merciless battle. If ever we needed to visualize ourselves as a working and living part of nature it’s now. There are many threads that have joined together to create our bondage to greed and exploitation as if it were something natural, and we have a few decades at best to cut through them and set ourselves and the ecosystem free before it’s too late.
Alan Rayner proposes a new concept called natural inclusion which challenges some aspects of traditional evolutionary theory. Here are the key points of his ideas:
Natural Inclusion (NI): This is Rayner’s core concept. He argues that nature fundamentally works through inclusion, not separation. Boundaries between things are seen as dynamic interactions, not fixed lines. Imagine the difference between walking through a doorway (inclusion) versus hitting a brick wall (exclusion).
Questioning Natural Selection: Rayner believes natural selection isn’t the whole story of evolution. He proposes that the process of change is more about the flow of energy and the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environment.
Nature as a Guide: Rayner suggests looking to nature for moral guidance. He proposes honesty, reasonableness, and kindness as core values because they reflect natural processes.
Rayner uses art, alongside writing, to explore these ideas. His paintings serve as a way to connect with people who might not be drawn to scientific explanations.
St Francis talked about the sun, the moon and the stars; the animals and the earth as our brothers and sisters. I found the Geranium in the photo on the footpath leaving Portscatho. It probably escaped from a garden somewhere nearby and I instantly fell in love with it. If our current worldview doesn’t allow us to fall in love with a plant, we need to get another world view!
So here, at the end of a heavy duty week on the allotment are some of the fruits of our labours after a long and difficult winter. Crops are growing; even broad beans in the polytunnel are in pod and fattening up – which was especially nice when we saw that they were selling at £7 a kilo in the supermarket yesterday. Spuds are pushing through and the tunnel strawberries are about to begin their ripening. Spared any early frosts this year the trees have had a good fruit set. The bottom right photo is of a hybrid blackberry that languished in the fruit cage for three seasons so we took a chance on moving it to a better position with more light and air. Eight years after taking over an overgrown field, the plot is finally looking established. There’s a settled feel to it that; after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing; suggests that the allotment has accepted our guardianship. There’s a profound difference in the progress of happy plants over unhappy ones and any successes we have are down to noticing what the plants like best and making sure they get it. The strawberries, for instance, have runnered all over the place and made their way to a narrow bed beside the polytunnel where they are protected from winds in any quarter, and bask in its radiated warmth. It would be the last place I’d have chosen to put them! – but the earth is kept moist from rain runoff, the sun passes happily through the polythene cover and it’s one of the few low-traffic areas on the plot.
Gardening takes up a lot of time and energy, but I’m a great believer in texture and so we’ve tried hard to keep going on other things – like botanising and taking trips in the campervan. I’ve written before about the degree of planning that I do before a trip and I’ve made great use of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s magnificent databases and distribution maps. But one thing that’s always frustrated me in the past was the fact that ordinary members of the public (like me) only got limited access to the detailed information contained in 40 million records. This meant that if I wanted to check the location of a plant I was interested inI could only get an approximate 2X2 kilometer square on the map. Trust me, scouring 4 square kilometers of bare countryside for a tiny clump of flowers doesn’t half slow you down. There is one particular plant that I’ve been looking for for three years.
Anyway this last week the database was opened up to all BSBI members, with some provisions for protecting especially rare and endangered plants and this gave far more detailed locational information. I’m much more interested in the kind of unthreatened plants which are especially fussy about their environment whether that be pavements or lead mining slag heaps. I had to apply for access and rather to my surprise it was granted. I fell on the database like a hungry wolf and quickly discovered how close I’d been to finding my three year quarry – that’s a trip for the next couple of weeks. But then we’d also been to a lecture on ferns a few weeks ago and one difficult to find plant had cropped up in the midst of one of my favourite places on earth; not pretty but, let’s say, post-industrial. So a quick search online and within seconds I’d got a reasonably precise location. But instead of the adrenaline rush I’d expected I felt a bit ashamed of myself – as if it was cheating. That’s one to resolve later but it feels as if I enjoy hunting more than finding.
My research into AI wildlife recording applications took another step forward when the BSBI released a phone recording app at the same time. Good for them! Of course we shot out for a walk as soon as it stopped raining and I entered a record on the hoof, as it were, with a minimum of fuss. Coincidentally I’d been tasked to produce a precis of several longish reports on the work of the Natural History Society that we’re members of. I always swore that I’d never go to another meeting after I retired but I relented in a moment of weakness. So – and here’s a major confession – I fed all three long reports into Gemini, the Google AI machine and analysed them one at a time and then it took less than half a minute to produce a brilliant summary of all three, of a quality it would have taken me days to produce. My personal prejudices, likes and dislikes played absolutely no part in it because it was produced by a deep text machine with no knowledge of which ideas I liked and which I hated. All my work was focused on asking the best possible question and setting the task in logical and unambiguous terms. You might call it a scientific approach.
I presented the report to the committee and one member kicked off about the absence of the term “research” that wasn’t in any of the contributory papers. I could see that the discussion wasn’t going anywhere and backed off, but I left the meeting feeling that I’d been the victim of gaslighting. My hard work was being dismissed because -well because what? Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist distinguished between organic and traditional intellectuals; the first group theorizing from a world of lived experience and the second (such as philosophers and clergy) giving history and tradition the whip hand. Give me the wisdom that comes from lived experience any day!
Back in the real world, I read two articles that seemed to treat plant recording as a kind of Ian Allan trainspotter discipline – more was clearly better. I get very fed up about this kind of thing, because it puts the amateur naturalist at a tremendous disadvantage. In one instance a recorder had submitted 135 thousand records to the big database. A little bit of basic maths suggests that with 3,500 plant species in the UK you’d have to find every one of them almost 40 times to amass such a score. The real scientific impact of such a magnificent effort is not in the gross total, but in building our knowledge concerning the distribution of plants across the country, their seasonality and preferred environments, the variations in their appearance and whether they are increasing or decreasing in number or in danger of disappearing altogether. Ten thousand records of a single plant – let’s say, bluebell hybrids made right across the length and breadth of the country could be tremendously useful. Amateur naturalists can be a vast army of potential volunteer recorders who, with targeted and appropriate help from the professionals, would get better and better at identifying plants and therefore contribute to the data that scientific research depends upon. There’s no hierarchy needed here; no need for anyone to feel intimidated or inhibited from having a try by the thought that they might get laughed at or patronized. The academic gatekeepers, far from preserving the integrity of the discipline are holding it back; squeezing the life out of it.
But hey! we’re off down to beloved Cornwall in the campervan and I’ll be testing the apps, looking for plants, doing a bit of recording and hopefully some sunbathing too, alongside a few trips to the pub. Here at the Potwell Inn, we celebrate the life ordinary. This weekend an old friend died of Motor Neurone disease. I have no idea how to process that.
An evening in the campervan with an excellent documentary series on Frida Kahlo. I really didn’t notice she wasn’t wearing much when I took it. Madame was consulted and she approved before I included this photo!
This little fella – I know he’s a ‘he’ because the females are all black has taken to spending his nights in the keyhole of our allotment shed and I’ve had to chuck him out two or three times in order to get the key in to open up. We were talking about planting more bee attractors on the plot, and now we’ve made up our minds to plant some Lungwort – Pulmonaria, and more Comfrey because the old plants have expired. This bee isn’t a communal bee but a solitary one; however apparently he occasionally gets into a gathering rather like Ivy bees do. I owe this ID to Alvan, a fellow musketeer, but I’m desperately trying to avoid getting into bees because at least flowers stay still while I photograph them, and I find that entomologists and lepidopterists can go into a faraway place where their eyes swivel independently in order not to miss anything.
Anyway, any interesting botanical expeditions have been delayed while we get the allotment up to speed. You’ll notice that the tomatoes in our polytunnel are all carrying commercial labels, but before you toss your head scornfully, we moved over to commercial grafted plants a couple of years ago because they are completely blight resistant and much higher yielding. The grafted aubergines which we also buy are sitting atop a rootstock as thick as a pencil already. We are already looking forward to the summer crops. The potatoes are peeping above their ridges; the Chard leaves are enormous but delicious and the fruit trees and bushes are almost finished flowering. Our two resident robins are so fat from following us around as we work that they can barely take off and fly back to their nestlings. Despite the awful weather of the past months, nature has her hand on the tiller once more, it seems.
Last Saturday we had a local field trip around Victoria Park and the Botanical Gardens and we spotted these Three Cornered Garlic plants which thrive around here having evaded border control whilst migrating from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the UK they’re harder to find – but I think they’re absolutely beautiful and deserve to be spared by foragers. In Cornwall whole hedgerows have been stripped of Ramsons – Wild Garlic – by commercial foragers. Which reminds me – as it’s peak St George’s Mushroom season – that although they’re generally promoted as safe I’ve met two people, both highly experienced mycologists, who developed symptoms of poisoning after twenty or thirty years of eating them safely. Some plants and fungi contain some pretty nasty accumulative toxins so please do be careful. If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your mind, don’t eat it!
Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.
I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.
So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.
Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife. Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted.
Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.
This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!
Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!
The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.
But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.
Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica
Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.
Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.
It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).
So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.
I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.
We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.
Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.
The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.
Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.
This photograph doesn’t nearly capture the drama and force of the river Erme just as it passed beneath the old bridge at the top of Fore street in Ivybridge. We turned around and crossed the bridge and looked down into something resembling a maelstrom; an unsurvivable torrent of peat-stained moor water shouldering down the narrow and deep river bed, past shops and houses and old mill buildings and out beyond the town, heading towards its seafall below Holbeton. Forty years ago we swam in the river at Mothecombe as I was recovering from a bout of viral pneumonia. Swimming upstream was hard work, but the return journey made us feel like Olympic athletes.
How to describe the indescribable power of floodwater haunts my mind. I dream about it and think about it constantly because it always carries a wealth of meaning, a hierarchy of suggestion. So far in one paragraph I’ve ventured –maelstrom; unsurvivable torrent; shouldering; drama and force. I see the water as if it were a flayed body on an anatomist’s slab, the knotted musculature speaking of movement; but poorly because that’s too static altogether because its days of carousing are over. Another image that came to me last night in the dark, was the sound of an invading army of infantry, advancing silently in the dark; but again the murmuring, even of an imaginary crowd of football fans bent on mischief has the menace but nowhere near the vocal range, the musicality of the water as it twists and turns over boulders. Then I thought of the twisting of the flooding river as a cable, and later as a rope (more flexible). I thought of a rope walk where the separate fibres are spun and drawn together creating strength and flexibility out of shorter fibres. But finally two steps came to my aid at once in my thoughts. Why not wool? Imagine that sheep are now the principal inhabitants of the moor and even the longest fleece must be spun into woollen yarn. The history of the moor, now that the mines have closed, is written in wool. The farmer shears; the fuller cleans; the spinner spins; a skein of wool draws together every corner of the moor and finally the sleins are woven or knitted. I like to think of the streams and tributaries contributing their ten pennyworth into the great yarn of water flowing towards the sea. And what could be woven from that yarn? Is there a place for the lady in the Sally Army? a place for the dodgy taxi driver, the ten firms of solicitors that cluster in the town, the psychotic man shouting at no-one, the local ladies of a certain age drawing raffle tickets in the Italian cafe, the bookshop owner and the cafe proprietor, the despondent landlord? The customers of the innumerable charity shops and the fast food outlets. The history of the moor isn’t written as much in the big events as in bus tickets, receipts and whispered adulteries in the bar. It’s Llareggub, the yarn of poets, woven from the water that has seen it all and washed it all away.
Anyway, enough lyrical stuff! The reason we were in Ivybridge at all was nothing to do with having memories recalled, but because the campervan was needing some repairs done about three miles up the road. In the past we’ve sat in the waiting room but we knew that this was going to be at least a day’s work and there’s a limit to the amount of sitting around I can tolerate. The principal repair – or at least it was when we first arranged the appointment – was to replace the badly degraded and cracked vac-formed sink. But then the mission creep crept in, and we added investigation of the non-functioning leisure battery charger, the removal of the old satellite dish that detached itself noisily one day when we were driving back from the Brecon Beacons – now known as Bannau Brycheiniog and getting the gas jet on the 3 way fridge working after three years. This time we decided to skip the 4.00 am alarm call to get us there in time for the workshop to open and we booked a couple of nights at the campsite just outside Tavistock so we could take a more relaxed approach with a night in the van either side of the appointment.
In view of the appalling weather we delayed leaving until lunchtime when the driving rain eased off; but just as we parked up at the campsite we noticed an old fault – a busted fuel filter – pouring diesel on to the gravel. I didn’t need to think twice about the cause, but the cure – at nearly 5.00pm was more problematic. Suddenly the early start at the workshop was in peril. Anyway I rang the AA and explained the fault and, wonderfully an AA van pulled in 20 minutes later carrying a spare. This man really knew his stuff and we were repaired inside fifteen minutes.
The next morning we resolved not to drive over the moor on account of the weather, but the satnav paid no attention and before long we found ourselves on roads, but especially bridges which were all too close to the width of the van. We soldiered on in the driving rain with Madame in brace position most of the way and eventually we arrived twenty minutes later than planned at the workshop; dropped the van off and called a taxi (I’m not going to name the company). The driver was a bit of a shock. An old friend of ours, a scientist, told us how he and his student friends had invented a new unit of measurement – the millihelen – which was the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. Our driver was somewhere down in the microhelen range, with a prominent hooked nose, deeply lined skin and what can only have been an expensive Beatle wig, improbably auburn and shining like spun plastic. He was also very difficult to engage in conversation but that wasn’t a problem because he was the most erratic driver I’ve met in years. We took the longest possible route on the way there which cost us £14 – and not the guide price of £10 – but in fairness it was further because he used the A38 and we were glad to be alive. On the way home he took the back roads for reasons which became obvious because he had obviously been using cocaine and carried on snorting noisily on nothing as we careered around the edge of Dartmoor at a cost of £10 and possibly a couple of counselling sessions. On the bright side he recommended an Italian place and dropped us off outside it.
It was absolutely freezing on Thursday. Ivybridge under black skies looked like the kind of place that sheep gather in shop doorways to shelter and then die of exposure anyway. The cafe – Marco’s Trattoria in Fore street was wonderful; lovely food; warm and functioning as a real social hub. The owners, we discovered when we spoke to one of them, were both professional engineers and huge fans of Italian cooking. We had a revealing conversation about her engineer’s take on making pizzas which involved the strictest time and temperature protocols.
The bookshop about two doors away was just what you’d expect with a decent local collection, loads of maps and natural history. I couldn’t resist buying a couple of books – local bookshops struggle to survive, and so desperate were we to stay out of the freezing weather that we even went into the bank and spent twenty minutes in a warm queue in order to make a cash transfer that I could have done in one minute on the laptop. Then a couple of turns around the centre of town before my fingers went white and I couldn’t feel them any more. On our way around we discovered a microbrewery being run as a social enterprise, and Madame was overwhelmed by the kindness of a Salvation Army volunteer who she asked where the toilets could be found and took her inside to their day centre. I was outside in the rain, and one of their customers passed me shouting at no-one in particular with the most appalling racist threats which, given his nationality, was rather surprising. With two and a half hours still to fill we sat in the better looking of the pubs for a couple of hours over a pint of Guinness until it was time for the taxi driver to put his razor blade away and fetch us. The Landlord had moved down from Northampton in October and he reckoned it had rained every day since then. When I told the taxi drive story to our youngest son he said that people always think that city centres are where it all happens, but he reckoned the real crazies live out in the sticks. Our oldest son said – “how do you think taxi drivers survive the hours without the coke”. That’s me put in my place then!
When we got back to the workshop, one look at the boss’s professionally mournful face told us that the job could not be finished in a day and so we arranged to come back the following morning. We drove to the campsite through Plymouth to avoid the roads across the moor but it turned out to be a totally stupid decision because the centre of the city was utterly clogged – possibly by the discovery of a 500lb wartime bomb and a recently changed traffic layout that foxed the sat nav completely and sent us around Derriford Hospital in an endless traffic jam. In the end we turned off the A386 on to the moor again.
On Friday morning – we didn’t need to discuss it – we set out across the moor and loved it. It was still raining and the bridges hadn’t been miraculously widened during the night; we even saw a few flurries of powdery snow but yesterday’s nightmare journey was vindicated by the scenery and the 40mph speed limit which was a very safe speed with sheep and horses everywhere. As we passed over the 12 century bridge at Horrabridge, Madame had an inspired moment as she recognised the Spar shop and the cottage we’d stayed at when our first baby was only 6 months old. He had screamed for hours and Madame had convinced herself that it was because he “didn’t like the wallpaper”. I went up to the Spar shop and bought a tub of Ski yoghurt which he downed hungrily and quickly, promptly falling asleep after eating possibly the most corrupting food I could possibly have given him. Later I stood in the garden and wondered whether I could cope with fatherhood at all.
In a couple of hours the job was finished and we drove home with a new sink, a functioning miFi system with a new smart TV, a fridge that worked on gas once more and a functional charging unit. We even found a garage that sold LPG on the A38, although the wheelie I did to get into it may have perplexed a few people and so – as they say – all our ducks were in a row. The smile on the mechanic’s face as we left the workshop suggested that we may have paid for his summer holiday too!
As a small postscript to this, I should say that a couple of weeks ago I bought a polo necked sweater knitted from raw Welsh Black sheeps’ wool to the same pattern worn by Ernest Shackleton. It cost an arm and a leg, and it smells like a sheep (lovely!) but it’s just the toughest and warmest garment you could imagine. I also bought the matching beanie but I think I may already have mislaid it somewhere. So although I can’t boast of weaving a history I can at least lay claim to wearing a bit of it, although confusingly it’s not black but brown; beautiful, warm, smelly brown.
Floodwater makes a strange and almost haunting sound; all the more frightening for being relatively quiet. This is water at its most dangerous, the point where it seems to assume a malevolent personality. The waves and pulses – yes, the river seems to pulse – whisper quietly to one another – they plan, they finger the banks as if they were looking for weaknesses; they race past me faster than a decent runner could manage . Imagine the sibilance of a flock of roosting starlings with the volume turned down; busy, organised and purposeful. The swans have decamped to a newly made lake among the houses opposite. With both towpaths flooded and impassable, we residents gather in small knots at the end of the terrace to watch, take photographs and peer upwards through the leafless trees and watch a police helicopter hovering overhead, praying that there’s no lost soul tumbling lifelessly along the scoured river bed.
It seems to have rained every day for over a month. Monsoon quantities of water soaking the ground and washing thousands of tons of impoverished soil into the river. The old floodgates have become cranky and unreliable and there’s even talk about removing them altogether because the Council have invested millions in a new flood relief scheme which works by storing the overflowing water among terraces which they hope will be filled with shoppers thronging a new retail centre in the summer. I spoke to a council worker early this morning who told me that the previous record height at the spot we were standing was 5.5m. Today it was 5.1m and rising. Maybe someone miscalculated, I wondered, with all these new build blocks of studio flats with a handsome premium for river frontage – maybe a river frontage in the midst of a climate catastrophe is like a ringside seat at an earthquake. Maybe an underground carpark below river level is tempting a providence that’s turning bad on us. Who even knows where we go from here?
This is not an act of god, this is an act of revenge for the raging stupidity of those who caused the problem. Last night on local television we learned that some SUV drivers had been driving at speed down flooded streets – because they could – creating bow waves that washed away the householders’ sandbags and caused their houses to flood. Words fail me.
