Poems for a lexicon lacking the word for God (3)

Strange, beautiful life

He is come to carry their need - take action, daughter.
Lost, broken world - you must never fear them, darling heart.
Appeared who is light, gave honey, writing a fire
Great I am his true father before yellow sun in blue sky.
We all, about the first story on this green earth,
Tremble and walk
Love, dream, find, write, fly.

Poems from a lexicon lacking the word for God (2)

We two get action, husband lover
Start sadly, helped me as new
So, I want a little brown dog,
I tease, which thinks of talk.
Very funny, wife.

Poems from a lexicon lacking the word for God

Some time ago, when I was still teaching, a colleague gave me a set of little magnetic words for the fridge.  I have forgotten their provenance, but they certainly posed a challenge, reflected in the title.   So I thought I would post something different.  Apologies to family and friends who have may have scanned these in our kitchen!

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Look, howl, people.
I don't think that man
is a large monkey.
Yes, broke, tragic celebrity,
Small animals are gone,
Fast plastic money runs away.

Preserved

This month of October I have been making chutney, an activity both more rewarding and more successful than my attempts at jam.

I use a recipe with distilled vinegar, raisins, apples, cane sugar and ground cloves and have a supply of clean warmed small coffee jars.  It takes time and patience to keep your chutney simmering until all the excess vinegar is gone and the chutney is thick but not sticking to your heavy pan.  I can tell mine is ready when a wooden spoon dragged through the chutney shows the bottom of the pan for a moment. 

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What is a preserved life?  A life where the bitter has bound itself to the sweet through the long process of heat, yet not burned.  A life where all the ingredients - the fruit of the vine and the fruit from the orchard, sweet sugar from the cane - have blended, and the scent of cloves reminds us that Christmas is coming.  A life that brings relish to the ordinary and is content to be stored in the dark.

Prized (Apple of my Eye 2)

Glowing red apples hung from my tree scarcely larger than Christmas tree baubles and I kept them hanging there until the first Saturday in September.  There were five left.  You only need three to exhibit in the show.  Class 110, APPLES.  Three dessert, one variety, with stalks. 

I took the scissors to the tree this time and carefully cut them off retaining the stalks.  Judges are particular about provenance and they like to see uniformity of shape, size and colour.  My tree looked like it stood a chance.  I know also now that the apples this tree bears are small and sweet, but the judge only tastes the cookery exhibits. 

There was the usual gap between staging, when you get to the hall, arrange your entries on the green baize of the trestle tables, wonder about and look at the others in various states of optimism and pessimism and the actual opening of the show itself. 

Two o'clock, and there we were as usual seated behind the raffle table while fellow exibitors gave us knowing looks. 

I had gained that coveted red piece of card.  First prize.  Not only that, my little tree had also won the RHS certificate for best fruit entry. 

I record this not just because I have a competitive streak, I know, but out of gratitude.  There is hope for a tree.

Toad in a hole

Why don't you just sit on the allotment and enjoy the peace and quiet?

Three people have suggested this to me recently, so I decided to go and sit under the damson tree. 

Take a pebble someone suggested.  I picked up a lovely smooth toffee-like piece of flint, ochre yellow, about an inch and a half long.  I was going to examine its cracks and fissures and its crazed surface. 

It was a bit dirty so I decided to wash it so that its colours would come out.

There was a sound rather like a squeak coming from the bath which is being turned into a pond.  A toad.  Resting its front legs on the black plastic liner, small body inflated with fear, sending out ripples.

I washed the pebble and immediately went back for the toad. 

A pebble is inanimate.  It grows warm from the warmth of your hand.  It lies smooth in your palm.  It invites thoughts on time, and history and clay.  Slow pebbles work themselves to the surface season by season from the subsoil of ages.

A toad is cold, where the water has brought its temperature down, but as its body warms it begins to become restive.  Still inflated its sides but now eager to escape from your cupped hands.

I put the toad down on the asparagus patch, close to the place where I know that frogs and toads lie up until the evening comes.  First it returned to its proper size, then it paused, and finally it crawled away.

I have kept the pebble, like a tiny stone egg.  My toad is safe. 

Seasonal tasks

On an allotment no-one tells you what to do.  No bosses, no exam deadlines, no worries.  The fruit and veg. follow their seasonal rhythms and as you attune yourself to them the next task becomes obvious.  Our summer raspberries fruited and flourished early, so it was time to cut down old canes as the new ones took their place.  Spinach, a biennial, left unattended in hot weather eventually bolted and flowered.  Its deep roots come out, with a tug, and into the raised bed went new seed.  I have sown autumn carrots and winter cabbages.  The blackberries sent out next year's growth and I will trim them to encourage them to branch along the hedge.  This sowing and growing, reaping and digging becomes a pattern of life.

Weeds are continual, of course.  After the showers, they spring up; persistent ones - sow thistles, buttercups, mare's tail; pretty ones that still need to come out - miniature pink and white convolvulus and speedwell; edible ones that I have never dared try - fat hen, nettles. 

Despite the disorderly season with its spring drought we have begun to harvest cabbage, carrots, courgettes and can see the orderly growth of our winter larder: squashes, maincrop potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, leeks. 

In my gratitude I reflect on Daniel 2:20 and 21.  I do not understand the national and international events of our era, but I am beginning to sense how the seasons play themselves out year by year.  God orchestrates both. 

"Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever,
to whom belong wisdom and might.
He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding;
he reveals deep and mysterious things;
he knows what is in the darkness,
and the light dwells with him."

Barrows

Barrows are practical.  Barrows are for barging up and down the plot.  Hefting, heaving, tipping, cleaning and finally putting away in the shed.  But even barrows can come to rest.

No evident post-modern irony - the straw scarecrow, the gnome made of flower pots, the notice proclaiming Welcome to my garden.  No disguises.  This is a working barrow in semi-retirement.

I sowed here before the spring drought.  Only the alyssum came up.  Never mind.  I lifted self-seeded calendulas from among the potatoes, some french marigolds came from a friend, the begonia from my husband's workplace and the cosmos from my family. 

My barrow is now static.  It has come to rest, like most things, close to the hedge, under the shade of the birch tree. 

Neighbouring marrows counterpoint yellow marigolds and the red ripening blackberries overshadow the begonia.  The cosmos garden grows from a rusting receptacle.

Rest in peace.

Water Snails

Snails come in all shapes and sizes.  Some come as bird food.  Earlier this week I saw a magpie fly down to the plot, pick up a snail and proceed to bash it on our shed roof.  

Some, in company with the slugs and the caterpillars, colonise our cabbages.

And some live in the water tanks.  Once in another hot summer, I saw the water level had fallen through repeated watering and little black pointy objects were adhering to the sides of the tank.  I peered more closely at them.  They were water snails.

I have no inkling of how they got into that bare environment.  It must be a boring life to be a snail in a water tank creeping up and down the sheer sides on one muscular foot, scraping up microscopic algae with a raspy tongue. I wondered, do they ever suffer from a snail population explosion?  It seems not, as numbers to my random eye appear constant.  Do they have any predators?  Probably not.  Our tanks, filled from the mains, never host anything else larger than midge larvae and the odd pond skater - another mystery visitor. 

Once, and let me use the passive voice, tropical land snails were found on our allotment.  They were captured and confined to a jam jar before being donated to a local school.  They were not small.  It is better that they occupy a large glass tank in a classroom with scope for labels, drawings and creative writing. 

Meanwhile, under the equilibrium that we currently enjoy, the magpies and other predators will peck at snails, conscientious humans like ourselves will scatter barrier pellets to deter them and in their tanks the water snails keep climbing, or stick fast, retreat into their shells and wait for the water to rise.

Bumblebees, Breezes and BMWs

A poem I once knew as a child, but cannot recall in detail celebrates the flight of the bumblebee.  Music and poetry pay tribute to the energy and ingenuity of these aerodynamic little wonders.  I love them.  I see them buzzing around the mauve and purple bells of our comfrey plant - all shapes, all sizes- busily being what they were made to be: beneficial bees. 

Sadly although bumblebees can land on and take off from nectar bearing blossoms with the precision of a plane homing in on the flight deck, there is one air current that they cannot navigate; the downdraft from the soft-tops that consider our little hill (gradient 1:10)  as an extension of Le Mans.  I notice the bees.  Slammed on to the pavement upended and undignifiedly waving their legs. I bend down and assist them into the prickly shelter of the pyrecantha bushes behind the cemetery railings.  They take a little time to reorientate themselves to being right way up, wings smoothed down and in place, all legs working. 

I rescue them for practical reasons - they are pollinators.  Also, I cannot bear to see them upside down. 

Next time you hear Rimsky-Korsakov's popular classic remember the BMWs and think of the plight of the bumblebee.

Preventative Measures - Penny Wise/Pound Foolish?

One day, we may have a fruit cage.  Till then, I am bandaging thin fleece (the pound shop again) like gauze around my cherry tree and my blackcurrant bush against the depredations of the pigeons.  

One day, we may have some handy plastic cloches.  Till then, I pile grass cuttings around my new potatoes thus poultice their frost damaged ends.

One day, we may have moth traps to waft seductive scents under the antennae of the codling moths and entice them to a sticky end.

One day I will buy beer for the slugs.

One day, I will don latex gloves and squash every single grub of the Asparagus Beetle.

This week, I have noticed the blackfly on the tips of the broad beans and cut them off.

Mulch

I cannot remember our last solid downpour.  Every morning and evening we are now attending to thirsty plants - potatoes, strawberries, seedlings - and praying that the east wind will abate and the seasonal westerly wind pattern return.  Most neighbours and friends on the allotment are doing the same, trudging from tank to plot and tank again.

In contrast, our large greenhouse is a controlled miniature environment.  Here we can open a window, slide back the door, damp down the vine, encourage the squashes, sunflowers and peppers that are emerging from their seed cases.  But we cannot hold back indefinitely the french beans and runner beans.  At night it is cold, out of the sun it is chill.  It is still too early.

The raspberries and loganberries have put on an impressive display of flowers.  Deeply spread mulch slows evaporation, feeds worms and plants alike.  I am leaving the mature trees aside and concentrating on my little apple that has set so much fruit.  I would much prefer rain to mains water...

City dwellers enjoy festival sunshine and cheer.  Gardeners look for clouds.  This may now portend our future.  I hope not. 

Shooting from the base

These gooseberry bushes are old.  Not perhaps as thorny and venerable as the ones that grew at my grandfather's Cheshire home, but in need of as much love and attention as his smallholding merited in the neglected decade of the Sixties.  Formerly, his fruit, vegetables and chickens had kept his family and neighbours through a war that is now fading from living memory.  That might have been one reason why I accepted these two as a gift; yet another rescue job.

The trick of renovation is to cut them back to the base. 

Apple of my eye

It was only a small tree. We uprooted it from the corner where the grapevine smothered it with its luxuriant tendrils of summer growth and the redcurrant bushes competed with it for water and nutrients. It took longer than I anticipated. Such things always do. First we dug a suitable hole, lined with well rotted manure, and then we heaved up the roots, with myself on tenterhooks lest we broke anything. Finally we bedded in our infirm apple, tamped it in, watered and hoped.
  
And the next season it was dotted with little white balls, like cotton where aphids lurking in woolly fluff on the branches were sucking its life from it. The sure sign of a sick tree or plant is always infestation. We do not spray in our household, we put on thin latex gloves and painstakingly rub the aphids out of existence. I do not take much pleasure in doing this.

And the next year, still no blossom. Murmurings and prognostications from the person who had sweated to move it. I pleaded for it. It seemed to have as much purpose as a rotary clothes line broken in pieces, or an old umbrella with twisted spokes. Our tree stood with scarecrow branches like truncated arms, a few leaves and an occasional ant. Clear of aphids now, in proximity to the best tree on the plot, like a barren parody.

Another spring came by.  It bore three small yellow apples, all of which fell off.

And now at last, this spring, it is recovering and laden with blossom,  It may be asymmetrical, but it is alive  and ready to bear fruit. A tree can survive long. The oldest book of the Old Testament, Job, says: For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again and that its shoots will not cease. (Job 14:7)

It is still upsetting to see the evidence of those who took their saws or secateurs to my tree with such disregard. Cordoned apples and pears I can understand. I have seen cherries against walled gardens and espaliered peaches. These are all carefully trained, inspected and monitored. Nobody trained my tree.  Yet it has recovered.  I have hope for it.

Some things do not easily rot

When we acquired our third plot it came with a high blackberry hedge that hides the metal fence boundary.  We keep it to deter casual visitors, to fill blackberry and apple crumbles and for the bird life, particularly the sparrows that like to chatter away to themselves amid its shelter.  We also discovered that weeds and turf sods piled up there broke back down into soil faster than on a conventional heap. 

But the hedge was also a 'quick and dirty' solution for less biodegradable material.

Clang!  My border spade hit something.  Botheration. Temporary postponement of the digging out of a new, hedge-sheltered bed.  Grass, twigs and even bramble cuttings will eventually break down.  Metal does not fit so easily into these categories.

The proper destination for any old iron, broken panes of glass, empty growbags, discarded plastic and other such detritus, is the skip.  Our skip is by the brown bins waiting for the skip lorry.  It is already full to overflowing. 

I am pleased to say that after some digging I did manage to extricate the offending objects.  Now I just need to concern myself with the white roots of couch grass, the yellow roots of stinging nettles and the invasive habits of the Russian Vine which festoons the bramble hedge with small white summer flowers. 

Some things do not easily rot.

Planting Plans

This year, for the first time since we moved from Manchester I have sketched a plan for each of the plots.  It's all there in red and blue biro sketched and scribbled on the reverse of discarded lesson plans and worksheets - greenhouses, trees, vines, and the bath that may (one day) turn into a miniature pond with frogs. It's my aid to rotation (please don't email me for advice, consult the experts for such pithy sayings as cabbages follow beans). 

To plan well as a gardener you need to discard sentiment.  The strawberries in this picture have already been removed to the brown bins, or otherwise 're-homed'. Today I have done the same with a bed of self-seeded beet spinach.   A couple of years ago I would have left it alone, to regenerate after the winter depredations of pigeons.  But now deeply tap rooted as it was, it is gone. 

Planning isn't hard when you love what you are doing, when you have a public library with helpful reference books to hand, and most of all when you have had nearly six years in the allotment community battling, manuring and enriching Essex clay. 

Planning on paper makes you visualise the plot, doodle little dots for daffodils, shade in areas of sun and shade, review the whole seasonal schematised layout.  Planning makes you do what you promised, bring unused parts under cultivation, enlarge beds, got out and buy seed potatoes to chit and garlic bulbs to plant.

Christians like to quote Jeremiah 29:11 on inspirational cards to each other when going through hard times.  Plans could be nebulous.  So often our plans stay in the mind's eye.  But if you write them down and then put them into action you know that they work.  God writes plans down and they are good plans.  Here's the quote given to the prophet who bought a field, the man whom God sent to uproot and to plant.  "For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." 

When work doesn't work

When work doesn't work it feels like duty, devoir, your homework, French irregular verbs.

When work doesn't work you're skimming through your paperwork, scanning the holiday features, reading for each detail of the the sunset holding a library book date-stamped with your return.

Work is a charade, an act, a picture, a book or a film fumblingly copied, two fingers held up to management, two words censored, blocked, bitten back, exploding in your mind.  When work doesn't work.

When work doesn't work, you come in from the field and hear the party for the profligate.

Who's he kidding?

A kid would be nice, Dad.  Look, I'm not pleading, honest.

Me and a few mates.  Low key, you know me, modest, the other one.

Your other son.

What do you have in your hand?

This week, with a promise not to open it before the day, I took receipt of my birthday present from my sister - a new pair of secateurs; with a Sophie Grigson cookbook to follow.  This has prompted me to tidy my trug.  By 'trug' I do not mean the gift of our Sussex trug from East Grinstead, a genuine artefact, but the little green and yellow ditty bag that contains my tools.

Tidying is a feature of this household, we are regular 'tidiers' but favour different areas.  His are the shed and the garage versus my desk and work bag plus the contested territory of the coffee table.

Hither migratory objects - books, beans, bank statements and the like find their way in much the same way as various items pertaining to his ditty bag or trug had found their way into mine.  Honesty compels me to admit that his was recovering from a soaking and drying out in the garage.  Enough, it was well and truly recovered.  Today it was time to differentiate and negotiate. 

For instance; I do not collect string, washers, wooden clothes pegs (useful for strawberry runners), red rubber bands discarded by the postman, or wingnuts.  Over to you, dear.  Likewise a hand fork, a spirit level, a pair of fluorescent bicycle clips and a set of screwdriver heads.

My stripped down trug now contains the following: one biro, one pencil, a pair of old scissors, a useful pronged object for removing weeds from paving stones, my new secateurs (from tomorrow)and my trowel.  

This last has to be my favourite tool.  Yes, I can manage a border spade or a small rake, but I love my hand trowel for its versatility, for the way its old-fashioned wooden handle fits into my palm. With it I can uproot weeds, kneeling to get at the stubborn roots of thistles and dandelions.  With it I can line out seed drills, scoop holes for seed potatoes, excavate miniature puddling ponds for leeks.  And when all is said and done I mustn't forget to clean it.  Many husbands are punctilious on these matters.

Tools are important.  At the burning bush God asked Moses, 'What is that in your hand?'  It is still a good question.

What does the store have in song?

We took down the Christmas decorations as is customary on Twelfth Night.  I expect I should have archived my last post then.  Ah well.

Our local emporium at the foot of the hill has moved faster, cashing in on the realism and the optimism of cash-strapped Essex folk - all Christmas decorations now 50p and big red Valentine cards now on sale - 99p no extra tax added.

The background music has changed too.  As I wander around searching for bargains, I have an attentive ear,  This is not aural wallpaper, but a fascinating soundtrack on local life.    Christmas was upbeat and retro and sometimes brought me close to tears - The Little Drummer Boy is one of my earliest radio memories.  We had stridency with Santa Claus is Coming to Town, cynicism with Lennon and a gospel flavouring with Mary's Boy Child.

Now, maybe it is the January blues, but the store is playing sad songs.  I don't recognise them probably because I'm too old, but I hear the voices of commitment, disillusionment and regret.

You may not need to buy three tins of chopped tomatoes for 99p, you may not enjoy canned music; but next time you go into the store listen for the lyrics and observe the shoppers, the mothers and the nannas, and the check-out girls.  You might smile, or weep, or pray.

What does the song have in store?