Tag: drought

Botany on the Damascus Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 1st and first picking of broad beans

Vegetables seem to be remarkably regular in their flowering and fruiting habits regardless of the weather.  I had thought that we’d be picking the first batch of broad beans at least a week early this year, but in spite of the vast difference in weather between this year and last, we’re picking just two days earlier. Potatoes and tomatoes are a little later but they have both been put out later for fear of a late frost.  The biggest diference this year is the strawberries. Although we’ve got a fabulous crop on the way, last year we were picking ripe strawberries in the first week of June.  This year we’ll be lucky to see them by the third week. The potatoes, I fear, have been afflicted by the incredibly dry weather and they’ll pick up if we get the promised rain this coming week. I’m loath to throw too much water in the direction of the potatoes because I think it diminishes the flavour.  I was grumbling to our neighbouring allotmenteer about the poor flavour of Jersey Royals over the past couple of years and he said he thought it was because the farmers have been prevented from using seaweed because it was thought to be adding too much salt to the soil. Our asparagus, on the other hand is thriving on its thick mulch of seaweed over the winter and is five feet tall now. I do hope there’s as much activity underground because we shall enjoy a good crop next spring.

So this week has been incredibly busy, with a good deal of grandparenting and a trip to replace the water pump on the campervan.  A friend was charged €230 in France 2 years ago for a replacement, but after a bit of research on the internet I sourced a brand new replacement for £50 and fitted it myself at the additional cost of a packet of electrical connectors. I felt absurdly proud of myself.

Apart from that it’s been absurdly busy on the allotment – so much so I’ve hardly had time to write at all. We’ve fitted a hazel wattle screen between the shed and the greenhouse to create a sheltered area where we can grow tomatoes and peppers.  It arrived with one of the end posts pulled out because presumably the delivery driver had dragged it across the floor of his van (after all it weighed 30Kg and he’s probably never seen one before).  Rather than send it back I decided to have a go at repairing it – it took 2 hours of  somewhat grumpy effort but I did finally manage to separate all the woven horizontal branches with the aid of some steel bars, and reinsert the post. It’s now in position and will be an effective screen against cold north winds.  Then, today the temperature soared to 25C so we went up early and  I hammered in the supporting posts ready for the tomatoes, nonethleless we both needed a shower when we got home.  The weather will break tonight, according to the forecast, and we’ll get some rain, so great relief all round.

Someone wrote to the paper the other day lamenting the fact that weather forecasters seem to regard sunshine as inherently superior to rain.  You can tell they’re not gardeners.  In fact there’s a proper drought building up. Our usually damp plot is bone dry down to a foot deep and so we’ve been forced to water as if it were July. Given that a full watering can weighs 22lbs and the round trip to the tank is 100 yards, you can see it’s a bit of a workout to water the whole 250 square metres.

Yesterday my friend Rob – the real botanist – came to check my ID of the Fumaria I’ve been going on about – and,  joy of joys, I was right and it’s Fumaria murialis. This probably means less than nothing to almost everyone else in the world, but it means a lot to me because it shows I’m very slowly getting my eye in.

Tomorrow or Monday the outdoor tomatoes will begin their outdoor life, taking their chances with whatever the weather throws at them.  Meanwhile we’re making the second batch of elderflower cordial.  The first batch is growing on us as we drink it – the problem is that home made is essentially unrepeatable.  This time we’ve gathered a bag of 50+ heads from a purple, ornamental elderflower tree.  So far the result is a lovely rose pink colour.  Sadly we had to buy another eight 500ml  swing top preserving bottles because the rest are all in use, and so our “food for free” cordial, or at least this batch, will cost about twice as much as the commercial stuff. However as the years mount up, home made gets increasingly competitive.  As ever, though, the flavour beats anything you could buy