Tag: weeds

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

Nature is never tidy!

It may look unkempt but there’s a nice Hungarian Mullein blown in from who knows where?

This is a piece I wrote for another magazine some time ago, and since I’m suffering a bit from double vision after having a cataract removed yesterday I thought I’d cheat a bit and re-publish it for a much wider readership.

“I wonder if I dare stick my head over the parapet to challenge several of the principles behind the tidy-up rules so beloved of allotment sites. Words like “rubbish” and “dumping” suggest that when we use them we have a clear understanding of what they refer to. I’m afraid I think this isn’t true in some cases. We allotmenteers are often inveterate recyclers and can’t pass a wooden pallet, a shower door or a glazed window frame without dragging it back to the site because we know “it’ll come in handy one day” The trouble is – as someone once wrote of Karl Marx’s rather evolutionary theory – the glorious “one day” of the last instance never seems to dawn. I’m intrigued to know how long a potentially useful item has to linger before it finally becomes proper rubbish. Imagine sending a team of lay-assessors complete with clip-boards to mark items seen (on a scale of one to ten of course) on their “state of rubbishness”. What about two assessors who disagree completely about a cardboard covered plot in autumn – is it a bold step in recycling and sustainability, or is it just dumped rubbish? When we moved on to our allotment ten years ago we found two bicycles in an abandoned compost heap. How long does it take to compost a bicycle? Where does an unkempt looking plot belong on the scale – a little untidiness around the edges? What if the untidiness includes ragwort|? Good for Cinnabar, moths bad for horses and cattle. Thank goodness there are no farm animals on site. What if it’s got creeping thistle? Couch grass, bindweed? Oh goodness we’d have to think about that! Well, let’s have an easy one; stinging nettles. Almost exclusive food plants to peacock, red admiral, small tortoiseshell, comma, and painted lady butterflies. If we run with the theory that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, then perhaps it’s permissible to remove them as long as we make provision somewhere else.

I see a lot of rewilding schemes where packets of commercial wildflower seeds have been thrown into a verge or the corner of a plot and left to their own devices. This summer we saw the lovely intense blue of cornflowers along the riverside. I’ll guarantee they won’t be there next year because this isn’t their natural habitat. Allotment soil is often far too rich for wildflowers that evolved on poor stony soil or in distant hills. To create true wildlife habitats could take years of preparation with several transitional states. So although it might suit our love of tidiness to clear the plots of weeds; as many as ten, ever-dwindling generations of wildflowers and their associated insects would struggle to survive. If we want to clear the plots of weeds we’ll need to start providing alternative food and shelter now because we’re in the midst of a mass species extinction already.

But what shall we do with the weeds? Annual weeds grow annually, it’s not rocket science. They usually set seeds – the nuisance seedlings that come up every year and which we hoe off our beds all too regularly. It’s the perennials like couch, creeping thistle, creeping anything in fact – tormentil, buttercup, and the pernicious bindweed that are hardest to deal with. And because some of them grow from rhizomes, the tiniest piece of snapped off root will soon grow again. So the only effective way of dealing with them is to dig them out – but the couch dives deep, metres deep in the ground and once it’s established we just have to grit our teeth and dig it out. But what then? We’d be mad to put it in our compost heaps because unless they’re seriously heated, they’ll just keep growing. Hot heaps are hard work, need continuous management and require lots of green material like grass mowings to keep them going. We’ve built California cylinders on our plot but even with the addition of gallons of what we’ll call human activator, they never really get going. Normal heaps never get hot enough to kill couch or bindweed and most of us land up with cold heaps that sit there sulking and do nothing.

So what do we do? If we take them down to the recycling centre they’ll probably wind up as landfill or be quietly burned in out-of-county incinerators. If we burn them in bonfires we’re going against current efforts to reduce pollution. If we all burn our rubbish we’ll cancel out all the CO2 being saved by the 20mph limit on the other side of the fence. But if we heap them up by the fence they’ll rot down naturally – if very slowly – mixed with prunings from fruit trees and return their goodness to the soil. Those rows will provide a safe shelter for a multitude of insects, invertebrates and small mammals. They could give living and sleeping space to slow-worms and hedgehogs, field mice and such like. They could provide for birds and the other larger mammals like foxes, badgers and even deer, all of which we’ve filmed passing through on the site.

We already have a wide strip of land next to the fence at the bottom of the site. These plots are heartbreakers because they’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a slope and they’re overshadowed by trees which keep the soil beneath permanently dry and in winter deny the soil any direct sunshine. New allotmenteers come and struggle for a season and then leave, demoralized and disappointed. These unrentable plots could be a part of a deliberate plan to create a proper but small wildlife and wildflower reserve. Coupled with shelter for the small beasties we could plant swathes of nectar rich pollinator plants and join with other green spaces up and down the river to increase the viability of the green corridor which is a bit narrow in places.

Every single reputable nature agency from the RHS to the RSPB is begging us to make more provision for wildlife in our gardens by leaving much more “untidy” space for it. There’s an old business saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast and it’s especially true for gardening where many of us were brought up to think that clean, weed free plots and straight lines were nature’s way. We’re gradually coming to realize that nature actually prefers, thrives on a bit of muddle and mess and neglect. So let’s have a think before we start clearing up. That abandoned piece of corrugated iron lying on the ground might – if we lift it slowly and carefully – have a slow worm under it. The weedy looking pond might welcome frogs or toads once more as they’ve been suffering from a fungal epidemic.

As to deciding what kind of wildflowers to grow, the cheapest and most reliable system is to wait and see what comes in on its own. Plants have been managing for aeons without our help and they’ll soon drop by. We’ve had innumerable wildflowers including half a dozen real rarities – unknown locally – some of them quite plain, like Bilbao’s fleabane this year, and some rather lovely ones like the Peruvian apple, the Irish version of Fumitory not to mention the very tall Hungarian mullein up near the gate. If I could put in a plea for just one plant it would be for an isolated clump of Bocking 14 comfrey that we could cut and steep to make the best tomato fertilizer ever. I know it smells like a dead sheep in a ditch but this first cross is sterile and doesn’t spread like most other comfreys. Thanks for reading this if you stuck it out to the end!”

Dissecting a canary

Yes I know it’s not a canary exactly, but on the allotment it seems to be bringing a canary style announcement to the coal mine. The tomatoes on our allotment, although they looked OK (with a great deal of watering), and tasted fine even though it has been a much reduced crop, have no seeds; no descendants; no progeny. The canary is lying dead on the bottom of the cage and suggests that although they remained just about alive during the five consecutive heatwaves, they were suffering greatly and couldn’t stand the temperatures. They weren’t the only casualties this season. The legumes either failed altogether or failed to pollinate well. There’s a reason for all this; apparently pollen gets sticky in the heat and doesn’t transfer so easily from plant to plant leaving them seedless.

For a while I thought we’d got the first mutation to seedlessness that ever happened on a tomato but I soon realized that Darwin would have sucked his teeth and shaken his head. If the seed merchants have the same trouble as us, there will be almost no viable tomato seeds next year and the price would go through the roof. I’ve seen internet reports of sunflowers with no seeds, and our own sweetcorn only managed a couple of viable cobs on each plant, and the potatoes were very small and sparse. The newspapers are being told by farmers that this year is the worst cereal season for at least ten years. You can ask what the outcome of all this will be, but you can only answer it by accepting that “the local supermarket” is not the correct answer. We, collectively, created this problem and as sure as eggs is eggs we’re going to have to do something about the way we live if we’re not all going to suffer serious privation when the prices rise and the shelves are empty. The canary is lying dead on the floor and I did the autopsy.

Charlie our neighbour gave us a couple of Sungold F1 cherry tomato plants in late spring and we planted them outside in a raised bed. They got the same watering regime as the ones in the polytunnel but they’ve had no cracking or greenback and the fruit is delicious. The problem is obviously high temperatures but anyone with a very small greenhouse or a polytunnel will know that they’re fiendishly hard to ventilate at night, while at the same time protecting them from the “shoppers” who climb over the gate in the late evening and reap where they haven’t sown.

But one plant which appears to thrive under the heat has had a great year both here in Bath and on the Bannau Brycheiniog, where we were last week. It’s called Fat Hen – Chenopodium album and it’s been a virulent weed in both places. Our friends keep sheep, pigs and hens – all of them free range within their field boundaries. They’ve got internet up there on their hillside and so we were able to discover that Fat Hen is capable of causing harm to animals and humans in spite of being consumed by us and our livestock across Europe and since neolithic times. Tollund Man’s last meal, we’re told, included Fat Hen but that wasn’t what killed him. Back home I turned to the books and worked out that the point at issue is how large a percentage of the diet comprises Fat Hen and how much you (or they) eat at one time. The take-home point is that in a field situation it’s better to cut a small amount and add it to the feed, rather than leaving it growing where the livestock can overdo it. Used in that way it’s apparently high quality food, and the oxalates and nitrates which cause problems are kept at a safe level.

But all this talk of poisonous weeds must have lodged in my mind and a strange dream carried me right back to the tomato family, the Solanaceae which gives us potatoes and tomatoes but also the Nightshades, Henbanes and Thorn apples all three dangerous if not fatal when eaten; and thorn apple, also known in the US as Jimson weed apparently had a loyal following among soldiers during the Civil War. I mentioned only a few days ago a T shirt I saw with the slogan “all plants are edible – some of them only once”. This was a property that was understood and often used by poisoners in the past.

Anyway, in my dream I was leaning against the wall of a pizza hut deep in conversation with one of our son’s ex’s trying to explain that something she was going to cook was extremely poisonous when another young woman turned up looking faintly odd; intoxicated and away somewhere else. She explained to me (with a voice from somewhere else too) that she had been preparing Thornapple for a meal. I begged her not to eat it and she replied that it was fine, because if you sang this song while you cooked it, the poison would be neutralized. Then she uttered this haunting ululating sound – the song – and then nodded as if to say “that showed you!”and wandered off.

Thorn Apple is an intoxicating hallucinogen with severe chance of causing death and whose hallucinations are widely spoken of by people who’ve tried it as horrible so it’s not likely to catch on. But it demonstrates that plants have the ability to synthesize good things and bad. Without them the earth would cease to have life in any form, but they also demand respect. For many years tomatoes were assumed to be poisonous precisely because of their relationship with Deadly Nightshade, Enchanter’s Nightshade and all the others and you have to wonder what brave soul took the risk of eating one and began the huge cultural change that brought the plant to its position as number one home-grown fruit in the UK.

Madame and me were walking one afternoon in Leigh Woods on the Somerset side of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridge, and a elderly man who looked like a rough sleeper came up to us in a state of breathless excitement and dragged us deep into the woods saying that he’d been living there for (if I remember right) ten years and he’d never seen a Purging Buckthorn before. I was right at the beginning of my interest in plants and after he showed us the bush, we shook hands and thanked him and went on our way. Purging Buckthorn – Rhamnus cathartica – is another of those plants it’s wise to get to grips with if you’re foraging in the woods. The clue is in both “purging” and “cathartica” if you think about it. A bilingual warning that all plants are edible, some only once.

But to finish on an entirely delicious and safe account of the tomato I’ve put a photo of the Italian dish Panzanella which I made to Anna Del Conte’s recipe but it’s capable of any amount of variation. It was while making this dish that I discovered that the tomatoes I’d harvested that day, had no seeds. Inside every silver lining, these days, there’s a cloud waiting to get out!

Foraging – like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

I’m allergic to plants in the obvious sense that I get terrible hay-fever between March and October and I always wonder if, when people see me in the street during those months, they might see my streaming eyes and nose and wonder if I’ve just had some terrible news. But I’m also allergic to the idea of picking them. Madame has no such inhibitions and it’s a rare day when we don’t have a small jug of wildflowers from the allotment in the middle of the table. Occasionally I suspect they make me sneeze but I wouldn’t be without them. Thinking for instance about the Cowslip, the dilemma about picking them becomes more insistent because they’ve declined so much in the past due mainly to changed farming practices and chemical weedkillers. The idea that we mustn’t pick them is a bit of an urban myth because they’re not legally protected if you just pick them for that traditional jam jar display. If, however, you’re making cowslip wine and need a bucketful of flower heads, your actions would be extremely thoughtless and reprehensible and if you uproot a few plants for your garden without the owner’s permission you’d be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act 1968. If you gather flowers and leaves for personal use in making herbal medicines it’s lawful, but it’s unethical if you strip a whole cluster bare and illegal to dig the roots up without permission. If you forage to supply your phytomedical business then you might get an appointment with our learned friends. It’s a legal but also an ethical minefield which I prefer to resolve by trying to take the best possible photographs to use for identification and taking the bare minimum from a plant only if I need to take it home for further work. I’m bound to say that the decline of wildflowers is very little to do with over enthusiastic picking as opposed to intensive farming and chemical sprays but legal sanctions and self restraint engender a cautious attitude. There’s another reason – amusingly expressed on a T shirt doing the rounds at the moment with the slogan – “All plants are edible; some of them only once”. The gravest danger lurks for any ill informed forager who thinks that because it’s wild it must be good for you.

But this raises the issue concerning learning our plants which begins with falling in love with them. At that crucial early stage how is anyone supposed to decide whether a pretty looking plant is on Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act if they don’t even know that such an act exists. Wildlife programmes on TV rarely pay much attention to plants, and when they do it’s usually the show stoppers that get the attention. It’s hard to imagine getting a programme about common weeds getting on to the screen without a Dalek shouting “Exterminate”. My Mum learned her plants by osmosis. She only ever used latin names if they had become common by usage but most of the time it was the common name used in her part of the Chilterns. She not only knew their names and where to find them, she also knew what they were used for. Brimstone and treacle was the name of a very unpleasant blood tonic not the title of a Dennis Potter play. Glycerine and thymol was a gargle for sore throat; dock leaves eased nettle stings although broadleaf plantain is better and if you’ve got the patience you can peel off the outer layer of a Navelwort leaf leaving a cooling substitute for an Elastoplast. Zinc and castor oil (Zac) – probably made up by the local pharmacist was the go-to remedy for rashes along with calamine (zinc) lotion for chicken pox. These were all well known and traditional remedies for the everyday complaints – the piles and varicose veins, childhood illnesses, constipation (my Dad was a martyr to his bowels!). So there was nothing strange and technical about a licorice stick or a Dandelion root and conversely all country children knew about deadly nightshades and Foxglove. For the overwhelming majority of children today even those common plant names are another language altogether and so plants – because they don’t know what they’re called or what they do, disappear to the background of consciousness and the reach what’s come to to be called “green blindness”.

Herbal medicine or Phytomedicine as they now call it – possibly because it sounds posher and less attached to the peasantry – demands a wide knowledge of plants. Dying and weaving use many wild plants for colours, foragers introduce old foods to a new generation so long as they know what they’re doing and don’t flout the law but for the average person there’s a huge gulf between liking plants and understanding their names and broad place in the culture. Many £500 weekend courses suggest that the freedom of the earth is yours when you’ve seen a Thornapple or a Death Cap just once, and every year someone will have a final meal of Hemlock Water Dropwort. It takes time to know even the basics fully and because we’re no longer peasants, drip fed the meanings of plants; but we have to do it the hard way on our hands and knees, and through books.

My own very cautious venture into plant medicine is confined to making calendula cream which is wonderful for skin complaints and we make a great deal of it using marigolds we grow on the allotment. I also made a batch of medicine for Madame which took ages and tasted filthy with no notable result, but the experience taught me a great deal and showed me where to obtain the plants I couldn’t forage or grow myself. However many everyday herbs which we grow on the allotment are foods, packed with vitamins and trace elements as well as specific molecules which have an effect on everyday complaints. Here I am, sitting and typing in rude health, having taken a digoxin tablet with my breakfast. This is a drug synthesized from the Foxglove and deadly in the event of overdoing it. Plants – and perhaps this is one of the most exciting and staggering gifts they bring to the human race – have the gift of putting together complex molecules which Big Pharma is only too pleased to identify, synthesize or refine and then patent making shedloads of money in the process. The Foxglove doesn’t even get a cursory thank-you on my Digoxin packet!

Just out of interest I did a bit of research on any commonly used medicinal herbs which are also on Schedule 8 and therefore fully protected. A bit of jiggery pokery and a small Python computer routine – AI, not written by me – compared the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia with the latest Schedule 8 list and came up with the fascinating fact there is only one plant appearing in both lists – the Marsh Gentian, which I’ve never seen – and three near misses with Centaury Thistles which would be easy to sort out in the field. Bear in mind, though that the UK National Trust, many wildlife trusts and all Sites of Special Scientific Interest forbid any taking of even parts of plants so it’s not an open house on herbs.

If you read my last post concerning the ghost garden where we’re staying we did a bit more research and discovered that the overgrown garden is the remnant of the guest house nearby whose owner was a keen gardener and botanist. So yes – it’s a melancholy oddity bearing in mind the hill farms surrounding us but it must have been lovely in its heyday.

Hemlock Water Dropwort – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

A quantum of hope

A little rain – and I mean little – more of a mist – fell earlier in the week and last night a little more. Madame woke up and we peered through the bedroom window and saw the first puddle in many weeks forming in the yard below . We’ve become weary of heatwaves with the need for early morning starts to water the plants on the allotment before the disabling heat blankets Bath. We say to one another how good it is to be up early but the enthusiasm has morphed from bright eyes to gritted teeth. Peasant life, we’ve always known, is no picnic. It’s small wonder that our ancestors spent so much effort on placating the weather gods and searching for the inadvertent sins that might have pissed them off. Blaming the victims has always been the first and best tactic, and getting us to blame our neighbours or ourselves is even cheaper and preserves the peace for the winners to pursue their wealth unhindered. Such gloomy thoughts with the cherry on the cake being the campervan failing its MOT spread through my mind and silence my imagination with introspective fog. I’m reminded of the 1950’s “ballad of the sad young men” – brilliantly covered by Mose Allison and The Who – and many others.

And so, in the midst of what must have looked like a shuffle up the road to the supermarket I met Wes, our neighbour, clutching a tall plant of Guernsey Fleabane which is having a bit of a moment this season. He was taking it to the waste bin having turned against it. During our conversation on the pavement outside his flat I looked down at the gutter and saw this little cluster of flowers which seemed to be raising the finger to the parched grass across the road. It was a single verbena flower(Verbena bonariensis), that initially caught my eye, and then when I bent down to look more closely there were others. Apart from the ubiquitous Wall Barley, there was Catmint, Lemon Balm, Dandelion, Procumbent Yellow Sorrel and Redshank not to mention Mexican Fleabane. That’s a garden of eight flowering plants in a strip of parched gutter seemingly surviving the heatwaves in the most arid place you could imagine. It’s hard to speculate on what might be keeping them going – maybe the cars parked there every day sheltering them from their south facing perspective. Let’s not get sniffy about the fact that several of them are garden escapes; the point is that these plants are truly drought resistant. Somewhere deep in their DNA there are genes that assist their survival as the global climate crisis becomes a chronic affliction. My heart was lifted and all day yesterday as I sat in a garage waiting for the van alongside the noisiest and dirtiest dual carriageway Avonmouth could offer, I kept remembering that little quantum of hope making its own way in a changing earth – that’s until one of our gentrified neighbours phones a councillor and threatens not to vote for them if they don’t get rid of the disgusting weeds. We have seen the enemy, it is us! Another thought came to me as I wandered back to the Potwell Inn in the direction of the river. There are large trees growing around and on the Green, and as I walked beneath them in their shade, the difference in comfort and temperature was striking. There’s a bench under one of them and it’s been in almost continual occupation since the heatwaves began. We need to be thinking about shade, and on the allotment this is perhaps the time to plant some fast growing shade producing trees to help us to keep our plants alive under the new weather regime. It’s against the rules to grow taller trees, and they are always blamed for depleting the soil moisture and yet there is some evidence of moisture exchange by trees into the upper 30cm of soil, and abundant evidence that shade reduces surface evaporation. So the case against trees on allotments and in gardens is not closed and we allotmenteers should, perhaps, be able to experiment with tree shade to see if it helps to reduce the prodigious amount of water we use to keep our plants alive.

Living through an age when we simply cannot rely on ‘the way we do things round here‘ to keep us alive. Agribusiness and big farming would have us rely on univented, energy hungry technologies to save the earth, and yet we know in our hearts that it’s their activities which have contributed greatly to the present crisis. British farmers are, by and large, a fairly conservative group of people and yet even they seem to be open to new ideas like regenerative farming as long as it helps them to run their businesses and feed the rest of us. Any allotmenteer will tell you that you can’t live on large courgettes and abundant aubergines the year round even if we do make a real contribution to feeding ourselves. However allotmenteers are a highly motivated bunch of potential citizen scientists who, with a bit of organization, leadership and help from scientists could conduct field trials on a scale undreamed of by the industry. Field trials of new varieties, new ways of increasing soil fertility and moisture retention, new methods of increasing water storage; the sky’s the limit, but only if someone trusts us enough to gather the data and process it so we can begin to understand what works on a small scale. Just one example that I can offer relates to composting. Over the years we’ve tried just about every way of composting our waste efficiently. Of all the methods we’ve found that the California Cylinder – which requires only a roll of stock fencing and a lot of large cardboard (eg bicycle boxes) is one of the best – especially if you grow enough comfrey activator – which is easier to do on a site basis. Does anyone know whether any dangerous and persistent chemicals are carried forward in grey water or human urine which, after all, mostly seems to find its way back into the rivers in about a day. We’ve used both but stopped because of our doubts. There are so many trials that we could participate in if only DEFRA would stop seeing allotmenteers as a bunch of tree hugging hippies or even worse terrorists. What about gathering and collating data on the most effective way of facing shed roofs for water gathering, or doing some controlled records on air temperatures and soil temperatures or soil moisture; and how about gathering information about diseases or crop yields or the best varieties for our soil. How about some soil surveys, insect surveys, or plant records. I think we’ve reached the point in our relationship with the earth where it’s a broken marriage which can’t be saved by saying “sorry” and carrying on as before. The sums of money involved in searching for a system that works would be trivial in relation to the cost of doing nothing, but it first requires government to lead. At present DEFRA has only 20 staff members out of 6,613 working on the problem. The danger (which most powerful legislators, corporations and oligarchs fear), is that opening Pandora’s box and encouraging cooperative structures to have our say would seriously hamper their activities. We need – with some help – to change a whole culture but that’s a challenge which many of the folks we garden with would be pleased to step up for.

The Green in drought. Let’s call it the Brown

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Spadgerland

Forget the vanilla perfume of a madelaine for one moment and think of a single sound that takes you right back to your childhood home. Mine would be the sound of the House Sparrow, or rather sparrows, because they’re such convivial birds it’s hard to imagine just the one on its own.

I’ve renamed this campsite for entirely selfish reasons. If you recognise the tin roofed reception building, the cider press and the orchard then you won’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t a clue where it is then Eldorado is waiting for you – provided you can find it. There are enough clues scattered through the ten years of the Potwell Inn that you stand a real chance of getting here if you can be bothered to wade through a million plus words. Years ago I saw my first kingfisher nearby. Today I heard and then saw a red Kite circling overhead; I’ve never seen the Ospreys that hunt across the area but hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful. What makes this place so much greater than the ornithological creme de la creme is the abundance of the peasant birds, the fish and chip birds; the ordinary everyday types that are rapidly becoming extraordinary as we continue to poison and disturb the environment. This paragraph is illustrated by a tall and slightly unkempt looking hedge. The campsite has taken all the best ideas from the French sites and there is a small enclave in which every pitch is a self-contained enclosure surrounded on three sides by tall hedges. The hedge at the top of this paragraph is barely ten feet from the campervan door. There are no dogs allowed to disturb the wildlife, and the customers self select after their first visit. The quiet campsite policies make every day feel like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. In fact the sound of children playing outside every evening is an equally chilling reminder that children once played outside and had never seen a Playstation on a smartphone. Happiness doesn’t always need to come commodified and packaged like a supermarket turkey.

Running a pub, even an imaginary one called the Potwell Inn with its name stolen from an HG Wells comic novel is extremely hard work and – dare I say – very poorly paid or rather not paid at all. And so these little campervan breaks are an essential escape. I often call them adventures because with a seventeen year old campervan almost anything could go wrong. Yesterday, having packed everything, I turned on the ignition and there was a profound silence. It was a glum start but I had a cunning plan. If I could just get the engine running, I could get to the campsite running everything off the alternator; as long as I didn’t stall the engine, which could leave us blocking a narrow road until I could get it going again -because I’d already used the emergency NOCO jump lead battery twice. It all went swimmingly until we arrived at reception and I turned off the engine without thinking. Oh gloom, oh silence. Mercifully the NOCO delivered for a third time and we managed to park up and call the AA who came this morning with a new battery and fitted it in ten minutes. He was a cheerful South Walian. Yesterday’s groceries were delivered in the evening by another cheerful delivery driver who shared my surname. There followed a long and serpentine conversation as we tried to establish some connection between us but I’m afraid we Somerset Poles cannot claim any legitimate Welsh blood although according to the driver the other kind of illegitimate bloodline was just as likely.

Anyway back to the birds. The sparrow is known in some places as the spadger, also spuggie, or (inexplicably phillip!). They were constant companions and the soundtrack to my childhood in suburban east Bristol. In fact they’re a bit complicated to identify because there are three species that are what sometimes get called little brown numbers. House Sparrows, Hedge Sparrows and even Dunnock rarely stand in an ID parade for our benefit – and so to my untrained eye they will have to look similar until they don’t any more. Last night just before sunset a flock of sparrows prepared to nest in the hedge on our pitch. My goodness they’re a chatty lot. Chickens roost in much the same way, each of them competing for the warmest spot in the middle. They’re much safer from predators in a thick hedge so I can see why they do it but they make quite a hullabaloo while they greet each other, quarrel a bit, shove each other off their respective branches and settle for the night. We became fascinated by the range of sounds that they can make without ever producing anything in the least tuneful. As the sun set they stopped their fidgeting and as twilight came they were silent. It was surprisingly moving to share that moment.

Today, using the Merlin app, apart from the sparrows I recorded Woodpigeons, Swifts, the Red Kite, barn Swallows, Blackbirds, Robins and Collared Doves; bread and butter birds in terms of rarity but many of them declining in numbers. Coming here always reminds me of the sheer joy that the natural world brings to us if we just stand, watch and listen. There is an ancient bond between us and the wildlife that surrounds us and it’s not sentimental or gushing leftie nonsense to hold that thought close in a destructive culture fed by greed and division.

There isn’t a division between so-called forward looking and backward looking politics, or if there is it’s characterised by backwardness in the industrial and financial wilderness and forward looking amongst those of us who actually understand what’s worth saving when the earth is burning. I write the Potwell Inn, even on the rare sunny and dry Welsh days, not because I’m a politician with an A4 list of policies to mend the world, but because human flourishing depends on the much broader and complicated set of behaviours that we call a culture. I’m naming this campsite Spadgerland in honour of the rogues; vagabonds; weeds; fish and chip birds and vermin which collectively give our lives depth and meaning.

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How to survive a heatwave

Taken over Alveston, sitting in Helen and Alan’s garden in July 2020

I think this was one Filton pilot’s attempt to cheer us all up by making smoke trails of smileys and hearts in the sky during the post-apocalyptic gloom of Covid, and it worked. This year we’ve sweated and grumbled our way through three heatwaves and by now we’re used to coping by completely changing our daily timetable. No more lingering in bed until 10.00am – I seem to have changed my body clock so much I wonder if I’ll still be waking up at 5.00am in the winter. There’s really no alternative but to reserve the very earliest part of the day for whatever hard physical work on the allotment needs to be done. It’s not that bad – I don’t set any alarms I just wake up, make a cup of strong tea and eat my regulation five fruit shortcake biscuits – that’s breakfast (sorry Doc!) . Today we cleared the failed pea crop away and hoed the plants off at the roots to gift any remaining nitrogen nodules to the purple sprouting broccoli which follows it. Then I sharpened up the hoe – always carry a sharpener when using hoes, scythes and secateurs and learn how to use it. A sharp hoe razors off the weeds with minimum effort. Two passes of the hoe and the spring tine rake is enough to clean the bed and then I spread compost or whatever on the bed and work it in with a three tined cultivator with a long handle. These are all simple hand tools and they’re worth their weight in gold. I once attempted to rotavate the bindweed and couch grass out of a new garden and it was a complete disaster. They both regenerate and spread from the tiniest fragment of their underground roots – but I didn’t know that at the time. My friend and mentor Don Streatfield once put a piece of bindweed root into the freezer for weeks and planted it again in a pot. It grew again with undiminished enthusiasm.

So then I marked out the two beds using a line and a long builder’s tape. I know it’s a faff, and measuring the distance between plants might look over-generous today, but next winter you’ll see they needed every inch of legroom. Then we water the holes and drop the plants in, firming the soil around them and water them again, and then we net them to keep out the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars will strip the leaves down to the ribs if you let them.

The peas and the broad beans were a complete failure this year. The wet spring retarded their growth and then the succession of heatwaves pretty well finished them off. They’re typical temperate, cool loving plants and the failure isn’t just down to our poor gardening skills; farmers have lost millions of pounds worth of crops this year and I expect both will be hard even to find frozen in the supermarket. If you live in an air conditioned house and drive to an air conditioned workplace in an air conditioned car it would be hard to gain any understanding of environmental breakdown such as growers and gardeners have.

So we work until it’s too hot and then we come home. Sometimes we have a late breakfast, but our preferred timetable is to have a late lunch followed by a siesta and then just a sandwich in the evening. It’s a Spanish way of life that suits the weather perfectly and keeps the allotment going through the hard times. Today I cooked a sort of paella, flavoured with smoked paprika, chilli, garlic and tomatoes in a strong fish stock and topped with pieces of roasted pepper and monkfish fried in a hot pan. Tomorrow we’ll be making dill pickles with the miniature ridge cucumbers we gathered today. Before that I need to finish digging the bed where the broad beans came to nothing and removing the bindweed as early in the morning as possible. It’s hard work but bindweed just has to be dug out every few years. We’ve been powering through our seven water butts and the next bit of civil engineering will be to link four of them together and install much bigger guttering on the shed and the greenhouse so we don’t lose a single drop of rain.

Above is a view of Bath from the top of the hill at Sham Castle taken in July a few years ago during a very hot walk, and the balloon below has been a regular sight during fine weather spells in the past, although there are rather fewer this year , perhaps due to the cost of gas to power them. I once had a flight in a balloon that took off at exactly. the same place. There are houses all around and so we launched as fast as a high speed lift and then flew pretty well up-river for an hour or so enjoying long moments of uncanny silence punctuated by awesome roars from the burner. It was a day not unlike today and at one point we sailed above a fox crossing a field which clearly had no idea we were there. The landing was less eventful than I had been fearing the whole trip and I got home with no idea how to explain, let alone describe the experience I’d just had. Improbably, the company which owned the balloon ( I was a guest of the pilot) was based just fifty yards down the road from where we now live.

It’s an odd time we’re living through. We’re researching plants for the allotment to give ourselves the best chance of landing a decent crop, and it may turn out that broad (fava) beans and peas will have to come off the plan – something we’ll deeply regret because they’re so powerfully better than their frozen supermarket equivalents. The upside seems to be that the cucumbers, melons and squashes all love the heat and the sunshine.

Sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

Astra inclinant, non necessitant

The Latin quotation under the photograph is translated as – “The stars dispose but do not compel”. Notwithstanding Amos Starkadder’s wonderfully funny sermon to the Quivering Brethren in the novel “Cold Comfort Farm” – “You’re all damned!” -(if you haven’t read it or seen John Schlesinger’s film you’re missing a treat); but there’s a great lesson for gardeners in the proverbial saying because the best we can ever do when we grow things is to dispose them to succeed. If you’re an organic grower then disposing your plants to grow well needs foresight, planning and patience plus a lot of compost. This morning we picked our first crop of Victoria plums from the tree we planted in 2020 the apples were quicker, but the pears are at least fattening up whilst the damsons seem to fall off too early. The pests are better at judging the moment than us. Badgers, for instance, always stole our sweetcorn the day before we were going to pick it. Nowadays we protect it by growing it in the polytunnel. The agrochemical industry wants us to believe that their products can predestine plants to succeed; that we can transcend thousands of years of human experience and spray the latest chemical (let’s call it Compel!) to dodge nature altogether. It’s a lie. There’s no other way to describe it.

I once spotted a book in an Oxfam shop called “The Half hour Gardener”, but it wasn’t so much the title as the author’s name which caught my eye. She is the daughter of a woman I once worked with and lost touch with back in the community arts days, and when we went to hear her daughter speak soon afterwards at an allotments association AGM she pretty much admitted the half-hour suggestion was a bit of a stretch. Even if it were possible you’d still fall foul of the weather regularly through a whole year of allotmenteering. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too busy, too knackered, too fed-up; the fact is, gardening is hard work. It may be true – in fact it is true – that gardening is deeply rewarding, but the reward is inevitably separated from the pain by a matter of months if not years.

Today, for instance, the temperature is in the mid twenties after weeks of dry weather punctuated by one, just a single but tremendous, thunderstorm and we’re about to enter our second heatwave in a month, and so we water. And when I say we water that means carrying dozens of watering cans each weighing twenty pounds down a rickety ankle busting path from the communal water trough to the dry beds. On a good day I could water the whole plot in about three hours but that presupposes that no-one else is watering at the same time, so on those occasions exquisitely delicate and silently mimed negotiations take place near the trough. The growls are never vocalized but we all understand the implications. Neighbours are neighbours after all and we don’t want water wars to break out.

The forecast is predicting even hotter weather on the way and I desperately need to dig over and prepare a large 5’x 12′ bed which has become infested with bindweed and we need to plant out purple sprouting broccoli there by the end of the week. We don’t generally dig, but occasionally the bindweed or couch grass migrating in from the paths need teaching a lesson and digging it out is the only way that works. The only plausible time to do it will be in the cool of the very early morning before the builders turn up to finish the work to eliminate black mould in the flat.

NB linen suit

Any dreams of shimmying through the allotment filled with delicious produce in weedless beds (wearing my linen suit and panama hat) seem to evaporate like the morning dew. Try as I will to look on the bright side at 5.00am, or mid morning when I need to walk up an icy hill to knock the snow off the nets before they break, takes a bucketful of optimism.

I’ll never forget the driving rain on the morning we dug holes to set the uprights in their anchors for the polytunnel. It was raining so hard I had to bolt the uprights in a foot of freezing muddy water which had filled the holes because they were below the water table that day. During COVID when everyone had time and energy the allotment site looked wonderful, but work and families had to come first when it ended, and it was sad to see their hard work so quickly overgrown with weeds. It demonstrated two important things about running an allotment; you might say two sides of a coin. On the one hand it takes time – quite a lot of time – to grow an allotment but on the other hand, COVID demonstrated that so many people were up for the challenge if only the time and opportunity were there.

The upside

I’m absolutely not trying to argue here that suffering is its own reward. We had enough of that in Sunday School; but that it’s worth a few wet days, tingling blue hands and cold feet to pick something delicious from a plant or tree that you nurtured through the droughts, the cold north-easterlies and the Azores highs to the day you cut it, warm from the sun, and take to the kitchen. Yesterday I sautéed the first batch of courgettes in butter and oil until they were just beginning to caramelize on the cut edges. No more than an hour from plot to pot. A few weeks ago we were scratching about for something fresh to eat on the allotment but now it’s in full flow, overflowing with gifts. The only response to it is sheer gratitude. I once thought I knew who to thank for it all, but these days I feel more comfortable offering my thanks to the Cloud of Unknowing; “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” After all, what’s a few hours of enjoyable work compared with the brightness and depth of tomato sauce made at home in the kitchen, or corn whose milk is still sweet, or borlotti – the winter banker for soups. We may be hard-up and scruffy but we live like royalty.