Naturally – and I mean that literally – naturally none of this is actually available on the allotment right now. I could almost certainly walk across to Sainsbury’s and buy them all, relatively cheaply but today we don’t need them because today we picked the first of our purple sprouting broccoli. That’s a red letter day in our calendar. We still have potatoes – although they’re starting to sprout now, and we have leeks plus all the stored tomato sauces and passata, a few herbs, rhubarb and loads of frozen pesto. We shan’t starve, but the point is we spent the day on the allotment clearing the last of the beds. I was building the frames for a new arrangement of water butts which should give us easier access to stored water at slightly higher pressure, with the aim of using it in soaker hoses.
Is it hard work – on the allotment? Well yes, I suppose it is. For sure, hammering large posts 2 feet into the ground is hard work, but they’re going to have to support 750Kg of water. In fact most of the infrastructure work is quite hard – building paths and beds; wiring supports and wheelbarrowing compost around; turning compost is really hard going and yet although I’m pretty ancient by most standards, however hard a day on the allotment turns out to be I invariably feel better at the end of it. I didn’t take a photo today because to be honest there wasn’t much to look at. About 2/3 of the beds are empty – they’re prepped and ready for planting out – but not yet.
And that’s the point of the photo from early last season. Apart from the potatoes which were grown in sacks, everything came out of the hotbed and they’re all in there again doing what plants do; sending down roots, making friends with the soil and all its inhabitants , soaking up whatever sun is available and gathering strength every day. I suppose Madame and me were doing exactly the same thing today. pottering around and dreaming of the first taste of all the plants we’ve sown, soaking up the brief moments of sun, listening to the birds and enjoying that strange semi-meditative state that can make mundane jobs, like weeding, into a pleasure. Gardeners don’t see the earth in the same way – we see the potential for wonderful food where anyone else might see bare earth. There’s a marvellously companionable side to allotmenteering and gardening, because the plot quickly becomes a kind of friend; a friend with funny ways and particular preferences like a dog that loves being scratched behind one particular ear. The wheelbarrowing and weeding aren’t work as much as caring as you might care for a friend. In return the earth gives us back our efforts with compound interest – food with peace of mind thrown in, plus bird watching, insect spotting, butterflies and moths, field mice, badgers, deer, hedgehogs, rats, wasps and bees, shared produce and neighbourly chats – all for £40 a year. The allotment teaches us patience, resilience when the inevitable failures come along, attention towards small things. It sets the day and its troubles into a longer perspective, gives us time to think and often to be grateful and brings home the old Benedictine couplet – “to work is to pray, and to pray is to work.” – and I don’t mean all that religious stuff, I mean real prayer that takes you out of yourself (ec-stasis) – and gives you some sense of belonging to the earth rather than just standing on it.
It seems odd to me, writing in this way because all too often blogging becomes a list of things we’ve done rather than trying to explain what they mean to us. Growing food carries meaning far beyond the nutritional value of the product. What we do can’t really be measured in productive units, calories, added value or any of the usual metrics so beloved of economists. Growing food is a way of life but not a lifestyle. It’s the hub of a wheel of interest and concern whose spokes extend to every part of our lived experience. We become naturalists, ecologists, economists, community activists and politicians because that’s where growing food leads us.
So, to say:-
Today I banged in a couple of posts
really doesn’t even begin to tell it as it is!
When the news came on Madame’s little radio I lost it completely and hurled bad tempered abuse at the radio. I’m truly scared by what’s happening. Fear and powerlessness are nasty and unproductive emotions and I was reproached for my outburst for frightening the children. There was nothing for it but to retreat to the river and sit there on a rock watching the peat stained water for half an hour imagining terrible acts of violence and revenge and struggling to allow the river to take the unwelcome thoughts away. It worked, as it always does, and so, sufficiently shriven, and after a supper of bacon, cheese and potatoes accompanied by anxious looks from my family, I consoled myself with Gary Sneider’s book for a while before rejoining the throng.
Our friends in Huddersfield share a great part of our history and values. They are highly active in the community, avid gardeners and implacable in their opposition to destructive chemical use by farmers, even going so far as to engage with one of the largest producers face to face. They describe the efforts of these companies to justify their noxious products as “greenwashing” and it’s hard not to agree when you read the notes taken at the meetings. 
‘S’ has made several poncho’s by ironing together plastic supermarket bags, an operation which she says is best carried out carefully and outside because of the smell.
We drank tea outside the entrance to Standedge tunnel and talked to a man with an intimate knowledge of the feeder lakes and reservoirs, who told us that the recent collapse of Whateley Bridge dam, a canal feeder reservoir in Derbyshire, was the direct result of the management failure to respond to weather forecasts by lowering the reservoir level. We were told that they are absolutely paranoid about running the reservoirs low for fear of negative publicity if a prolongued drought should increase the demand for water in the canals. We were also told that this was not the only nineteenth century dam liable to collapse after sudden floods, and that other centres of population are equally under threat from old dams being subjected to excessive loads by keeping them full. Whether any of this will emerge during the enquiry is doubtful as the more senior levels fight to cover their arses and blame the weather as if it were a surprise. No doubt “lessons will be learned” but there is no hope that among those lessons the government will put any extra money into averting a disaster. One day, perhaps, dozens or even hundreds of people will be killed, and a minister will visit for a photo opportunity in a hi-viz jacket, but the facts on the ground will not change – nature is not there to be controlled and farmed for our own benefit.
But anyone who comes to the Dales, which still seem the same as ever, and thinks the landscape – which really does take your breath away – is ‘natural’ in any way at all, is deluded. These dales are the product of not one but many forms of agriculture over the millennia. The ancient landscape was not so long ago buried under hundreds of metres of ice and with no flora at all; there’s nothing immemorial about it, and it could change again in the blink of an eye or the stroke of a pen far away in London. The farmers here rely on public subsidy for 80% of their income and, trust me, they are not rich. Were it not for the support they get, the land – which is marginal and unproductive – would be left ungrazed and would swiftly become scrub. Woodland and forest, desirable though they may be in the right place, are not ‘free’. In historical terms the whole landscape was intensively managed and if it is to remain in the form that we love, open and available to us with its biodiverse communities, and able to achieve the balance between sustainable food production and intensive farming leading to ecological breakdown, we will need to invest money, and farmers will still have to do the work. When a whole farming community disappears we lose the skills that have been honed over centuries and built into common life. The media like to fret about disappearing tribes in the Amazon, but don’t get sufficiently excited about the prospect of losing the hill farming communities in our own country.
No prizes for guessing that this was our local Sainsbury’s the day after the snow fell. To be fair it was a combination of equipment failure and panic buying but the same thing happens every time we get a period of severe weather. The system collapses, people get angry and we realize that there is no slack, no resilience in it at all. I had a quick look on Google and I could see that there were people complaining everywhere – broken by the fact that they’d been forced to buy brown bread instead of white! This kind of event is almost designed into the system. Some time in the 20th century the notion of public good was set aside by the food industry in favour of profit. One kilo of asparagus is flown from Peru at the cost of 8 kilos of carbon released into the atmosphere Our passion for fresh, out of season vegetables and fruits may not (like meat production) be releasing methane into the atmosphere but it’s making up for that with all the other greenhouse gases involved in transporting it a thousand miles overland, and even if you buy local produce, when the infrastructure collapses because it’s not properly maintained, the milk, the fresh seasonal veg and everything else that needs to be brought to market stays put and sometimes even rots in the ground.
This is the season where the weather can be all over the place, and today as we walked down to the allotment we noticed the automatic greenhouse vents were open. It was no more than 5C with a cold north westerly wind blowing and the ground was still frosted, but the sun was intense and a very little 6’X4′ greenhouse can soon heat up even in the winter. If we were on a mission it was mainly to get the three recently finished beds under cover before the snow. They need to warm up ready for the early plantings, but in addition I wanted to clear the way to build the hotbed, the wormery and the last two raised beds, as well as get rid of a few of the really nasty weeds – like bindweed and couch.
If we do get a substantial fall I’ll need to go up and clear the nets of snow. In the past we’ve seen very strong steel frames bend under the weight. I received another photo this morning of the rapidly growing pile of very fresh and hopefully very hot horse manure that my friend Annie is saving for us and so I sorted out a dozen empty compost bags so we can transport the manure back in our little car. Really I’d love a pickup – we had one many years ago and I loved it – but Madame very properly reminds me that you can’t take grandchildren out for the day in the back of a pickup. Warm clothes? No probably not.
For the first couple of minutes it kicks off but very quickly it settles down to not much more than a whisp of smoke and steam. It’s rather like burning charcoal – after a hot start you restrict the access of oxygen and then, with a bit of judicious topping up and maybe some wood chips sprinkled in now and again, it will burn immensely slowly for a week and reduce the weeds to ash that then goes straight on to the compost heap. I know that some people swear by stacking it up and wrapping it in black plastic, or – even worse – just chucking it on the compost heap and rendering the whole heap a nursery bed for weeds. Sometimes you just have to do the least worst thing you can think of.
