Tag: organic

Back on the allotment again

Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica

Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.

Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.

It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).

So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.

So big you can’t see it

1080827Sometimes the hardest things to spot are invisible because they’re everywhere.  Like the air we breathe, or as the sea appears to a fish, the all encompassing embrace of the big ideas have insinuated themselves into our inner and outer landscapes and become the framework itself. We know this is the case  but it takes a film like The Matrix to spell it out. Today’s Guardian publishes a report on farm subsidies that makes scary reading in the precarious real world we inhabit. $1 million dollars a minute to pay farmers to do the wrong thing is such a preposterous idea that you might wonder whether it could possibly be true, but the reason it slips past us is because we never stand in a bank watching a man in a green overall withdrawing millions in cash.

The best place to see the madness of subsidy is locally – we’re in Lleyn, for instance, and we’re staying right next door to a typical small mixed farm.  There are a few cattle and sheep, the adjoining field has a mixture of tups, and some Jacobs sheep graze the clifftops.  There are all the usual features of the small farm here, hens, a couple of noisy ducks and some mangy looking cats eyeing us up. As we arrived here the farmer, whose knees are shot from handling sheep, was moving multiple trailer loads of nitrate fertiliser on to the farm. I reckon about 30 tons of the stuff passed by us. He’s not rich for sure, and he’s struggling to keep going in a market that’s rigged against him; impoverishing his own land in order to stay in the game. Ironically we saw him yesterday carrying a heavy bag of seaweed up from the shore, over his shoulder. He knows what he needs to do but he can’t do it.

A mile away we found another dairy farm while we were out searching for a source of freshly caught fish. You’d hardly know it was a dairy farm, it looked more like an industrial estate with its huge barns, silos and tanks.  Everywhere there were warning signs that this was a bio-secure area and we were not welcome.  Little bucolic charm there, then, but another sign of a broken farm economy.

The government last week announced a huge extension of the badger cull.  With tuberculosis becoming endemic in dairy herds, the cost of compensating farmers is enormous and yet almost all the scientific evidence suggests that badgers are not the main source of the disease.  TB is a disease that spreads most quickly in highly stressed environments – such as when you force cows to produce far more milk than they are properly capable of. The principal feed crop grown on intensive dairy farms is maize, which is deficient as food without supplementation – rather like living on Big Macs! Badgers absolutely love eating maize and so the farmers are the most likely cause of the explosion in the badger population by providing thousands of acres of their favourite food.  Add to that the constant movement of cattle around the country and it doesn’t need a degree in agriculture to see that the problem is probably another example of agricultural self-harm.

And yet, I read an intriguing article in the same newspaper last week that reported how many industries are quietly greening their approach because it makes more economic sense.  Ironically they’re not publicising this because public perception is that ‘doing the right thing’ results in more cost and less quality in the product.  Some Portuguese wine producers have gone organic without announcing the fact, because they get bigger yields and better quality and they can sell at the same price.

The only way to tackle this desperately urgent challenge is to take on the stakeholders, the industrial farm corporations, the supermarkets, the manufacturers of damaging fertilizers and lethal farm chemicals, but most challenging of all, ourselves. I remember one tired old management cliché that might fit here – culture eats strategy for breakfast. The answer always comes back “we’re only giving the public what it wants!” and it’s true. The situation won’t really change until we see through the ideological fog that sustains intensive, destructive, subsidised farming and demand something better.

Controlled rotting resumed in the kitchen

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Here we are, back home and that means two posts today with a bit of luck and some time. First off, ‘though, there is the revival of the sourdough starter and the kefir to think about. The Potwell Inn is a plain sort of a place – or it would be if it existed –  and here we try to avoid mystification, and when it comes to sourdough starters and their care, there’s enough ordure written about it to keep our allotment fertile for the next ten years. So here’s the key principle: wild yeasts are are ubiquitous – they’re everywhere and they’ll still be there centuries after the last lobbyist declares that chemical X will save the world, thereby ending the world. I’ve only killed a sourdough starter once and that was a deliberate experiment to see how long I could neglect it before it died.  The answer was that I couldn’t kill it at all, but under the anaerobic conditions of its container it turned into another life-form so powerfully smelly that I had to throw the container away.  Second point is that getting a starter going is so easy you wonder how the hipster artisan bakers have got the nerve to sell the knowledge for £150 a morning. Get some dark rye flour and stir it into some tap water and leave it in a warm place until it starts to bubble (could be days – don’t wory).  Then throw half of that away and add more flour and more tap water, give it a stir and keep going like that until it’s ready to use.

So getting back from North Wales means the neglected starter needs a feed because it’s been neglected for a fortnight and it’s sulking. I do use organic flour; my favourite is Bacheldre Mill, but I don’t fuss about water.  By all means waste your money on organic single malt virgin water brought over from the Isle of Sky in a coracle but it won’t taste any better.  I do not employ holiday starter sitters to stir the infant broth daily, even on minimum wages. I have not scoured the antiques markets for authenic barm pots and neither do I subject the infant starter to any ceremonial prayers or position it on a lay line. Most particularly I would never dream of shelling any money out for someone else’s starter, but if you happened to know where the Potwell Inn is (which for reasons already described would be difficult because it doesn’t exist), but if you should happen to pop by at the back door of the pub I’ll gladly give you a bit.  It’s lovely and it smells like apples.

As for the second exercise in controlled rotting, the kefir was in an even more perilous situation because I’d forgotton about it for weeks.  You know how it goes with kefir – drinking it every single day for ever would bore you stiff. So it’s been languishing at the back of the fridge waiting patiently for someone to show it some love.  Today I showed it some love and I strained it and washed the grains off (with tap water) and and put it in a clean container with more full cream milk. Once again it’s organic milk because that’s what we use. Because I’ve washed it and possibly because the chlorine in the water is a bit of an inhibitor, it will be slow to recover, but it will recover.

The pantry is full of various other vegetable bits and bobs undergoing their own lacto-fermentation and they too will cope with whatever life throws at them. I don’t sell this food so any public health inspectors reading this need not trouble themselves to Google up the Potwell Inn and attempt to pay me a visit, and if I do suddenly expire one day from some unexplained cause it’s vanishingly unlikely that the wild yeast will have done it!