Tag: insect attractors

Not a bee then? a Furry Dronefly!

Four consecutive days of wall-to-wall sunshine should have reminded me that the spring equinox – not the boring Met Office one but the proper mobile one – isn’t always on the same day. So we missed it entirely while we worked on the allotment. When I was a schoolboy I was invariably referred to by one teacher as “rod pole or perch” – an ancient system of length measurement which lingered on the back of our exercise books along with acres, chains and gills. Equinox is at least based on an observable measure – the day nearest to offering an equality of time between night and day. Easter, of course does its thing based on a 13 month moon cycle defying all logic and creating great hazard for those who always plant their potatoes on Good Friday. I love it: the sheer irrationality of it all defying the tidiers-up makes me smile.

Anyway we were so busy on the allotment that the equinox passed us by and bang on time I’m driven back to the same old question – why is nature so good for us that it distracts us even from marking the (old) beginning of spring? After the winter we’ve had, I can’t begin to say how lovely it’s been to feel the sun on our backs at last. Coming back home every day with our muscles aching and fingers creaking you might think a bit counterintuitive to make a fuss about it. But the allotment offers one small part of our lives over which we have almost complete agency. In an existence filled with expectations from every quarter; bills; health problems and you name it – the allotment is an oasis in which we get to choose what to do without having to bend to the cold winds of authority. There are rules of course but they’re mostly common sense and neighbourliness. Nobody pays any attention to the daft rules about the permitted colour of sheds and the precise percentage of flowers to veg that must be adhered to, and as any Welsh poet will say; rules are the primrose path to creativity.

Anyway, the business of agency is a key concept for achieving eudaimonia – true, deep, happiness. We spent a lot of time this week planning how to move the compost bins and turn them into raised beds, how to move two water butts from one optimal position to another even optimal-er one. We ordered our seeds, decided our priorities and prepared beds for sowing and planting out in the next few weeks. Each day we felt that little bit stronger and we thanked the weather gods for their generosity as we always must.

Being perpetually hard-up we are free from fantasising about machinery and fencing to keep out badgers and people. Every bit of mulch has to be planned and transported down the bumpy path and, expecting the weather to be unexpected much of the time, we develop a kind of radical patience thanking nature for her unexpectedly generous lessons. The bee at the top for instance is not a bee at all but a fly; a dronefly- in fact a Furry Dronefly. I’m not an entomologist but a handy app on my phone helps me to sound cleverer than I really am. “Shame on you” cry the gathered deacons with their withered knowledge and multiple imagination-sucking certainties. But I’ve got other things, better things to do – like learning Welsh and cooking lovely meals and so I’m content to make an assisted guess now and again.

Autumn continues to come good.

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.

It’s felt as if we are snatching our food from under the wheels of the climate deniers

Potatoes, broad beans, tayberries and strawberries

At this time of year it’s hard not to be wide awake at 5.00am, and more particularly this year because the timetable on the allotment has been condensed by about a month. A late, wet spring and a mild winter have challenged our ingenuity, so when to sow and plant have become more of a gamble than ever. The plants, on the other hand, are able to compensate for their straightened circumstances and race to complete their cycle of growth. “Time is short” – they seem to think – “Let’s get on with it!”; and I know that talking to your vegetables is thought to be a sign of madness, but they talk to us all the time and it’s downright churlish not to at least acknowledge what they’re saying. At best we are intelligent companions to our allotment plots. We sow and hoe; feed and water, and try to protect them from beasties and east winds as best we can.

It can feel like endless hard labour; hitched like a trailer to the back of a runaway season. The Potwell Inn may seem like a dream life, furnished with warm evenings and cool wine; perfumed by nectar – but it ain’t nothing of the sort. Tasks pile up and all we can do is take the most urgent from the top of the pile while the bindweed shoulders its way across from the abandoned allotment next door. More like a guerilla war against entropy – made far more difficult by knuckle dragging politicians and their sweet talking lobbyists as they bury their tiny brains in the sand and pretend that nothing is going on. But there is always pleasure to be got from drawing on sixty years of experience. Picking just the right tool from the chaotic shed; the draw hoe that will slice the weeds off at the ground if we keep it sharp, the cultivating tool for working compost and pelleted organic fertilizer into the surface; the indispensable ridging tool which gets used just once a year. Hand tools aren’t just useful, they become companions.

The compensations are still there to be snatched out of harm’s way. Our new potatoes came on last week, and they are so sweet I’d pay a tenner for a plateful with a big knob of butter. We grow a first early called Red Duke of York and in early season they’re better even than the Arran Pilots that my father and grandfather swore by. Broad (Fava) beans have done well this year and, again, we eat half of them uncooked- straight off the plants – as we do the strawberries and tayberries. We revert to the prehistoric practise of foraging our patch of earth in spring and then freeze and store; make jams and pickles and sauces in the autumn. Our neighbours probably see our plot as a disgracefully unkempt and weedy riot, but the insects, bees and pollinators; the dragonflies and damselflies and hoverflies wouldn’t agree as they work the clumps of catmint and marjoram. On a good day you can hear them even above the continuous noise of the passing traffic and the ambulances ferrying the casualties of modern life to the hospital.

But then, of necessity, there’s much more than just allotmenteering to contend with. There’s cooking and eating; cleaning painting and decorating, shopping and baking before a moment can be found for a bit of botanising, let alone writing. Did I even mention arthritic hands and knees? – the unwanted honours of getting old. The average summer day begins appallingly early as light floods into the bedroom; the hours race by and by five o’clock in the afternoon and against all common sense we break open a bottle of vinous sedative and talk about love, and children (harder than herding cats) and plan campervan trips. In between times there are always new skills to learn, new accomplishments to strive for. There are no mountains to climb and no dull cruises to endure because our bucket lists are full of the mundane and the ordinary which – given a good light and a fair wind – can sparkle like a teenage dream.

So it’s now eight am and I’m off to the kitchen to make strong coffee and wake Madame. The day begins.

Hmmm – fish pie!

In an ideal world I’d grow more flowers

IMG_5112But 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.

But to return to the starting point, I love flowers and I’d dearly love to grow more of them but with limited space it’s a matter of priority to grow food and so our compromise is to grow as many beautiful insect and bee attractors as we can.

These are lifted from Ken Thompson’s excellent book “The Sceptical Gardener” –

  • Of the lavenders Hidcote Giant is shown as better than Hidcote
  • Marjoram
  • Cardoon
  • Erisymum linifolium ’Bowles Mauve’ (Wallflower) – best for butterflies
  • Echinops – Globe Thistles
  • Catmint – ‘Six Hills Giant’
  • Borage
  • Agastache foeniculum – Giant Hyssop
  • Echium vulgare – Vipers Bugloss
  • Salvia verticillata – Lilac Sage, Whorled Clarey

The photo at the top of the posting is of our globe artichokes which, with a bit of luck will flower this year.  Yesterday we were casting around for somewhere to plant three angelicas we’d raised from seed and they can grow to very tall plants so they needed to be somewhere they wouldn’t stifle the neighbours.  It’s a gamble but I though the two old toughies could fight it out between them. We grew angelica in a previous garden and it self-seeded freely for several years and then disappeared, but it’s a lovely flowerhead that attracts insects (like all its cousins in the Apiaceae) and better still, the stalks are edible.  I’m desperate to make a bit of crystallised angelica for the Christmas sherry trifle!

So flowers that attract pollinators and that you can eat are a double whammy.  We scour the books looking for likely companion plants, and grow herbs wherever we can.  We’ve got two specific herb beds one for tall ones and the other for short ones – drrr – not exactly Gertrude Jekyll but it works for us, and that’s all that matters. Last week we spent a happy hour just chewing herb leaves – how sad is that? There’s an empty patch in the herb bed where we’re hoping last year’s begamot will eventually wake up and show its head but who knows?

The chillies, aubergines and peppers are all roaring along in the propagators and will have to be displaced this week by the tomatoes.  Hello summer, goodbye floorspace! And we ‘solved’ the oversupply of seed potatoes by planting all the Red Duke of York in big bags and pinching half a bed for the Sarpo Mira. We even found time to have an afternoon snooze in the sunshine – the very essence of allotmenteering.