Well the last ten days were a bit of a challenge but at last the polyps (six more of them, including a real biggie) have been removed from my colon and my system is almost recovered from fasting followed by 24 hours drinking drain cleaner and a morning under sedation at the local hospital watching the job being done on a big screen. I found out later that they’d given me a combination of pethidine and midazolam which were the reason I was able to not wriggle/scream/ or change my mind. As is the nature of these drugs I can barely remember what went on and as for the bus ride home it’s blank. I can remember the exact moment they wore off, though, as if a curtain was lifted and when I read the consultant’s notes I had the usual post-operative WTF? moment. On the plus side the (award winning) team were lovely and kindness itself.
So …. the campervan was fixed on tuesday after being recovered for the second time with a non functioning clutch. On Sunday we checked out Morrison’s garage at the Mall and they still sell LPG, so we’ll be ready for the next adventure as soon as they re-open the road through Pilning, and today we had our flu and covid top-ups and pressed a big bag of apples for juice during the afternoon.
Having decided to carry on with the allotment we’ve been working hard every day getting beds cleared and prepped ready for planting up. There are over a hundred broad bean plants of different varieties growing steadily in the greenhouse in their root trainers and very gradually we’re getting back on track. It’s been a magnificent year for the apples, and all of the trees planted in 2021 have fruited this year, which has created a new challenge for us because in spite of my careful records, it looks as if the nursery had mislabeled some of the trees, and in one row of five the first and last had been wrongly labeled – so Winter Gem and Grenadier had been transposed. This was the first time we’d been able to see the problem. The red- skinned apple on the left was one we inherited and we’ve never known for sure what it is but have gone (provisionally) for Ribstone Pippin and the green one on the right is Winter Gem which, ‘though it doesn’t look all that nice is actually delicious and very fragrant. The red spots on the skin are caused by a reaction between oxygen and the skin as the apple ripens off the tree.
Apple identification is a difficult skill to learn because it includes consideration of the horizontal and vertical section of the fruit; its shape, whether conical or round; exact description of skin colour; streaking; degree of greasiness; flowering and ripening times, the colour of the exposed fruit and the degree of russeting and you have to do a lot of it before you can be proficient. We spend a lot of time on the National Fruit Collection website – it’s extremely thorough and well worth bookmarking.
Anyway, while I was feeling sorry for myself a very divisive philosophical issue came up on the allotments when a member wrote a rather cross Facebook message about “rubbish” being “dumped” along the fence line at the bottom of the site. Madame absolutely forbade me to respond, but I feel safe here to write that there has been a growing problem, and distance, between those allotmenteers who believe you are only closer to God in a garden as long as you’ve slaughtered every blade and leaf of plants which you didn’t grow for food or aesthetic pleasure. Wild animals too, but especially badgers rats and foxes, oh and squirrels and mice – oh alright then – cats too are not permitted either. As for insects and above all caterpillars, need I say more?! At the greener end are those who, like us, keep a trail cam to enjoy the nocturnal visitors (which also include deer); we control the rats by never chucking the remains of Friday night’s takeaway on the compost heap because we know that rats originally came from India and love a curry. We have a scuzzy looking pond in which rat-tailed maggots can grow into hoverflies, and we allow lots of weeds to stay – especially nettles – because some rarish butterflies love them, and some lovely seed-setting grasses for the birds to chomp on. We obviously don’t want the Whites to eat our brassicas and so we net them carefully. Sweetcorn needs fortifications to keep the badgers out and so it goes on. Our allotment is, by the standards of the evangelicals and fundamentalists of tidyness, messy; but here’s the point. Nature just loves messy, and over ten years we’ve been visited by a dozen relatively rare plants which stay for a year or two and then move on. There was Peruvian apple, Stone-parsley, Bullwort, A rarish form of Fumitory, and others too. All-comers are welcome to come and raise a family over a couple of seasons and if some people think they’re just weeds it’s their loss.
Our relationship with nature is a conversation in which (for instance – like the apple trees) no-one speaks for four years and then something important happens. We accept that the plot we rent is not ours, but belongs to two of us (two legged creatures) and all of the other creatures from deer down in size but not importance to amoeba and thence to pollens and yeasts. We cannot compel but, as the astrologers say of the stars, we can only dispose, and if you don’t talk to the plants how will you know what they need?
So if we empty our buckets of trimmings, prunings and nuisance weeds like couch and bindweed along the fence we’re not dumping them (with all the negative connotations of that word, we’re putting them there because as they rot down to return their nutrients to the earth they provide a place of safety for dozens of species like woodlice, spiders, ladybirds, all kinds of pupae, field mice, hedgehogs and slow worms whose contributions to pollination, clearing up infestations of blackfly and suchlike, eating rotting leaves and aerating the soil – we rely on. We are part of a vast interdependent food chain. We do not dump plastic waste, old pushchairs and mattresses crisp packets or discarded drinks bottles and cans.
But we do process and store all sorts of delicious food that would otherwise be wasted. These tomatoes were picked green from dying vines after the drought, and ripened in the dark so they could be reduced to a roasted passata which keeps for at least a couple of years and is as good as pixie dust for bringing a pasta dish to life.
But we don’t live in an ideal world – even at the Potwell Inn, and so even photos like this are compromised by the fact that the last touch of sun from a beautiful day was just disappearing behnd the trees. On the other hand, when we went up in the morning to plant the last few potatoes, the sun was reaching the whole of the plot after its winter sleep. Roughly speaking it reaches all parts directly between the two equinoxes, which means that for the whole of the growing season we’re no worse off for sun than our neighbours at the top of the slope and much better protected from the wind all year round. Prospective allotmenteers often reject the plots at the bottom of the site, especially if they come in mid winter with the ground frozen hard, and it’s worth remembering that it can take several seasons to get the measure of any piece of ground. I’m quite sure that real allotments – as opposed to the imaginary variety – all have their different challenges, and waiting for the perfect plot to come along is a recipe for never doing any gardening. Half the fun is knowing your patch of earth and working with it to produce some food. There’s an issue of mindset here – piece of ground isn’t a blank canvas, it’s a complex ecosystem that you can only join on its own terms. The saddest thing is when new allotmeteers take on a plot, blitz in in spring and sow or plant anything and everything only to see the weeds reassert themselves and the crops fail in the sumer.
