Tag: Hotbeds

“The map is not the territory”

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I actually spotted that concept in a book on permaculture that I’ve been reading recently – but when I looked up the source of the quotation it turn out it was first used by the philosopher Alfred Korzybski in 1931 when warning his readers of the danger of confusing concepts with reality. I think it was used a bit around a once fashionable management/self improvement tool some years ago known as NLP (neuro linguistic programming). It was pretty much a load of old pseudoscientific snake oil but we had one bishop who went in for it as a way to sharpen his communication skills. The trouble was it usually clattered into every conversation with all the subtlety of a steam traction engine so it didn’t really work with us professional sceptics.

However, as a useful counter to trusting in maps too much it can’t be faulted. The two photos at the top were taken today on the allotment as I worked there in the pouring rain trying to figure out with the aid of a long tape, a calculator and a load of steel pegs trying to figure out why I couldn’t fit the prospective polytunnel on to the allotment plan.

Much cursing later I discovered that my schematic map had tidied up the rough edges on the allotment so much it had become a bit fictional in places; not least because there is not a straight line or a right angle or a parallel path anywhere on the entire plot. I had been seduced by the ‘draw rectangle’ tool and the embedded grid at the expense of accuracy. There aren’t many days when Pythagorus’ theorem is the most useful tool in my life but this afternoon I offered up a small prayer of thanksgiving to Bill Willams who taught generations of us to be better mathematicians than we deserved to be. Wiping the rain off the mobile I discovered that I could calculate the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides and then set my right angles square and accurate. I was so pleased I even fixed little flags on my four corner poles.

That done, I realized that it’s going to be a close thing to get the polytunnel legs into their respective holes but – as I explained to Madame later, it’ll be such a snug fit you might imagine that I did it deliberately. I do love a bit of civil engineering and we’re so looking forward to using the tunnel to extend our season at both ends.

The hotbed is now up to 20C and so as soon as this storm is over – it’s blowing a hooly outside – we’ll start sowing. In a couple of weeks we’ll be setting up the second propagator – the first one’s full of basil plants at the moment – and we’ll begin again. The next season is always the best and there’s always an excuse for the last one and so we soldier on. Winter can be fun too.

Windfasting

We thought we were in for a good shriving when we went up to the allotment today. The plot is very well sheltered from the prevailing south westerly winds and so we don’t worry too much about Atlantic storms unless they get into the forties and fifties, but even then – when the sheds at the top of the site are keeling over – we can usually rely on the sheltering line of cypress trees. Today though the wind was blowing from the east, the coldest and least sheltered quarter, and it was due to veer later towards the north and the west while increasing in force. These are the winds that do most damage to us. Grape vines are particularly vulnerable to icy winds, and today there was no avoiding going up there and making the growing crops as windfast as possible. The broad beans (aquadulce claudia) are pretty bombproof and seem to relish the winter, but too much wind rocking sets them back, so we attached a windbreak to the big net cloches which we only use to keep the pigeons off. The biggest danger was to the purple sprouting broccoli which are five feet tall now and will fall over in extreme winds. They were already staked with canes but today we drove in tree stakes and tied them in with old polythene shopping bags which make surprisingly good plant ties and gives then a third use before we have to recycle them.

So within half an hour we’d warmed up banging in the stakes and clearing away all the dead leaves and since we were enjoying ourselves we looked around for another winter job to get on with. This year, because of travel restrictions, we can’t drive over to our usual source of fresh horse manure which a friend kindly heaps up for us every year about now. That goes into the bottom of the hot bed and gets covered with a soil/compost mixture to give us a quick start in February when it usually takes the soil temperature to over 20C. Twelve months later the whole lot has composted down and is full of worms so we recycle it on to a couple of lucky beds – it’s gloriously rich stuff. After an experiment with growing cucumbers and squashes in grow bags sited on top of the leaf mould bin last year, we discovered that the fabulous crop had been enabled by the roots breaking out through holes in the bags and working their way down through the leaf mould, drawing abundant moisture as they went. So today we capped the bin, newly stacked with another one and a half cubic metres of leaves, with about half the contents of the hotbed manure – getting on for a foot thick. This year we’ll plant squashes and ridge cucumbers directly into the super rich soil and then, in a year’s time we’ll recycle the mixture of leaf mould, manure and topsoil on to the beds again as a soil improving mulch.

The other half of the hotbed contents went on to the rhubarb bed where we intend to plant a third variety in the next few weeks, giving us continuity of supply over the summer. We both love eating rhubarb and it’s a remarkably tolerant and generous plant that needs very little attention aside from water and rich food. The water isn’t a problem because the bed lies above one of our underground watercourses, so we’ve incorporated a good deal of grit into the bottom of the bed so it doesn’t get waterlogged in the winter.

The third job, then, was to build an alternative hotbed using only the materials at hand on the site. The council had dumped what looked like a couple of hay bales up in the leaf bay; still green enough to give at least some heat I hope. So we started a new deep bed (just over 1 metre deep) layering up the grass with more leaves and wood chip, and with a sprinkling of dried chicken manure now and again to add more nitrogen. With a gallon or two of human activator and capped with our usual soil/compost mix we’ll see if it reaches any useful sort of temperature.

All of which shovelling, wheelbarrowing and forking had utterly vanquished the bitterly cold east wind, leaving us warm and content in the way that only a winter morning in the fresh air can do. There is no feeling in the world to match a completed job on the allotment snatched from the jaws of the sort of lousy weather that keeps most of us indoors.

But all the thoughts about wind and rainwater; underground streams and hotbeds; trees and perennial plants lead inescapably to a mea culpa on my part. We’re completely organic, we make compost, we don’t dig, we recycle almost anything including (the liquid bit of) our own waste, we’ve spent much of our working lives in community groups and even started an artists’ studio cooperative. We’ve lived in a couple of communes …. come on ……. join the dots and one obvious philosophy surely comes to mind 🙂

Permaculture

Twenty years ago we had a brief flirtation with permaculture – I even took part in an astoundingly popular TV film about it and – (utterly tongue in cheek) – displayed the dreadful 1950’s woollen carpet given to us by our neighbour – being used for weed control. In those days we kept a flock of chickens and, to be honest, the film company were desperate for someone who could talk confidently on screen and who lived close enough to Jekka McVicar to justify bring a film crew down from London. It was her fault for putting me forward! So chickens; a row of California cylinders steaming away; some nice veg and an orchard complete with a pair of pants that had blown off the washing line – what could go wrong? For goodness sake – I even showed them where the dog and various cats were buried! The garden was a total mess so I told the crew we were using permaculture principles. You simply wouldn’t believe how many complete strangers said to me “saw you on telly last night“.

But it’s taken all this time to overcome my inexplicable prejudice against permaculture. Maybe it’s to do with the way some of its advocates seemed insufferably smug, or treated it like a religion. I couldn’t seem to shake off the feeling that it was an immensely wasteful way of using land; that it was first cousin to foraging but would never be any use to anyone except rich kids who could afford to shop at Sainsbury’s and save the world by picking a few blackberries.

I was wrong on almost every count – I’ll repeat that out loud – I WAS WRONG! – this confession will possibly amaze my friends. There is a marvellous book of meditations by Anthony de Mello that I once used in group work all the time. One of my favourites was the story of a fish that decided to look for the ocean, not realizing that the ocean was the very matrix in which it lived and swam – so ubiquitous that the fish couldn’t see it.

I don’t believe in the god you don’t believe in either!

The misconception about permaculture being about a sort of foraging is very widespread. Ken Thompson, in his otherwise pretty sensible book “The Sceptical Gardener” completely dismisses it (P106) while confusing its whole overarching philosophy with forest gardening. Just for the record, I don’t think that forest gardening will feed the world either; nor do I think that permaculture is the same thing as regenerative farming, but I do think that aligning our whole way of life to the rhythms and patterns of the natural world; living sustainably and generously with our neighbours; breaking free from the prison of endless growth and using whatever we find “to hand” – whether wind or rain or sunshine or soil as creatively as we possibly can by designing systems that balance inputs and outputs.

All my sleepless nights pondering hot beds, thermal storage, hydraulic ram pumps, composting, water storage, tree planting, hot spots and frost pockets, wind power solar panels, ponds polytunnels and insect friendly planting schemes ….. blah blah blah. Like Anthony de Mello’s little fish I couldn’t see permaculture anywhere out there because we were already doing it – up to our necks in it, but just on the small 250 square metre plot we happen to have at our disposal rather than on a grander but imaginary smallholding. Which means that we won’t be able to use my design for imaginary portable chicken arks or indeed eat the imaginary eggs which, fattened by grass and grubs would be the goldenest and most delicious and sitty uppest eggs you ever saw; but we’ve done that and it was marvellous, and we hope that many others will be able to enjoy it as much as we did.

So there we are. We were looking for a philosophical home and it turned out we were there already. The Potwell Inn is like that – full of surprises.

This is my happy place

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I’ve been feeling just a bit curmudgeonly this last few weeks – a combination of living in political chaos, fag end of winter blues, problems with the campervan, rising damp, reading too many books about climate change and wondering how on earth we’re going to sort this mess out.

I do have an antidote for it all  – and it’s getting back to the stove – making stock, baking bread, baking cakes, that sort of thing. I also notice that when I’m feeling a bit glum I also eat really badly, and suddenly, cakes, biscuits, toast made from white bread,  convenience food and general junk look endlessly fascinating, so getting back to the stove sorts that particular temptation out, well –  all except for the cakes. The other antidote, the one Madame favours, is sowing seeds, and so once again I’m sharing the kitchen with a busy propagator.

The last remedy is going through my photos and looking at all the lovely things I spotted last year – and that’s what I was doing when I found this photo, taken by Madame, of me skulking the cliff path at St Davids and making a list. That’s my waterproof notebook in my hand, my stick and my new hat and my old space pen, Swiss  army knife, X10 pocket magnifier in my pocket.  In the bag too is a copy of Rose, “Wildflower Key” and a couple of fold out keys for grasses and lichens. If you want to know what paradise looks like this is it – although possibly a less knobbly pair of legs would improve it a bit. I couldn’t be more happy than I am when I’m out in the sunshine amongst the plants and insects and birds.  Just a little way further down the path last autumn we picked enough wild mushrooms to make the best omelette I’ve ever tasted.

Oh and we’ve got miniature tulips flowering in the window boxes – along with the irises and daffodils – I think that’s quite mad but it’s true. The remnants of storm Ciara are still howling through, and looking out of the window just now, the sky had that yellowish hue that looks like sleet or snow on the way.  Our son just rang from Birmingham to say that it’s snowing hard there. These certainly are confusing times, but I try not to let it get to me too much. This week  we’ll go and collect a load of hot horse manure for the hotbed and in a couple of weeks we’ll be flat out again on the allotment.

 

We all need to choose!

Two pictures that seem, to me, to express a parting of the ways that’s so important the future of the earth depends on us taking the right direction. The first was taken in Portscathoe, Cornwall in October 2014.  A green lane and bridleway that we often used, and which had ancient hedges on either side was flailed, presumably to make space for farm equipment to travel up and down. The second was our organic hotbed, taken this afternoon.  Notwithstanding the difference in the seasons, the lane will never properly recover, and the displaced small mammals, insects and birds may never return. The hotbed, in its various iterations will go on providing good food and spent manure to the soil for as long as we are able to tend it.

Last time we went to Heligan I took with me Wendell Berry’s collection of essays “The world ending fire” and it lit me up.  So too this last visit when I read Isabella Tree’s book “Wilding” and followed that with my latest read – “Green and Prosperous Land” by the economist Dieter Helm. It’s so easy to get despairing and cynical about the state of the earth and it’s vital the we don’t get sucked into a mindset that plays into the hands of the agrichemical industry and the climate change deniers. I spend a lot of time trying to make connections between what’s possible for an individual or a couple like us and the sort of global change that’s needed. It’s no accident that the isolated individualism of our culture plays into the sense of helplessness.

Yesterday I was talking to a leading light in our neighbouring community garden -with which we share an ugly boundary of Cupressus.  When I explained a plan to replace it with a more natural hedgerow he agreed completely and then spent the next five minutes explaining why it would be difficult, the Parks Department would never agree and they’d make us pay for it all anyway.  He was probably correct in every sense and yet …… ?

I know I quoted the old management saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” only last week, and it’s still true – but that’s not a reason for giving up. It just means that we need to go about it in a different way, by changing hearts and minds.

There was a warm southeasterly wind today. It was so strong it pulled out all the pegs on one side of a net guarding our chard from the pigeons, and left it flapping helplessly. We fixed it and moved on to other jobs.  We don’t talk much on the allotment, we both know what needs doing and we seem to divide the work without much discussion, each according to our preferences and abilities. It is a place of sanity and re-enchantment, and  a place where our 250 square metres can represent the whole earth in our experiment in low impact living. It is, in truth, a culture of its own and the truly radical thing about new cultures is that they’re caught and not taught, and they don’t care a fig about power, wealth, gender or age. Individually the choices we make don’t change the world much. But collectively? that’s a different matter altogther. Collectively we can change things if we can only believe that it’s possible.

Hot beds

I wouldn’t dare say that this is the way to make a hot bed because, like the vast majority of people, I’ve never made one before, and the only one I’ve ever actually seen was at the Lost Gardens of Heligan where they import many tons of horse manure from Newmarket for their lovely pineapple house. As I said yesterday it’s pretty hard to lay your hands on the good stuff and I know, from talking to one of the Heligan gardeners last year, that they had a similar problem with sourcing the right kind of manure to get the heat they needed. You wouldn’t go all the way to Newmarket from Cornwall if you didn’t have to. On the other hand we’re not trying to grow pineapples and I don’t have any friends in Newmarket, so hopefully Annie’s stuff (she’s no slouch as a rider) will do. I can only promise to report honestly on how this experiment turns out for good or ill.

I have to give credit to Jack First’s book –“Hot Beds: How to grow early crops using an age-old technique” 2nd Edition. I bought it last year and it’s a mine of information.  There’s plenty of other information out there on the internet and after a lot of research I came to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as a perfect design but there are some good pointers. For a small bed like ours the most useful advice came on the Garden Organic website which suggested a proportion of 3:1 for manure over topping.  

Just as an aside here, I’ve got a bit of a thing about perfectionism and following exact instructions.  Nature doesn’t function that way at all, and so the last thing in the worldI would want to claim is any universal validity for my methods.  This is just what I did – nothing more.  My advice is be brave, use what you’ve got and forget experts.

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Anyway – the procedure goes something like this.  Build a box – mine was solid but I may yet have to drill holes in it to let air in.  On the internet I’ve seen apparently successful systems with slattted bars or made from pallets. Fill it up to two thirds with fresh manure – should I have had more straw in mine?  honestly I don’t know yet.  Then I topped up the manure with 1/3 by approximate weight of a 50/50 mixture of topsoil and good compost with some horticultural sand added. As you see I mixed it in the wheelbarrow, raked it level and covered it with a layer of polythene held in place with a pallet.

Will it work? Well, I checked the temperature of the manure against the ambient temperature in the nearby soil.  The soil temperature was at 5C and the manure (after less than 24 hours in the box), was 12.5C. You can see a soil thermometer stuck into the soil layer so I can monitor how things are going.  If it fails the whole lot will be composted, and if it really flies I’ll put a couple of deckchairs on top for Madame and me to warm our bottoms.

What it offers is the potential of increasing our heated propagator space by a factor of three and increase the length of the productive season by maybe six weeks.  Apart from being hard work, what is there to lose?

Where’s it gone? – Oh there

 

So yesterday at last the sun shone and the snow had melted and so we drove over to Annie’s stables to collect the manure for the hotbed.  It’s surprisingly difficult to source manure ‘fresh’ – as it were. Just as every item on a restaurant menu comes with a small pack of needless adjectives like delicious attached, the word manure is rarely seen without its attached qualifier well rotted.  We’ve asked high and low and our search for the freshest, smelliest and hottest manure has met with head shaking and occasionally patronising hints that we don’t know what we really want. So as always we fell back on a friend who lives in one of my old parishes who was pleased to help out, and even sent photos of the growing pile to keep us focused and cheerful. Yesterday we lined the back of our little car to stop any leaks from the bags from soaking into the seats and drove over.

My guess is that I shovelled about 300Kg of the stuff into bags (we always save the old ones they’re terribly useful) and lugged it into the back of the car which was pretty flat on the springs by the time I finished. Then we drove back to the allotment while Madame amused herself by swatting copious numbers of manure flies that had decided to come with us. Everything has to be wheelbarrowed about 100yards down narrow paths from the allotment site car park and so by the time I’d tipped all the bags into the hotbed frame I was aching just about everywhere. I was pretty glad that I didn’t build the frame any bigger because against all expectations the manure was simply swallowed up.  I really thought I’d have quite a bit left over, but that certainly didn’t happen.  Still, it’s all done now and today’s job is to cap the bed with a mixture of soil and proper compost and then cover it and wait for it to heat up.

Our site is divided into two halves which are nominally organic and non-organic.  As I was unloading the car I fell into a conversation with a man who had come across from the organic half and we had one of those blokey chats that men have, which are more concerned with rangefinding than sharing – each of us trying to find out enough about the other to orientate ourselves.  As we drifted from wheelbarrow punctures to carrot varieties we finally ventured into contentious ground.  I said ” really we’re all organic here except for one man, two plots across, who used Roundup to clear his plot.”  He put on a most virtuous face and said – “Roundup? I wouldn’t go near that stuff.” And so the conversation drifted on about permissable chemicals and the Soil Association rules and then, out of the blue he said – “I use that other stuff, glyphosate it’s called, but I don’t spray it I just paint it on the leaves.” I was speechless.

How much beauty is required to launch one ship?

The answer, of course is one millihelen, that’s to say one thousand times less beautiful than Helen of Troy. If we’re going to consider a scale, the ugliest child I ever saw was in Kingswood, on the eastern edge of Bristol. I was in a thoughtful mood that day because someone had made me his executor and next of kin without asking me (or telling me) and I was walking up Two Mile Hill to see a dodgy solicitor. My dark mood was deepened by spotting this child bearing down on me in his pushchair, being pushed by his obviously doting mother.  He was squat and almost bald with a thick neck and such a malevolent expression he could have curdled milk at 200 yards.  I often think of him now, aged maybe sixteen, and I wonder if his doting parents still show photos of him to all their friends.

You see, I write this blog and I post all these photos of the alllotment as it develops but frankly, other peoples’ children, holiday snaps and graduation photos rarely convey the emotional freight that the owners project on to them. Even more so, I imagine, with photos of other peoples’ allotments. If I switch off my pride for a moment, most of them – especially the ones taken in the winter – are a bit of a specialist interest.   Those recyled boards on the new hotbed spent last year on the edge of the strawberry bed – oh for goodness sake! is this supposed to be interesting? Well it is to me, but I’m an allotmenteer.  The plot is seen with the eyes of love, endlessly productive and immaculate.

Did you ever see W D Griffiths brilliant documentary film “Nanook”? There’s a scene where it becomes the childrens’ responsibility to warm father’s boots ready for him to venture out into the frozen wastes and catch fish.  On a bad day they (the boots not the children) might be so frozen that they needed to be chewed – yes you read me right – they needed to be chewed in order to make them soft enough to get them on. My children are not interested particularly in gardening and Madame has better things to do and so there was no-one available on the allotment this morning to chew my gloves which had been put away wet and therefore were frozen solid this morning when I tried to put them on. Temperatures had dropped to -3C overnight.  Worse still, I couldn’t make a flask of tea because the floor of the Potwell Inn kitchen had been mopped and I had been forbidden.  This is the real allotment experience that you never read about in those hideously expensive coffee table books. But the hotbed is complete and ready to receive its load of precious manure tomorrow.  I had to buy a big polythene sheet this morning to line the back of the car.  It’s not the first exceptionally smelly load we’ve carried – I ‘ll never forget the rotting seaweed – and it certainly won’t be the last, but actually soaking the seats with poo will probably provoke Madame.

I was so pleased with finishing the hotbed that I carried on and finished the long-planned border to the east edge of the plot, so I can level the path and make it less lethally dangerous. But I always underestimate the muscle power required to use the post-rammer and always regret it a couple of hours later. No it’s not angina you idiot you just never know when to stop!  Et Voilá , the right hand photo seen with the eyes of love I’ll give it at least 750 millihelens. But then I’m the proud father

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