Tag: resilience

The well tempered household

The title, “Well tempered household” is a steal from a gardening classic by Christopher Lloyd called “The Well Tempered Garden” – well worth reading even though he seems to think of a small garden being anything less than three acres. “Tempered” in the sense that he’s using it has nothing to do with bad tempers or good manners because it’s drawing on a process familiar to sword makers when steel is heated and cooled in order to make it less fragile, more ductile and altogether stronger. A well tempered garden in this sense is a garden that’s capable of withstanding the kinds of climatic surprises and shocks that we’re becoming all too familiar with.

So extending the metaphor to a whole household – like the Potwell Inn – seems not to be too far a stretch, at least to me. We’re not tidy, we’re frequently bad tempered but the Potwell Inn is a well tempered household because in amongst the joyful moments we’ve seen a few shocks and many stresses; we’ve endured scary times and sad times; we’ve frequently been hard up, and to borrow another idea from Nietzsche – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I like to think that layer after layer of experience has been forged into the steel of our being, such that our resilience has made us strong.

Of course there are some shocks that experience can’t overcome. Yesterday we went to visit an old friend with Motor Neurone Disease and against all the odds we had a really lovely afternoon together. Any difficulties in listening to his failing voice were overcome, and – not for the first time – I felt the presence of a kind of luminosity which is not unusual among those who are approaching death. We left and drove back to Bath on a warm and sunny evening and I was overwhelmed by a sense of fullness as all my summer evenings were forged into one. It was an unexpected and extraordinary moment.

Back in the kitchen there were jobs to do, and so I kneaded the new batch of dough for the morning and set it into a banneton that I’ve only used a few times before. I don’t think I could ever write a full account of baking bread. It’s so embedded in my memory and my hands that hundreds of micro decisions contribute to the final loaf. There is a recipe stuck to the fridge, but it’s overwritten with so many amendments I rarely even look at it. But when the stars align and the starter, the batter and then the dough come right there’s a feeling that it’s going to be good. But there’s another feeling too because having the starter right, having the flour and then the loaf right are tokens of stability. Well tempered baking is a fundamental part of a well tempered household and so too is the allotment which brings us healthy food. Today we harvested tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines, green beans and sweetcorn and Madame picked 2Kg of blackberries from the footpath. Today we’re winning the sweetcorn battle with the badgers six nil. Lunch was good.

The Pyrex bowl in which I’ve proved every loaf I’ve ever baked is so precious and replete with memories that it’s only ever hand-washed. I’m not sure I could cope with losing it. The sourdough starter is more than ten years old and always sulks when we go away and don’t feed it. Recently a couple of American neighbours were in the process of moving away and they entrusted a three generations old sourdough pancake batter to our care.

So yesterday evening we ate late, watched television far too late – binging on “Bear” series two – and then listened to some of the music again while we drank too much wine. The sound track is amazing. A short night, then, and up early with a thick head to bake the loaf.

As the produce floods in, I spend more and more time in the kitchen. Today there were the blackberries to be cooked and strained through a cotton twill bag to make jelly. Bramble jelly is one of the most fragrant of all the jellies, and it always feels like we’re eating summer when we have it. Then today I also made the first batch of roasted tomato passata which we use as a base for many meals throughout the year. I suppose all this is another instance of resilience; of the tempering process that keeps the household on track even during the toughest of times. Without our sack of flour, the bakers yeast and the sourdough starter and a cupboard full of preserved produce from the allotment we’d have felt very exposed, but as it was, our principal enemy was isolation.

Are we self-sufficient? Absolutely not; but are we well tempered and resilient? without doubt!

When the going gets tough …..

The endlessly adaptable Mexican Fleabane – Erigeron karvinskianus spreading along our street year by year
Phew what a scorcher! – says the sub editor for the 10,000th time

The Met Office defines a heatwave as a period of three days or more when the temperature rises above the expected. So no argument then! we’re in a heatwave; something I guess most of us in the UK would have known without the benefit of the definition. However, definitions sometimes throw up potential problems such as this one. In a time of global heating what’s expected? Upon what form of statistical calculation is that decision made. Is it the average temperature? the mean temperature? – and what happens when the temperature is rising year on year? Even if the mean June temperature is calculated over the past five, ten or even fifty years, it will surely rise; and at what point will the media be dutifully reporting a cold snap because the mean June temperature falls below a level that we’ve become wearily accustomed to. Maybe we need an alternative way of expressing the impact of temperature rises – for example excess deaths; the effect on crops; the price and availability of food; the water levels in the reservoirs; pollution in rivers as the reduced dilution effect of dry weather gives the game away ?

Of course, what we usually do in the real world is lament the idiocy of politicians who are too cowardly to address the crisis, and get on with it as best we can. Here at the Potwell Inn we’re getting up early and going to the allotment soon after seven o’clock so we can get three or four hours in before it’s too hot to work any more. Some jobs are much harder – for instance setting out young plants when temperatures are likely to rise to 30 C (86 F). They need intensive care from day one. The simplest manual jobs like tilling a bed or raking in compost or fertilizer can be exhausting, and watering becomes a test of stamina. At its worst I can walk 10000 steps between the water troughs and the allotment.

But there’s an upside too. After a seemingly endless winter in our flat we both felt thoroughly seedy and out of condition, but now we’re suntanned and as fit as fleas. Allotmenteering is both a physical and also an intellectual challenge – trying to predict what might happen next. I suppose you could say it resembles sailing, inasmuch as reading the weather almost becomes an obsession. We look to see where the wind is coming from. South westerlies can be warm but they also bring rain in from the Atlantic. A cold easterly can decimate fruit blossom and kill tender plants – we lost our Tarragon and Rosemary as well as an established Clematis during the winter and any heavy rain or snow can be destructive of plants or netting. It’s no use thinking “I’m not going out in this” because staying in might cost you your crop or your nets.

So we don’t feel in the least downhearted about this heatwave because, like the Mexican Fleabane in the photo, we can – if we work at it – adapt to all manner of changes. Don’t for a minute imagine that I’m saying we can adapt ourselves out of catastrophic climate change without changing our whole lifestyle. What I am saying is that being hard-up for most of our lives, being prepared to keep the household just about going by earning a living wherever it’s possible is a great training in resilience – I’ve washed up in a hotel, driven buses, been a rather poor welder, a groundsman, a night cleaner in a factory, worked nights on my own in a rat infested factory sawing large blocks of polystyrene foam into sheets, and worked in a prison and a couple of old style mental hospitals. I can cook, clean and grow stuff and of course I worked as a parish priest for 30 years and I think I learned a great deal about being human or how not to be human. Madame has a very similar skill set and so we muddle along contentedly together, knowing that a good life doesn’t depend on having a Range Rover.

I’ve been reading a short article by Prof Massimo Pigliucci in “Philosophy Now” which I picked up from a newspaper stand before I looked at the price. Anyway the article lists six ethical ideals shared by almost all the world’s faiths. This is a long way from religion in the commonly understood sense. These values are:

  • Practical wisdom
  • Justice / morality
  • temperance / moderation
  • fortitude / courage
  • Humanity
  • Transcendence (gratitude, hope, spirituality

This group of dispositions broadly represents what’s usually called Virtue Ethics. To risk simplifying the idea so much it becomes a parody, these kind of dispositions, when internalised and lived out in everyday life, are the most effective guidance we have for flourishing – not for getting rich, or amassing honours and power but simply flourishing, being / becoming human. When you think about it it would be hard to express a better wish list for gardeners, nurses, or so-called captains of industry.

There’s a kind of grim satisfaction in knowing that when the climate catastrophe finally strikes us, the wealthy can only hope to buy a few more years of absolution from the bletted fruits of their behaviour before they realise they’ve got no talent for being human and no skills to change themselves. The snake oil salesmen and the invisible Seventh Technological Cavalry will have fled, and their last moments will be spent howling at a blackened sky like Violet Elizabeth Bot “I’ll thcweam and I’ll thcweam and I’ll make mythelf thick!”

Growing, cooking, eating

Of course, however much we’d like to boast how skilled, clever or green fingered we are the truth is that it’s more likely that the allotment is growing us rather than the other way round. However well planned and executed the season is, our plans are at the mercy of the weather and a thousand other unpredictable variables any of which can trip us up. For instance when we arrived back from Wales we checked on the garlic and pulled a single bulb to see how things were going on. It looked fine – it just needed another couple of weeks to plump up. I think I mentioned this when I wrote on Friday or Saturday,

Anyway, yesterday I got down to some serious weeding in the garlic bed and discovered that one or two plants were soft where the stalk met the bulb. A quick survey of the whole bed revealed about half a dozen badly affected plants and so we decided to pull the lot in case there was an outbreak of something really nasty like white rot. There were two varieties in the bed – one was much more affected than the other, and after a long consultation of the text books it looks 90% sure that the plants had been infected by basal plate rot, a fusarium fungus. This is caused by a multitude of stresses; weather, water and over fertilization for instance and so regretfully we’re putting it down to yet another instance of the collateral damage caused by the exceptional weather this spring,which has broken records in alternating between continuous rain and drought, coolest and warmest consecutive months and persistent episodes of cold wind from the northeast and northwest. Plants don’t like stress and that’s when they get diseased or attacked by pests.

The upshot is that we have lost about half of the crop and we’re presently drying the (apparently) unaffected plants. At least fusarium can be controlled by rotation, whereas white rot persists for decades. I don’t think over fertilisation is the problem because we use no fertilisers, just compost. Ah well; life’s rich tapestry we say; but it’s another piece of evidence that maybe we have to change the way we grow things. It’s almost a given that it’s a good thing to sow some crops – like garlic, broad beans and even peas in November/December to get them off to a rapid start in the spring with the promise of an early crop. But for several years we’ve been wrongfooted by the weather and now we’re wondering whether to abandon the technique of overwintering our plants (except perhaps in the polytunnel) and getting everything in much later than we’ve been used to.

We talk a lot about the pleasures of gardening – and they are many – but we tend not to stress the disappointments, perhaps for fear of putting people off or of simply showing what terrible gardeners we really are. Organic gardening deliberately eschews all the chemical shortcuts and remedies so it’s more like hand-to-hand combat in amongst the rows. We embrace and encourage coalitions of friendly forces by inviting in the trillions of soil friends, insect predators, companion plants and physical barriers; leaning on nature rather than technology to even the scales in our favour.

The payback, of course, is on the plate. I love the surveys that purport to show that there’s no difference in flavour between organic and intensively grown vegetables. What they don’t mention is the fact that all supermarket veg, whether organic or not, are stale if not close to death before the tasting takes place. If you ran a bowl of our fresh allotment peas, straight off the vine, with even the best brands of frozen peas – you’d wonder of they were the same vegetable; and “fresh” peas from the supermarket are fit only for soup. Cooking times (usually steaming for us) are shorter the fresher the vegetable is and so their nutritional value is greater. Better flavour, shorter cooking times and higher nutritional values make cooking more rewarding than ever.

Today, apart from a greedy bucket of peas, we picked a large bag of elderflowers from which we’ll make cordial tonight. The only two food items we seem to be completely self-sufficient in are elderflower cordial and tomatoes as puree, passata, dried and as various sauces. The elderflowers are free, of course, and greatly undervalued as a flavouring. We often use the cordial to sweeten rhubarb; but at the moment it’s perfuming the whole block with its strange combination of nectar and cat’s pee. The neighbours must be wondering what on earth we’re cooking now. The variety we picked today is a decorative purple cultivar that makes the loveliest pink syrup.

I said at the beginning that the allotment is growing us as much as we grow it and by that I mean firstly that most of the traditional varieties we grow have been selected and preserved for many years – so in a sense we’re part of their reproductive process. But in another way, we grow because in spite of the occasional disappointments nature is generous beyond all our deserving. We learn fast that our hard work is as nothing in the great cycles of seasonal change. We try to dispose but we cannot compel and can never forget that even half a crop of garlic is at least ten times what we planted – and in the case of our foraged treats we did no work and invested nothing. Cordial is £3.50 a bottle and we make it for about 50p so our carrier bag full of flowers today was a free gift from Mother Earth. The insect life seems to be increasing every day as the season progresses and more and more allotmenteers are growing wildflowers and digging ponds. The site is close to becoming a 4 acre nature reserve. Learning to embrace the occasional failure is another kind of gift too. Sometimes we get despondent, but it’s not personal because there’s more strength in yielding than attacking with fire and chemicals. Today it’s one nil to the fusarium, but hey – it’s got to make a living too!

Dealing with drought (?)

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I know, it makes me feel a bit premature too, since we’re probably about to break the record for the wettest February since records began – but if climate change means anything at all it’s the fact that our weather is becoming less and less predictable. The swings are wilder; feast and famine come together in the weather cycle and ironic though it might seem, we’re investing heavily in water storage at the moment at the Potwell Inn because it’s raining. Starting to wonder what to do after it’s been dry for six weeks and the government is planning a hosepipe ban will be too late. We’ve been storing 1000 litres for a year and I’ve been busy planning and building a new storage layout, connecting the butts and increasing our capacity to 1250 Litres immediately and later perhaps adding another 500 Litres to take the water running off the compost storage bins.  It seems all wrong to use pure drinking water for the allotment, but for the most part we’re all very inexperienced when it comes to efficient watering. I’m quite sure we water too much – in my case because I actually enjoy it on a summer evening – but much of it will be wasted. So one of our climate change lessons for the next few years is to learn how to water just enough and not too much.

We’ll also need to be looking at the plants we grow; the varieties that work and a whole range of new horticultural skills. There will be things that can’t survive the new weather regime and I’m sure the seed catalogues will be offering lots of expensive new varieties.  On the other hand, open pollinated varieties using the best seed gathered on our own allotment year on year might do even better.  I’ve read that it’s surprising how quickly adaptations happen. There’s a good case for looking again at some of the trad varieties that could bring useful genes into play. I once had a micro-variety of cherry tomato that had been treasured since the war by a retired firefighter.  It had no name – just ‘Tim’s tomatoes’ and the fruit was absolutely delicious.  Sadly they died with him but whatever they were, they loved life exactly the way Tim grew them.

There are so many things we can do as growers to mitigate climate change.  That’s not an excuse for not doing all the things we know about in our personal lives, the way we shop and travel and dress. But change, when it comes, will come slowly and we need to prepare for the extremes in the meantime. We’ve done some trials with windbreaks and frostbreaks (hardly needed this winter);  I’ve written often about drainage and improving soil condition – all these things can add resilience to an allotment. Our allotment is sheltered from the prevailing southwesterly winds by a line of tall trees, but the northwesterlies, northerlies and northeasterlies can be incredibly cold and destructive and so we’ve put all our structures – greenhouse, shed and compost bins on the North side, and we’ve built a strong windbreak to the east. We’re not allowed to have fences or hedges but there’s nothing in the rules about training vines and growing vigorous soft fruit along wires.

The hotbed, although it’s quite small has also given us flexibility during the early months of the year.  It’s surprising what you can grow on 12 square feet of fertile soil, kept at a steady 20C. Climate change is a real challenge, but it’s one we can rise to.  I’ve just spent the happiest couple of days sourcing exactly the right kinds of pipes and connectors and one additional water butt that fell into my hands when I walked into a local garden centre and saw the very thing I was looking for next to the till waiting to be returned to the wholesaler. I did a deal with the boss on the spot and got it at a reduced price. So that’s in the back of the car along with a pile of connectors and pipes that I can’t wait to assemble.  For the first time we’ll have a free (OK it cost a bit) but a sustainable source of rainwater that flows freely to a convenient tap at watering can height. It’s been a logistical challenge but by a bit of judicious juggling I’ll have preserved all bar a couple of gallons of the water that we’d already stored. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it.  That’s one bit of infrastructure to cross off the list, and then I’ll turn to putting a roof over the compost bins and harvesting the rain off another 60 square feet. Further down the line I want to try out an idea for solar heating using an old radiator that I saw at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth years ago and I might even have a go at an irrigation scheme run off a 12V battery and a solar panel on the shed, used to operate a solenoid valve and ……….

Madame gets exhausted by my enthusiasms so I’d better shut up. The flat is full of seedlings. Greta Thunberg came to Bristol today.  Bristol – for the benefit of the political commentariat who never leave London (the Great Wen as William Cobbett would have it) – Bristol is a large city near the confluence of the Wye, the Severn and the Bristol Avon where people speak with a funny accent and around which the electrification of the railway was diverted because too many people voted Labour. George Ferguson the previous Mayor was very involved in Green Politics and the present Labour Mayor has continued in the same vein. There were about 30,000 people there at the demonstration and the march passed off completely peacefully as everyone except the police and the media expected.  The local evening news reported that ‘thousands’ of demonstrators turned up and probably by 10.00 pm the BBC will be reporting that ‘quite a few’ people came and ruined the grass on College Green. It’s a good job, then, that these wicked demonstrators have already started raising money to repair the damage to the grass caused by 30,000 pairs of feet. Meanwhile the police were busy filming these nascent terrorists – some of them at primary school – are we living in la la land?

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