Tag: extreme weather

“UK genetics project looks for lost apple varieties to protect fruit in climate crisis.” George would have known what to do!

Here’s a fascinating and chastening story from the Guardian newspaper at the weekend. It’s all there above, but you’d need to have sharp eyes and plenty of patience to join the dots. The common factor that joins the threads together is a name you’ll probably never have heard before. I always feel I knew him well because he was Madame’s boss for the four years that she worked at Long Ashton as an Assistant Scientific Officer helping to record experimental field trials of apples and pears; especially for their cider making properties but also as eating and dessert apples. If ever there was a man who knew his apple varieties inside out it was George Gilbert. After he retired he had a considerable hand in designing the orchards at RHS Rosemoor and for the Lost Gardens of Heligan. He could name many varieties simply by closely examining them; the markings, the shape and structure of the flower end and the stem end, and no doubt that word beloved by field botanists and birders – the jizz.

It was George’s great misfortune to live through an era where the brewing of cider shrank to a vestige of its former self, and the justly mocked Golden Delicious apple, grown mainly in Europe was feted as the apple of the future flavourless, unattractive but capable of being used in a cricket game without bruising and easy to grow. The Cox’s Orange Pippin – one of the few apples to come true from seed – always was, and still is liable to disease and difficult to grow. Hybrids galore have been bred from the Cox, but the emphasis was always on yield at the expense of flavour, and they have to be sprayed with a cocktail of fungicides and insecticides every ten days from fruit set until just before harvest.

Tens of thousands – if not millions of apple trees were grubbed out on government subsidies, many of them irreplaceable local varieties naturalised within their unique microclimates. Our son helped grub up an orchard on Severnside until the farmer discovered that he was only thirteen years old and not allowed to drive the tractor. Apples for the most part don’t come true from seed and so resurrecting these lost varieties can almost never come from seed banks, they have to be grown from grafted budwood. Back in the day if the question “which variety of apple is best adapted – let’s say – to growing on a windswept island, battered by the salt winds of the Irish Sea, a hundred people would have shouted out – “The Bardsey you idiot!” The good thing about the Bardsey apple is that it survives in specialist nurseries and orchards and could form part of a grafted apple renaissance in the midst of a climate catastrophe. The real challenge is that there must be hundreds, even thousands of micro-adapted apple varieties which were grubbed out and burned; so the scientists in the study cited by the Guardian are taking samples in Rosemoor Orchard – planted up by George Gilbert who must have had an eye to their future usefulness. The key point is that these are just a tiny proportion of the varieties that once grew in gardens and orchards over the previous centuries. Stripping out and comparing DNA samples is not the best way of discovering their unique properties, but the only way that’s available to the researchers – post orchard-apocalypse. As Joni Mitchell sang so beautifully – “you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone!”

The battle to save the lost varieties takes on a much more than antiquarian significance as the search to find apple varieties for a very different climate future gets more intense. Many important insects have a mutually important role to play; they pollinate all kinds of fruit but many have evolved to emerge at exactly the time the apple blossom appears. They gather nectar and pollen for food, and the trees get pollinated. If that partnership fails we get a catastrophic failure of biodiversity and we lose a valuable crop. Just to take one example, most allotmenteers like us, no longer have any clear idea of when to sow and plant. Spring weather is so unpredictable now that we’re always trying to second guess the date of the last frost, or those destructive easterly gales. Will April this year bring showers of soft refreshing rain or portend the beginning of a prolonged drought?

I very much hope that the scientists can make rapid progress towards a DNA database and find ways of combining the growing and eating qualities of even a very few traditional varieties. This, surely is just the beginning – there are lovely collections of Welsh apple varieties (some of them in the photo above) in orchards run by the Marcher Network in the Welsh Borders. There’s another lovely collection at Plas yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales; and the National Botanical Garden of Wales also has an extensive collection of Welsh apple varieties planted by our friend Charlie Stirton, the first Director and now close neighbour. There are the Lost Gardens of Heligan and probably hundreds of other unknown collections nurtured for their qualities in remote farmsteads across the Western side of the UK. The writer and singer Raynor Winn and her husband are custodians of one of these. Cider has become a big business now, and so-called varietal ciders – Katy, Kingston Black and probably somewhere in a Dartmoor village even such melodious relics as Slack ma girdle fetch premium prices, although a now-passed cidermaker universally known on Severnside as ‘Doughnut’ – once told be that he always blended his cider and always included a few Cox’s.

My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had a huge collection of tools, many of which he’d made himself. The point about them wasn’t that he used them very often; there must have been some that he never used – but if he’d ever needed it for the once in a lifetime job it would have been there waiting for its moment in the sun. Biodiversity is crucially important to us because when we move into unpredictable times is when we most often discover the irreplaceable usefulness of a single species. The apples are teaching us a lesson we simply can’t afford to ignore because – to quote a memorable sermon I once heard preached by Bishop David Jenkins “if we don’t act now there may be hell to pay!”

Hardening of the oughteries

Taken yesterday in Gorran Haven – who or what is “boy jowan” and is there a future for them?

The title of this post is a borrowing from Frank Lake, the inventor of Clinical Theology which has pretty much disappeared these days, but back in the day was a force for good in its attempt to make a marriage between theology and healing. Nowadays it looks like a forced marriage that was bound to fail; but this term – hardening of the oughteries – perfectly sums up for me, the danger of committing the ultimate ethical error of confusing ought with is.

On Thursday when I last posted, we were preparing for unseasonably strong winds down here in Cornwall in the far South West. An hour or so after I pressed the send button, an HM Coastguard vehicle turned up on the campsite , warning that the weather forecast had underestimated the strength of the storm that was about to make landfall, and the predicted 60 mph gusts were more likely to be up to 80 mph.

The campsite owner toured the site warning us that force ten – storm force winds – were about to arrive and giving us the option to leave ASAP if we were worried. A small convoy left the site within a couple of hours and we battened down – veterans of fifty years of western coastal camping during which we’ve lost three tents. This time we were in a campervan, it’s true, but the rest of the family were all in tents. At the height of the storm people were clinging to their tents to try to save them. Around twenty five people slept in a community room on the site while their tents were smashed by ferocious gusts of wind. In the van – broadside on to the winds – we rocked on the suspension as brief periods of silence were followed by explosive gusts slamming us.By the morning, half of the campers who’d elected to sit it out had lost their tents. It was the biggest storm we’ve ever encountered; pretty scary to see what nature is capable of throwing at us as the climate emergency advances.

All of which brings me to the oughteries. For us, and for millions of others, the link between the climate emergency and our wasteful, greedy and polluting way of life is so obvious we can splutter with rage at those who don’t – or won’t – get it; and playing at being the cock that crows on the dunghill is a curiously self-regarding way of trying to change things. Hardening of the oughteries is that state of mind that abuses a kind of of self regarding personal virtue in order to detach ourselves from responsibility. When we suffer the extremes of the climate emergency there’s no virtue in claiming that we weren’t responsible because we walk everywhere and recycle plastic. Waiting for the opportunity to say “I told you so” overlooks the critical point that the climate emergency overwhelmingly affects places and people we have never met; the poorest of people generally speaking; and the kind of people who have no alternative but to become migrants and refugees in order to escape famine and wars funded by the wealthiest parts of the world and often proxy wars over scarce natural resources.

As we drove down here we took a short cut off the A30 towards St Austell and to my great surprise we passed a lithium mine. The mad rush to promote electric cars to lessen atmospheric pollution seems to ignore the obvious capacity of lithium mines to create their own unique pollution hazards. In this county which has been so hard hit by de-industrialisation and the collapse of tin and copper mining; it will be hard to say that thousands of new jobs mining lithium should be turned away. The Cornish inshore fishermen are only now realising that their dreams for a Brexit powered goldrush were a cynical con trick. I don’t want to be saying “I told you so” to any of these people, and neither do I want any of them to have to sell their houses and move away as the only option for a better future, away from the insecurity and exploitative jobs on offer in hospitality and cleaning for out of county second homers.

The ostrich approach is to believe that we can carry on the way we have and hope that the technological seventh cavalry will come galloping over the hill to save us with giant machines capable of removing gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from our polluted air. Of course it’s blindingly obvious that there are no free lunches to be had in combating climate change and big machines demand big energy to run them; setting us on a mind numbing treadmill that demands more and more energy in order to extract the pollution caused by extracting and using more and more energy.

Hardening of the oughteries simply polarizes the debate and delays any prospect of change – always to the advantage of of the biggest winners; the international corporations who stand to lose most when we finally come to our senses. Less really is more; it’s hardly a new idea but so far as I can see it’s the only viable alternative to our present course. The visionaries need to do more than shout at the cynics and so-called realists. We need to model an alternative future with every means at our disposal. It’s nothing less than a paradigm shift that we’ll need, as we watch the dream of never ending growth and progress collapse; and nothing could be a greater dereliction of responsibility to turn away and shout “I told you so” at the victims.

Beware false dawns

If I had to nominate the most frustrating and dangerous time of year for the unwary gardener it would be right now. I’m too embarrassed to photograph the overwintering broad beans which, after a week of interminable sub zero temperatures and scything east winds look more dead than alive. When a freeze lasts so long, no amount of protection seems enough to prevent the slow destruction of cell walls. Even the garlic looks a bit sad. To think we were praying for a good cold spell to spur it into growth a few weeks ago! It would be all too easy to welcome this weather as a return to a traditional winter season – but it’s not. Everything about the weather has been excessive these past twelve months; wettest, dryest, hottest, coldest, stormiest. It rather reminds me of my community work days when we dreaded the autumn magic mushroom season because mixed with cheap cider the effect on our young people was to make them completely and sometimes violently unpredictable. Anyway, that’s enough about the government let’s get back to gardening.

Climate change is happening fast and so, exactly like covid, there’s no point in sitting around waiting for things to get back to normal because whatever normal might turn out to be it won’t be our normal. I suppose if you drive to work in an office or live in the centre of a city you might not notice these things unless you garden ; but we live bang in the centre of a city; a jewel of the West Country tourist trade that just happens to be at the same latitude as – let’s say Newfoundland, parts of Russia and Norway and Canada; thank you so much Gulfstream. However when the jetstream takes it upon itself to holiday 1000 miles south of where it normally does, the weather comes with it, and if the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre decided to follow suit we would all be in deep doodoos – probably penguin doodoos!

Even under the old dispensation February could throw up several gloriously balmy days followed by a freeze, and we’ve moved our last frost date into the second week of May after some bad experiences with the grapevines. “Cast not a clout ’till may be out” refers to the (Crataegus) blossom not the month; and for the ultra cautious gardener it’s still good advice. But – as it seems as if we’re going to have to get used to these extreme and unexpected outliers in the weather. Last year many of our neighbours lost their potatoes in a late frost on May 12th, when we also lost some borlotti and runner beans when their fleece blew off. We must think seriously about plant protection for extreme wind and cold; and increasing water storage for drought.

However that won’t be enough, and we’ll also need to expend some serious thought towards changing the plant varieties we grow and breeding some better ones if we can. Here at the Potwell Inn we’ve taken on all three challenges by building a polytunnel, which will be finished tomorrow if the forecast holds up. We’ll increase our water storage by building a sloping roof on the compost bins and harvesting rainwater from it ; but it turns out that one source of excellent advice on new varieties and techniques for a more extreme climate comes from across the Atlantic in the USA, because it’s a country with an enormous range of climates.

The US is some way ahead of us, not just in organic and permaculture techniques but also in publishing books about it – hats off to Chelsea Green – and I’ve been feasting on some really compelling ideas. Winston Churchill once described our relationship with the US as “two nations divided by a common language” – and it’s absolutely true to say that I’ve needed to be really careful about making assumptions while I’m reading. Cultural differences matter and today I realised that our only experience of corn is of growing sweetcorn. I don’t think I’ve ever given a moment’s thought to growing corn to store for the winter as a source of carbohydrate. This is the time of year, as winter comes to an end, when we realize how small our stored food supply has become. Lunch today was a fabulous bean soup which has become an indispensable staple; but our only home grown contribution was the herbs and some tomato passata. We have just 200 square metres of growing space – which is far too little to be self sufficient in vegetables. John Jeavons suggests it would take around 8000 square feet to feed two people and that’s eight standard British allotments worth. We’ve got just the one, so our ambitions need to match our land. That’s not to say we shouldn’t garden our space as efficiently as possible, but it would be silly to beat ourselves up because we still have to buy some veg. Our take on this is to grow the things we love that are most expensive to buy.

Suddenly food preservation and storage has come on to the agenda as we begin to realize the sheer fragility of the food supply. In the past, our experiences of food shortages have been very temporary, but in the UK some shortages have been ‘baked into’ our disrupted supply chains. This isn’t entirely down to trade deals, it’s also about industrial farming and food production. When it takes ten calories of fuel to produce one calorie of nutritional value, at a time when oil production is trapped between the twin pressures of ever higher extraction costs and anti pollution legislation; something is going to break and it will boil down to a choice between changing our ways or breaking something we really can’t repair. As civilizations and epochs go, the anthropocene is more like a dragonfly – a long time developing and then very quickly spent.

Anyway, to get back to practicalities we’ve washed and sterilised all our pots and modules and started the propagators. Early sowings – replacement broad beans for instance! – are underway, and with the polytunnel on the brink of being finished, we think we can gamble against even the most inclement weather and get the chillies, aubergines, peppers and tomatoes started. I also think now, in the light of my recent reading, that the three sisters planting needs to be understood and honoured within its cultural context and not treated as a horticultural novelty; and that will need to happen in the kitchen as well as on the allotment. I’ve always wondered what on earth ‘grits’ are and how you might eat them! We have no idea whether borlotti will grow up the corn stalks, and we’ve also tried to dry and prepare the seeds from our winter squashes, and it’s clear that we have a great deal to learn.

It’d been the most tremendous week. We defied the weather and worked on the polytunnel every day until our fingers froze. It was always going to be a challenge because it fitted the available space – let’s say – snugly; or more honestly, down to the millimeter. I’ve learned a whole lot of things about building these structures including the fact that angle grinders don’t like aluminium, and filling up your metal measuring tape with mud is a bad idea because all the markings fall off. But in the unlikely event that we ever build another one, we’ll do it in half the time! The next challenge is to recalculate all our sowing times to make the best ue of the new tunnel. I foresee several frank exchanges of views as my Tiggerish instincts collide with Madame’s Eeyore. In matters of germination temperature settings in the propagators, (in Flan O’Brien’s terms), I’m definitely a full throttle man. Madame thinks only of the fireman

Here it is – just waiting for the skin!

Tortured by damsons

Yesterday belonged to Storm Francis which, following so quickly behind Storm Ellen, raged about us with intermittent heavy rain and shed-busting gusts. It’s impossible not to feel just a bit excited in the thick of a storm but maybe it’s easier when you know that your allotment is sheltered from South Westerly storms when the lucky ones at the top of the site who grab all the sunshine and only half of the frosts are getting the full force of the weather. When the rain eased for an hour we went up to see how things were, and I couldn’t resist making this short video of an old cherry tree being battered by the wind – it gives some impression of it at least.

However, that wasn’t the highlight of the day at all because just when I thought it was safe to sit down and watch the rain running down the windows we were given a bag of ripe damsons that looked as if they needed some instant attention. Now I love damsons – however they’re cooked. We make damson jam, damson vodka – there’s about a gallon of it maturing in a cupboard waiting to see if we’ll start drinking alcohol again – there’s damson chutney which is delicious and the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten was some home made …… need I go on. Why I am so passionate about the damson is a mystery except that I think my Granny used to make it using damsons from their orchard. They also had greengages which also make the loveliest and most fragrant jam, but however the obsession began, it’s never gone away. We haven’t got any damson trees on the allotment. We didn’t plant any four years ago because they can take 15 years to come into full fruit; but we have friends who, in normal times, would let us pick a few pounds of fruit from their trees, but these aren’t normal times and visits are out of the question. So damson jam suddenly became a possibility even though we’re on a very low carb diet and can’t eat it.

You wouldn’t think, after three weeks of successfully and painlessly avoiding bread and sugar and all things carbohydrate, that it could be so challenging to make five pounds of jam for the store cupboard -but it was.

What follows is hardly a recipe, possibly an entirely new form of psycho-recipe, since a list of actions and ingredients hardly does justice to the damson. The biggest problem is getting rid of the stones. Almost all the books tell you to remove the stones before you cook them. That’s just about the daftest idea ever and I don’t believe for a moment that anyone would sit and stone a big bag of damsons. Although they’re a kind of plum, ripe plums will release their stones far more easily than damsons will. Damson stones can only be removed with a great chunk of lovely flavourful flesh, so I cook them down until they’re just soft; give them a bit of a pummel with a potato masher to loosen the stones from the flesh and then take out the stones with a skimmer, leaving the maximum quantity of flesh in the pan. Don’t, though, be tempted to sieve the stones out because those gorgeous whole skins are a huge part of the aesthetic of the jam. They furl like dark leaves in the finished jam which, with a bit of luck, will be all the clearer for your trouble when you spread it on a slice of bread.

The jam

In, then with the sugar. You might be tempted to use raw sugar, but really I prefer refined cane sugar to let the maximum flavour come through, and then bring it to the boil stirring all the time to stop it from catching. Then you chuck a knob of butter on to deter scum from forming and boil it until it gets to setting temperature or wrinkles on a cold plate – whatever. Yesterday the boil brought to mind Homer’s often used line about the wine dark sea. As the pan seethed and bubbled, the wind and rain shook the Potwell Inn windows and howled through the cracks, and the jam – which is the colour of rich burgundy – moved like a troubled sea in my imagination. But like Odysseus, tied to the mast to escape the temptations of the Sirens, I was adamantine in my determination not even to taste the forbidden fruit, except when the murderously hot jam bubbled and splashed on to my arms and hands, and the only way I could ease the pain was to lick it off. In fact I had to move closer to the pan to make sure I had plenty of occasions to do so.

Once the jam was finished and bottled I scraped every possible morsel into the last jar when Madame appeared and grabbed the wooden spoon – I have the photo to prove it. And all the while I was cooking, my heart was broken at the lack of a loaf of everyday sourdough – also off the list – and a lump of butter and a slathering of damson jam which would amount to half a day’s allowance blown in a moment of madness. Madame, however smirked as she licked the spoon into the unprecedented whiteness of a gull’s bone left on the seashore of the wine dark sea.

That’s what I mean about recipes and cooking – there’s always more going on than meets the eye. If you have a mind to, you could read William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say” – I’ve always loved it. I’d print it here, but writers and their descendents deserve their royalties – I don’t know of many rich poets. I do know a blogger, though, who’s lost more than half a stone – which didn’t come from a damson. I’ll escape the clutches of the diabetes nurse and her threatened medications yet!

Something hot?

Habanero – the hottest one we grow!

Well, in the midst of this strangest of seasons we have managed to grow enough chillies to keep us going through the winter, although taking the extraordinary weather into account it looks as if ripening the last few stragglers is going to be a problem. For the first year since we’ve been on the plot, we managed to eat all our sweetcorn before the badgers/rats/squirrels and possibly deer got to them. We only managed this by planting them in the most inaccessible place and surrounding them with sheep netting barriers – it was, however, worth the hassle because home grown corn (like most veg) is so much better than the shop version. You wonder if they’ve been 3D printing them from cardboard.

The chillies seem to be a bit of a blokey enthusiasm, with fierce competition to grow a chilli hot enough to heat a small town for a week – a sort of vegetable willie waving, if that’s not too lively a metaphor for a Tuesday morning. We don’t even eat anything much hotter than a Jalapeño, so my Apache chillies are dutifully frozen, and the Habaneros respectfully avoided. The pleasure it seems is in the achievement of getting them to bear fruit and ripen – which in a season that’s swerved between the biblical extremes of flood, fire and storm is a bit of a problem. *Even the frogs have done exceptionally well this year but the boils have mercifully stayed away.

However the cherry tomatoes have suffered terribly from brown rot, and that’s down to the erratic rain and sunshine and exacerbated by water splash on the leaves. But we’ve gathered enough from the rather sad looking bushes to make a couple of litres of oven dried tomatoes in oil. It’s a skill to balance dryness with sheer toughness because once they’ve gone to far, no amount of olive oil will bring them back to life. I like to give these tomatoes twenty minutes in their oil at around 110C in the oven after drying them overnight at 65C because low acidity bottled fruits can, in exceptional circumstances, develop botulinus contamination.

The same problem happens with figs if you dry them in their skins. To be fair, nearly everything is better eaten fresh, straight out of the ground or off the tree. I’d make some fig compôte except we’re cutting out sugar at the moment and all of my favourite preserves are close to pure carbohydrate. As Oscar Wilde said – “I can withstand anything except temptation”, and DH Lawrence got positively aroused by them, but I think they’d both be quite safe with this year’s efforts in the Potwell Inn kitchen.

So this year has been pretty good. I love the fact that the old, unglamorous plants like savoy cabbages, brussels sprouts, and especially leeks are all loving it. The autumn leeks are stout and sweet and the succession ones are coming along far better than they have for the past four years, which – I guess – is what allotmenteering is all about. You have to embrace and enjoy success when it comes, but never get blown off course by failure. Once you’ve renounced the chemicals and given up the extractive attitude then you’re in a one on one relationship with the earth which has its own ways and is a far better teacher than any book. In many ways, ‘though I can’t claim any deep knowledge of the subject, the earth teaches a form of Tai Chi, or Taoist spirituality. I don’t mean all that stuff about being ‘closer to God in a garden’ which completely misunderstands what happens when merely looking at something miraculously becomes beholding. Forgive me, I’m digging deep here but it’s a crucial distinction.

There really is a huge difference between hard gardening that wants to bully and harry the earth into submission, and contemplative gardening that opens intangible channels through which we can ‘hear’ and even ‘understand’ what response is asked of us.

Don’t cling! Don’t strive! Abandon yourself! Look beneath your feet!

Ryōkan

* Biblical joke, sorry. Old habits die hard.

First frost – bang on time

 

Or at least, bang on time as long as two consecutive years make a trend. Cropping French beans in the autumn is always going to be a bit speculative, and although we’ve had a few feeds off these and another batch, last night’s frost was enough to do for them. A year ago we’d had the coldest October for many years and this year it’s been the wettest, all of which is completely symptomatic of global heating. Twenty years ago we could entertain ourselves with thoughts of a Mediterranean climate but now we are begining to grasp that what we’ve inherited from our destructive behaviour is extreme and destructive weather.  Last night the temperature on our north facing  second floor window ledge went down to 4.5C, and when I looked out of the window as soon as the sun came up I could see frost on the green outside. When we got up to the allotment the beans had succumbed. However this year we were ahead of the game, and so any other tender plants have been moved under cover or harvested and stored.  This has produced a great deal of material for composting and we’d been slightly concerned that the heap wasn’t heating very well, largely due to the ingress of rain. But adding a lot of cardboard, turning it roughly and chopping the waste by getting on top of the heap with a spade have all helped. Along with a few handfuls of fish blood and bone sprinkled  with the wood ash from our incinerator, the heap was heating up fast today and we’ll resist resist adding any more material until we can turn it all into the next bay and start afresh.

The window boxes are due to be changed too, and so today we swapped the first couple with new ones planted up with spring bulbs. It doesn’t make much of a photograph, but gardeners have a lovely knack of seeing beyond the bare facts into the future.  To me those neat boxes, covered with gravel to stop the mud splashing up aganst the windows, are a promissory note for the future, and it won’t be long before the green shoots appear. We’ll strip out any of the existing plants in the summer boxes that can be saved, divided or propagated and get them ready for next summer. Any spare or spent earth and growing medium goes straight on to the allotment.

The wisdom of converting to raised beds really came home today.  After so much rain, in the past we’d have struggled to do any work at all on the wet ground – but now it’s easy, and the no dig regime means that we just loosen any weeds and pull them out carefully. The beds themselves are often firm enough to step on without fear of compressing the soil too much. Weeding, and the raking up of any green material that’s lying around isn’t just cosmetic. Slugs feed on decaying matter and the less food we leave lying around for them the better.

This morning the christmas cake emerged from its wallpaper hat and went into a cupboard wrapped in greaseproof paper and ready to be fed with a little brandy whenever I think about it. Maybe this year I’ll actually get to ice it, but it takes ages and costs a fortune for the marzipan, and I’ve noticed that the family often peel the icing off and leave it on the plate because it’s so sweet. Madame and me, however, love to share a flask of tea and a slice of Christmas cake up on the allotment on cold winter days.  As soon as I’ve sent this post I’ll be back in the kitchen making Christmas puds – so then all the preparations are done and we can concentrate on everything else we want to do. There’s never a dull moment at the Potwell Inn.