Pretty Primulas

Not having television at the click of a switch (excepting excellent I-player, of course) fosters the habit of reading.  So at the close of Christmas Day I took out The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse and fled to a pastoral scene of nymphs and shepherds; Chloris and Doris, Colin and Cynthia.

The shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night (concerning whom I have heard at least two sermons this month) are recorded in Scripture, but alas, Chloris, Doris and their crew live where no topographer can trace them, in Arcadia.

I left Spenser and Sidney to their courtly devices and chose to spend some time with the poems of John Skelton (c.1460-1529).  And if you can find it, read his address To Mistress Margery Wentworth.

Here is the second stanza:

 Plainly, I cannot glose

Ye be, as I divine,

The pretty primerose,

The goodly columbine.

Off to the allotment the following morning and there were my pretty primulas, under the big apple tree, full of promising buds, yellow petals beginning to open out.   And there was the robin, not as familiar as Skelton's Philip Sparrow but equally adept at seeking small worms, eyeing me from the low branches.

 

 

 

 
 

Screen Saving

I left the machine unattended for a few minutes and had a pleasant surprise.  The computer's 'innards' prompt it on these occasions to bring up the photos we have stored.

There were the wigwams of runner beans, the dessert grapes photographed in close up by my husband on an antique glass dish against the backdrop of our net curtains (the picture is better than this rudimentary description), the sweetcorn from 2011, the laden damson branches from the same year, the apple trees covered with snow, and then with fruit.

Happy memories in a season when it is too wet to do anything other than gather leeks and spinach and dig a few artichoke tubers.

How our thoughts will loop round when left to idle.  I hope that your recollections this Christmas season are happy ones.  May you set your mind on those that bring joy.

Essex Egret

We have always loved those solitary fishers, herons.  When we lived in West Didsbury we would encounter them at intervals along the banks of the Mersey - thin ones and healthy ones, accomplished spearers of coarse fish and those whose ineptitude made us fear for their survival.  Here on our allotment, they like to visit the pond, to the discomfort of B.  He has placed a large, very life-like plastic imitation heron on one bank to discourage them.  The goldfish are still there, circling hopefully just under the surface whenever they perceive a human silhouette.

But the only time we had previously seen the heron's smaller relative, the egret, was on the marshes at Tollesbury, a fitting place in its wildness with the oystercatchers calling over the mudflats. 

On Friday I saw an egret in Writtle, three miles from Chelmsford, fishing in the overflowing stream that runs by the willows along the side of the college.  It was there lifting up its feet in its delicate whiteness as I drove past and there on the way back. 

Little visitor, if only you could come and establish yourself by our pond.  Meanwhile, good fishing.

A string of thoughts

The frost has thickened on the spider webs along the avenue and they droop from shrubs, for all the world as if a child has been festooning the bushes with silly string.

Monday was cold, but we strimmed and aerated a small lawn and a resident robin came down for the pickings. 

Holly from the hedge brings its bright berries to our Christmas wreath.

Jerusalem artichokes in soup seasoned with garam masala - comfort food for cold days.

Saturday's job awaits - finishing a clearance; cutting privet.
 
Our leeks thicken slowly in the frost ready for Christmas Day.

Mud, Actually

Heavy rain does not usually stop us.  It didn't on Saturday when we had a four hour booking.  In that time we uncovered the concrete base of an old greenhouse, removed brambles and moss, found and redefined a border that was lost under grass and finally strimmed.  Strimming leaves my husband's glasses spattered with mud. 

We raked up, and left the bags of rubbish for next time.  We recommended a mutual friend who could replace the wonky fence panel we had broken up.  We discussed coming back with some shrubs, but the customer preferred a small bed of herbs closer to the house. 

That is my favourite bit.  If life were only strimming and clearing it would become very weary and we would become very muddy, large heavy duty raincoats notwithstanding.  Now we have a chance to bring oregano, chives and variagated mint that we have propagated by division on our allotment over the road.  At the moment they have sunk back to the roots but with the warmer weather they will return in the spring.  I comfort myself with this thought as I look out at the rain and read George Herbert's meditative poem, The Flower.

Golden Age

G, approaching his nineties, one of our most enthusiastic and most expert of customers summoned my husband this week to lift his celebrated chrysanthemums.  It was a good experience for them both.  My husband came home with big bunches of these lovely 'gold flowers'  (the derivation of their name is from the Greek) and many spare roots.  These have found a temporary home in containers in our greenhouse before we decide where to place them on the plot. 

G and others share with us their plants and their passion; we prize their longevity, their decades of experience and good gardening. 

Here is an exhortation, not only for horticulturalists...:

"Rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God.  I am the LORD."  Leviticus 19:32

Method of Transport

In an ideal world we would walk or cycle to each gardening job.  My husband often does so.  But daily life sometimes demands the use of our little red hatchback, gift of generous friends, registered fifteen years this month.  Yesterday it was time for the annual MOT.

I am glad to say our car passed and needed only the replacement of a light bulb in the sidelights.  We exhaled a sigh of relief and inhaled the scent of a newly-cleaned car, courtesy of the dealer.  Gone for the moment were the reminders of cat poo and fox poo, rotting leaves, grass cuttings, mud and all the detritus that accompanies this job.  The car was clean, its windows were clean inside and out.  It was a good feeling.  All is secure under the bonnet (hood for my North American readers), our new rear tyres are ready for the winter weather (thanks to other friends and a great garage in Woodford) and we are set for whatever comes next. 

Preferred method of transport - two legs or two wheels, but four wheels keep us both rolling; thank you God. 

Eats, Strims and Leaves

Bamboo - diet of pandas so we are informed - tall, elegant and invasive.  Another day, another tidy up .....

Eats - have a substantial breakfast on the day you do a clearance job.  Porage is recommended.  Make sure you keep eating digestive biscuits throughout.  Good for maintaining blood sugar levels.

Strims - I do not do machinery.  Petrol strimmers are fearsome and noisy tools.  Walk the ground.  Encourage frogs and toads into the safety zone and rake up afterwards. 

Leaves - Pick up fallen leaves and stuff them into bags.  Compost them where possible.  Strip foliage from bamboo thus providing economical home-made stakes.   Depart from owner/tenant/lodger... with a cheery smile, caching cash as you go.  Book next visit if requested.  Drive to the public amenity site, haul out sacks and let bamboo cascade over the edge of the big green container to join berberis, pyracanthra and all the seasonal trimmings.

To Daffodils

Exactly where they were found does not really matter.  The truth is that someone threw them out.  We kept the bulbs safely in the shed away from marauding rodents and others until last week when I sunk them into a selection of re-used terracotta pots, plastic bowls, planters, all the usual stuff that we get given.

I know two poems about daffodils.  Wordsworth's, The Daffodils, which I learned at school which begins I wandered lonely as a cloud... and Herrick's To Daffodils which I found in my old Victorian anthology Palgrave's Golden Treasury:  Fair daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon:

So this week, the teacher in me suggests a challenge: write about planting spring bulbs.   You could try verses in the style of Wordsworth or Herrick; you could describe going to the garden centre or the pound shop; pondering where to plant or stuffing them into spaces.  As a colleague of mine used to say - when writing descriptively use your five senses.  But PLEASE DON'T try eating them, as daffodils are poisonous.

Plant bulbs now to benefit later from your own spring memories such as Wordsworth's.  Or just write the poem.

Blackberry and Apple

My hands are still scratched for yesterday but it was worth it.  One of those days where you work hard for the customer, pruning, cutting out blackberries, mowing, strimming, weeding the patio, the lot. 

We started at the back.  Usually we start at the end nearest the house, but this time we went back to the two Bramleys to the rear.  How often I have seen trees like these in the former family homes of outer suburbia.  Old, mossy, decaying in places but still bearing fruit.  Some enterprising people have a scheme to collect and sell them on, or to make cider.  These apples had rotted in the long grass.  I hate seeing food decay.  We took what we could.

Then on to the blackberries (see my blog of 27th August Canes in the Rain).  Overripe blackberries, swollen, rotten, falling off and staining my hands purple, dry brown blackberry canes from previous years, sturdy prickly blackberry runners making for the ground and putting out clusters of roots at their tips for next year.  Part the shrubs, track them down to the ground, cut them back.  (If we pay a return visit we shall dig them out). 

Blackberries and apples, ingredients for many a crumble, summer pudding or suet pudding wrapped in cloth, steamed to perfection and served with thick cream in the days when we knew little of cholesterol and counting calories.  The jam tasting, the slow overnight dripping through suspended muslin of strained blackberry jelly.  The sharpness of apple chutney.  Motherhood and apple pie.   Good memories.

To every thing there is a season...

Travelling to my Friday course of studies in Chelmsford, I noticed that the undulating hills of Essex were clothed with brown carpets of ploughed soil.  For this is the season when we once sang We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land... Yet this post is concerned less with ploughing up than with planting afresh. 

Autumn is the traditional time for bare-rooted stock - trees and bushes.  (If you want confirmation of this, consult the RHS website which I have added to my page.)  So last week on the plot we were also doing this. 

One of the Michaelmas tasks, which I omitted to mention, was moving two donated gooseberry bushes to a permanent place.  They had been sitting in two temporary containers since the summer and now it was time to shake the soil off their roots, dig a very big hole, remove the ubiquitous couch grass roots, as best we could, and lodge them firmly in place.

I also had a chance to split and pot up some chives.  I'm not completely sure whether I should have done this (ditto the odd bits of rhubarb), but it's done now.  As the old boys on our allotment say You've two choices: grow or die.  But it is my hope that the remaining warmth of autumn days will cause our gooseberries to put down strong roots and our tough chives - remaindered some years ago by a florist -  to sink beneath the soil and then return in the spring. 

And then on to the next task, next post, our daffodils.

A Michaelmas Day morning

It was Michaelmas Day (Michael and all Angels) celebrated on 29th September.  A warm sun shone and the sky was clear.  We worked on our orchard plot in our shirt sleeves, digging over, tidying, uprooting the sweetcorn (a few kernels); clipping crimson leaves from the strawberries to make them more productive next year, pulling up runners that were too weak to survive. 

Necessary maintenance.  The plot is tidier now and better defined.  The summer stuff is gone, but leeks will swell in the coming cloudbursts and the last tomatoes ripen under glass.

Bird Seed

The parakeets have discovered our sunflowers.  It was only a matter of time before they landed on the heavy nodding heads and bent their necks to peck out the seeds.  A parakeet's bill is well suited to shredding sunflower seeds.  First peck the whole seed out of the flowerhead and then extract the kernel from the case, letting the empty husks fall to the ground.  This is the closest I have come to these greedy green birds.  They normally scream overhead through the trees but do not roost on the plot.  Now they feast here and leave a litter of petals and broken bits beneath them.

Meanwhile I am harvesting the stuff we have grown for ourselves: beans and the thinnings of cabbage which is starting to heart up, late in the season, and Bramley cooking apples. 

It has been a hard year, but there is enough for us and plenty for the birds of the air.

The dignity of labour

It's a wet afternoon as my husband sets out in the face of a soaking to tidy and trim up the village.  Sometimes you just have to lever yourself off the sofa and face the task in hand.
  
I was reminded of a job we did earlier in the summer (At the edges) .  As I worked on the front lawn I got an interesting response from the passers by.  Staffies (the dog of choice of our neighbourhood) strained past me and stopped to sniff.  German Shepherds lugged their owners along opposite.  Mothers with buggies made for the shops.  Teenagers in hoods, intent on their music stared straight ahead into cyberspace.  Some pensioners stopped for a natter inches from my head.  (I am happy to say I have forgotten the details).  As far as most were concerned, I was invisible. 

Working at ground level you notice window-cleaners; men with satellite disks to instal; builders and decorators; electricians; people putting in loft extensions; and the postie, picking up his heavy sack from the depositary on the corner, ready to walk the length of the avenue.  Service industries.  Ponder that a while.

Preserves at the point

My jam making was haphazard until my husband bought a special thermometer from a trendy kitchen shop.  Before that it was the 'congealed drip off the spoon' method, or the 'cold saucer treatment'.  I grew tired of conducting these empirical experiments and the damson preserve turned out as a sweet gloopy sauce for flavouring vanilla ice cream or natural yoghurt.

Last night, we reached the vital point of 220 degrees F (105 degrees C) and this morning the jam had set.  The precision of this amazes me.  As you ascend the scale there is one temperature for jam and another for nougat; one for soft toffee, one for hard toffee and the high one for humbugs (according to my trusty Farmhouse Kitchen cookbook).  Right temperature, right result.  All it requires is the proper equipment and patience.

I don't always have much patience in the trials of life.  But I take comfort from this.  There is a point at which it all sets.  Shorter or longer than fifteen minutes in this case.     

At the edges

This month is a new start for me, as I formally started gardening in partnership with my husband.  It's my pleasure to do this.  Yesterday was an example ...

We visit a small block of flats with lawned gardens that can only afford both of us at certain intervals.  I had been longing to tackle the edges.  Here is what I discovered.

The council had weedkilled all along the border with the pavement and some had spilled over into the grass.  It's a pity when what was meant to kill weeds also kills lawn. 

The ornamental pavers that looked so solid had not been set in.  So I tidied around them as best I could.  It's a pity when there isn't time to lay the proper foundations.

I then took the half-moon, a tool beloved by my late father, and edged up all along the front.  I took out sections of straying clover, long grass, and sometimes wild violets (inevitable).  I found anthills where the winged ants were still in the nest.  I cut so that when my husband takes the mower his job will look clean and professional. 

Now all can see that this is lawn and this is edge, where I tidy the dust and the soil I have shaken from the trimmings before dropping them in the brown bin.  This is our livelihood and this is our neighbourhood.  We are putting back the edges.

Showy Sunflowers

We did it!  Our 'random' sunflowers won first prize in the 'flowers grown from seed' category.  These twin cotyledon seedlings scattered in the compost, struggling up unannounced among last year's potatoes, snacked on by snails and slugs, have grown so tall.  They are a gift.  Whenever I go down to the plot I see them high above everything else except the beans, bumblebees at their centres.

Borlottis also won second prize in the 'any other veg.' class.  Busy bees visit them too.  Blessed September, filled with fruit and vegetables.  We give thanks.

Facing ivy in league

I spent yesterday working alongside my husband - I like to be there, I enjoy it when people call us in to tackle their gardens.  He puts nice stripes on their lawns (weather permitting) and I tackle the bushes.  Yesterday it was the turn of ivies, morning and afternoon.

Ivy grows up and over from the neighbours' house and pulls down trellises with its suckers.  Ivy spreads like a horizontal tree, ends up vertical and then fruits.  Ivy creeps under boundaries and along the ground.

I tackle ivy methodically.  First I cut off everything in front of my face.  Then it's on to the hard bit. Those long dangling portions are disposed of and now I see the structure, the trunk, which can be as thick as my wrist.  Out with the heavy duty pruners and take it down section by section, tearing off ivy from the fence as I go.  The brown bin is full and I've only tackled two panels.  The customer and her neighbour will have to consult.  I've exposed the situation and made a start.

I pack up and go.  The spiders and snails I dislodged are finding a new home.  I'm off to mine.

Bank Holiday Weekend - Canes in the Rain

On Saturday, in the light rain, I began the job.  There was thunder and lightning as I finished, sheltering in the small greenhouse and feeling the glass shake and vibrate with the thunder overhead.  But I had managed to cut out most of the dry canes from this summer's raspberries that grow in the shade of our eating apples, kneeling on the damp grass of the path to reach into the thicket. 

Raspberries give me hope for harvest.  Next summer's canes are already growing green and tall.  In similar fashion, it was time to tackle the tayberries, disentangling their long dead runners from the new shoots and cutting them out.  Propping next year's floppy growth over the ramshackle supports to tie in later. 

And the big job that I had tried to avoid.  The wild blackberry, cousin to the tayberry, that sent its branches up into the apple tree.  The right place for blackberries is along the hedge on the other plot where we can keep them under control.  A methodical cutting out of sections, branch by branch down to the root until it was all down and in the brown recycling bin.  Now I can see my tree. 

Mornings

Yesterday was quiet.  I got to the allotment earlier than usual, before my neighbour opened up his shed, started strimming or turned on the radio.  Before the children in the house behind the plot came out and started bouncing on their trampoline.  Before the man with the grinder in the alley opposite started on his DIY.  It felt very peaceful.  I did not feel I was on the allotment at all.  I was on holiday. 

Long ago when I used to go walking I would feel like this at the beginning of a day in the Austrian Alps.  The air was fresh, we had breakfasted, put on our boots and were ready to climb the waymarked paths.  Around us were alpine flowers.  The breeze carried the sound of distant cowbells.  It was a sublime experience.

I don't have to get into one of the circling planes I see flying overhead and go abroad.  I have it all here - flowers, clouds, dewy grass and the morning ahead of me.

Allotment Meditations - Prelude: getting there

I have just returned from a Quiet Day at the Chelmsford Diocesan House of Retreat at Pleshey (www.retreathousepleshey.com) and have been inspired by their circular walk and prayers.  Why not write your own, my friend suggested.  I thought, yes, I could have a go, based on the allotment.  Not everyone can visit the allotment, but you can visit this blog.  Here goes......  Oh, and before I start, the new illustration, taken by my husband,is his Hartley greenhouse, his pride and joy.

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Sooner or later I will get to the allotment.  Some days it is easy.  I wake up, have breakfast, pack my cloth trug, water and suncream, put on a hat and I'm off. 

Sometimes, I want to sleep.  Blood sugars are high. Consequently I grumpily procrastinate. 

Sometimes I pull on my green wellingtons and walk in the rain. 

Whenever I get to the gate things are different.  I unlock and slide back the bolt and walk through to another world.



Show your onions

For the second year running we have won first prize for 'onions as grown' ; that is: dug up, washed and exhibited but not 'prettified' in any way.  Large leaves flopping on the green baize of the table, no nice little loops of twine around the stalks.  Our three onions came as they were - the only exhibit in their class.

The sets were a gift from a friend who had more than she needed.  

Allotment life should be like this, sharing and swopping, propagating and passing on.  Our raspberries and gooseberries (second and third) were sourced in a similar way.  Experienced allotmenteers are happy to help out.  You have the option to say no, gracefully, to what is offered and in time you acquire an eye for what to accept and what to decline. 

As for next summer's show - anybody for a red dessert gooseberry?

Pick Your Own

Pick Your Own is an invitation and an injunction.

An invitation - to the allotmenteer who has been waiting all summer for the raspberries ripening in sun and shower.  Now is the moment.  Pick your own to bake crumbles and make summer pudding.  Pick them from the hidden places underneath the leaves before they turn and rot and fall to the ground.  Pick daily, so that the next fruits in succession continue to ripen and swell.  Pick them before the pigeons.

An injunction - as you walk past other plots where raspberries hang, ungathered; past grapevines whose young tender leaves are perfect for dolmas, past bright marigolds and scented sweet peas, past jostaberries on uncultivated plots smothered in weeds.

All is open to view on an allotment.  Plots are unfenced, paths are communal, Entry gates are locked.  Obvious thieves will come over the fence or squeeze through the weak spots on the railings.  These instructions are for those on the inside too. Gather from your own plot.  Do not steal; Do not covet. 

The year of the slug

This must be the year of the slug.  With the bountiful showers - for which I am giving thanks - come slugs and snails.  Shameless snails are abroad in broad daylight consuming my broad beans.  They hang like blobby marbles on the underside of the leaves a foot in the air.  A foot like a suction pad keeps them there. 

Slugs and snails ate my kale.  Now all I have is a few skeletal ribs.  Slugs slide up the panes of my greenhouse and snack on aubergine and coriander.  Snails are eating my cabbage, and even my hardy winter squash (which comes from Peterborough) has not escaped.

Snails sneaked their way into the shed.  They sought cellulose and found it.  My wall calendar was hanging there with picture perfect photos of cottage gardens.  I bet all their snails are floating drunk in beer traps, foaming to cruel death with blue pellets, scaling pots of hostas whilst trying to navigate little piles of eggshells.  They are certainly not eating their way through the months of June, July and August. 

Time like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away wrote the hymnwriter.

Time consumes at a snail's pace.

Nice one, Cyril

A catchphrase, strapline, ditty, call it what you will, that will mystify the young.  However, I am not thinking of football....topical as it is at present.

Cyril, possibly with a K is the name of a strawberry, and this is another rescue story.  Some surplus strawberry plants were growing in a customer's garden, asked for, disentangled from the long grass, and taken to the plot.  We were told they were Russian and hardy.  Several years later this has proved true.  Even in the rainy conditions we are experiencing they have ripened in intermittent sunshine and are large and tasty.  Now they are sending out runners that we can propagate for the next generation.

Cyril is not a name for little boys nowadays but it has a distinguished history.  In the ninth century Cyril devised an alphabet for the Slavonic peoples, based on the Greek one, translated the Gospels, and with his brother Methodius wrote them in the new script.  Faith - transplanted from Byzantium to Bulgaria, growing in new soil.  Keep giving it away.

Prized (2) Penstemons

This weekend was the first show of the season and I looked around the plot for flowers.  Flowers only is the tradition here for the first show - no veg. and no home baking. 

We only had two exhibits and I am pleased to record they both gained second prize.  Once again they had been rescued.  The penstemons, which flowered a month early, were hauled out by customers who wanted to redesign a bed, taken and replanted next to our shed.  They needed a fair amount of cossetting and cutting back before they recovered from such a translocation.  But they are tough hardy perennials and came back into bloom in a shade that might be called an icy, minty purple. 

Likewise the non-bearded iris - large yellow and cream blooms.  They are prolific, common to this area and our customer was bored with them.  We dug them up from her front garden and replanted them in a large recycled rubber tyre.  They won second prize in their category (for the second time).

At the end of the show I bid 40p in the auction and came home with a huge bunch of flowering shrubs, honeysuckle and roses.  The scent of the mock-orange blossom is now filling our living room.

That sinking feeling

Plodded down to the plot in rubber boots to check the flooding.  The heads of clover and common daisies were six inches underwater in some places, swaying as if transformed into seaweed.  My onions are surrounded by a moat.  I hope they do not rot off. 

The soil where I attempt to weed is viscous, muddy.  We have been making mounds of compost and horse manure, building it up year by year, but hungry vegetables seem to eat as much as we can load on and then the level sinks once more.  There is a process of constant replenishment.

So much water has fallen that our apple trees sit healthily on little islands above the sodden grass. 

Bamboozling the pigeons

Tidiness was paramount - as you can tell from my previous blog.  I used to wonder why other people left tall meadow grass around their gooseberries and did not cut out a nice little tidy circle at the base of each bush.  Now I know better.

Pigeons do not have many brain cells, in my opinion.   They like to go for the obvious.  Bright redcurrants or ripe gooseberries are an invitation, as is the bed of cabbage seedlings that I planted out and netted on Tuesday.  Netting everything is fiddly.  One day we may be able to afford fruit cages.  But in the meantime I am wondering is there a virtue in untidiness if it deters the pigeons?  Grass is growing around my gooseberries and redcurrants.  Strawberries are sheltered by mare's tail, a weed that I particularly detest.  But let's see if it works. 

At the margins

Last year I cut out three beds for winter squash and courgettes.  The plan was that these frost-tender plants would grow in the shelter of the blackberry hedge against a backdrop of tall purple malvas.  This year I have only one planned vegetable bed. 

A gift of honeysuckle has spread all over the first bed mixed in with the native wildflowers.  (I hesitate to call them weeds).  Slowly and surely it is finding its way to the metal fence.  The malvas have completely taken over the third bed.  Nettles and convolvulus poke in profusion up from the weed heaps in the hedge which should be slowly turning into compost.  In the remaining middle bed I have sweetcorn.

Once, I would wanted to maximise every inch, and spent time weeding and weeding.  Now, as long as the weeds and wildflowers remain the other side of the boards holding in the compost piles I am content to let them be.  Experts spend time researching permaculture, garden design experts plant in swathes and batches, I have the margins - a corridor for wildlife, a sunbathing spot for cats, food plants for caterpillars, nectar for bees. I have a profusion at the margins.

Celebrating the Queen Bee

The bee I have in mind is small, furry and rotund - the bumblebee that chose to make its nest in our communal compost heap. 

I had seen the occasional bee going in and out of the unwieldy pile that is our communal heap, the site of my digging and sieving for several months.  But now all this activity has to cease.  Bees are nesting in it.  There is probably more than one queen marked out by the distinctive white patch on her 'tail' raising her larvae amid the twigs and sticks.  Protective adult bees came out in noisy but peaceful protest, buzzing around us when we tried to dig out some compost at the weekend.  So now my handwritten notice proclaims that they are 'busy and beneficial' and to be left to complete their job in peace.

Much the same could be said for our monarch - may God bless her.

What I did on my (Bank) Holiday

Once I would have got into the car and driven a round trip of 120 miles to the grey Essex sea coast.  But this Bank Holiday we went to the allotment.

Imagine, the familiar routine of putting a picnic together, packing the teabags and mugs and then loading petrol mower into hatchback, loading tools and welly boots and setting off.  (If anyone protests, I would suggest they try pushing a petrol mower down a 1/10 slope and then up at the end of the day).

Arrived at allotment site.  Technical hitch with petrol mower (don't ask). Thank you kind neighbours.  Occupied self by digging out a barrow load of compost from the communal heap.  Onwards to mowing, husband!  Three plots with lush grassy paths in need of attention.  Had lunch.

Here are some of the tasks I found to do whilst mowing took place elsewhere...

Moved some more 'random' red lettuce seedlings to new spot in our cool greenhouse.
Sowed a row of radishes.
Planted out and netted five rows of curly kale.
Sowed more cabbage in pots.
Sieved out the compost dug out earlier into pots for sowing later on.
Weeded (getting tired by now)
Lifted the blanket of horse manure from the top of the potatoes to check if they were sprouting and then covered them again.
Put straw round strawberries.
Pulled off frost blighted strawberry flowers (alas).

Late afternoon.  Sat down under the damson with a cup of tea.  The sun came out.  The damson had set and the fruits were elliptical and green, no bigger than a zero on the keyboard.  It wasn't raining (for the first time in about eight hours).  This is why we do it, we said.  

A plug for saved seeds - radishes

If you have sufficient resources but insufficient time you can go to the garden centre and buy plug plants.  Radishes, beetroot, whatever takes your fancy have been propagated for you and sold on for you to put straight into your raised bed or wherever you grow your salads.  But if you have time in abundance you can save seed. 

It is a fiddly business winnowing out radish seeds from their long narrow pods, rubbing them in the palm of your hand until they fall into an old pharmacy paper bag - the outcome of many visits with my repeat prescriptions.  But I am glad to say it works.  Last season's seed went down to the allotment in March and now we are eating the first radish of the season, small, round and crunchy.  All that remains is to keep sowing successionally and remember to let the last plants of the year flower like mustard.

I am already eyeing the rogue parsnips that survived the winter and wondering if this too will work.

Frost in April

Frost in April has struck and dotted a black centre at the heart of some of the strawberries that have blossomed too soon.  Once this has happened, it is no good leaving the blossoms to grow in the hope that fruit will come.  The remedy is the drastic one, to pinch them out and toss them on the compost heap.

I do not worry as much now.  I know that behind these early ones are a cluster of other green buds waiting for a sunny day.  Now I inspect my strawberries whilst weeding in the rain.  Positioning them away from frost pockets  would also help.  Ah well, only another three years and time to move them again.

Random Harvest

'Random' say the younger generation and 'cool'.  Cool under its former meaning I understand as soft welcome rain falls on our allotments this Easter Monday.  As for random - that has a meaning all of its own too.

This year, I congratulated myself on planning out a system for all three plots, consulting two organic handbooks and drawing up plans for proper rotation.  However, life in all its physical and spiritual dimensions differs from life on paper.  Kind neighbours - fellow gardeners and allotmenteers at church have given us onion sets, broad beans for spring sowing, and the promise of surplus seed potatoes.  Kind neighbours on the allotment left three packets of cabbage seeds with the invitation to take them having sown all they needed.  Somehow we will find room for them all.

Meanwhile spinach that lay dormant in the homegrown compost is dotted about the plots; sunflower seeds have sprouted where they fell after I left last year's seed head out for the birds, and the malvas I planted, whose young leaves the people of the Near East treat like spinach, are reproducing by the hedge. 

Chance favours the prepared mind, someone famous is reputed to have said.  But  it has been my experience that after all the preparation we need to make space for the generosity of God, through believers and non-believers alike, and through randomness, which we know is also included the plan. 

We are off in the rain after lunch to make ready for the potatoes.

Lettuce rejoice

My winter lettuce are thriving and I am so glad.  I sowed them late last year in our cold greenhouse, along with rocket - which came up like a rocket, was consumed, bloomed and has been taken up.  I pick the odd slug and snail off these little winter gems but on the whole they are hearty and green.

When I think of the cost of fresh salad leaves in the shops I rejoice.  It was worth all the fiddly business of thinning out, picking out weeds that lay dormant in the home grown compost and watering at the end of hot days when the temperatures rose so high that the indoor grapevine began to put on its early leaves.

After these we shall have lollo rosso and then the tomatoes that are germinating in pots on the floor of our lounge and then chilli peppers perhaps.  The key is successional sowing.  No gluts, I hope, but a steady supply of seasonal produce throughout the growing season.  Leave it to others to try exotics - pineapples in hot pits -  lettuce will do me fine.

Bee Aware

I have been sitting beneath our damson tree during this pleasant but unseasonably warm weather listening to the bees.  It is early for bees to be about and the tree which is white with blossoms has a muted air. 

Last Friday I picked up an article in The Independent which suggests that bee populations are crashing across Western Europe because of the use of neonicotinoid pesticides which attack bees' central nervous systems, affecting their homing abilities so that they are more likely to die while away from their nests. 

I could point the moral to this story, but dwelling upon it will only increase my anger and sadness. 

In the meantime, we will continue not to spray.  I will take up the offer of some pulmonaria from a neighbour on the allotment.  Bees like pulmonaria because it blossoms early when there are not many food sources available.  We could propagate more lavender and rosemary.  If we gardeners and allotmenteers made our plots 'bee havens'  and our margins and rough edges places for bumblebees and solitary bees to nest then, God willing, when this still unproven but potentially deadly substance is withdrawn, the bees will recolonise our countryside.

Flying Machines

The Grand Canyon jigsaw is complete.  The next challenge is a toy biplane.  I shake the bits out onto a tray, count and itemise them.  Going from two dimensions to three is easier than it looks, even for fingers that could never get the hang of playing the piano.  What emotions linked the mountains of Arizona to my little plane?
I am reminded of flying eastwards once, above the Rockies, as an electric storm began to light up the clouds.  Suddenly I felt the onset of turbulence that is signalled when the bell sounds and the passengers return to fasten their seatbelts.  Invisible turbulence can come at any time out of a clear blue sky.  All the reasoning in the world is of no avail at that moment.  The pilot, detouring, took us around the storm, high, higher than Everest where the jetstream winds blow almost continually.  I had the thrill of fear, of falling out of the sky, like Icarus in Joni Mitchell's tribute song to Amelia Earhart, ' ascending on beautiful foolish arms.'

How crazy it is, feet on the ground at less than 100 feet above sea level, to relive this panic.  As my not very dextrous fingers screw the tiny plates and bolts together I repeat Psalm 119:73 Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.'

Lonesome Pine

I saw it on the way to the shops, a little Christmas tree that had been discarded along the track behind the garages used by dog-walkers.  Potbound, dropping its needles, but with little green points of growth and the scent of resin weeping in tiny drops from its trunk. 
Rescued, it has now been taken down to the allotment and put in a sheltered spot by the hedge.  Strong winds dry out conifers.  I pushed my two thumbs into the rootball to loosen the fibrous roots that had grown to the shape of the pot. 

It was a mild day and rain followed us home. 

Strata: the Remaking - Arizona Mountain Jigsaw

Some helpful hints for readers who have not opened a new jigsaw box since childhood.

• If the manufacturer says there are 500 pieces this is correct.  Trust them.
• Put in the frame first.  Those blue bits are sky. 
• Pieces cannot float - they have to connect to each other.
• When pieces connect they fit snugly together.  Pieces that are too loose or jammed in were probably not intended to connect.
• You may have to turn a piece around many times before you can see where it fits.  This is not a problem, it is all part of the puzzle.
• Stop when you are tired.  Put all the disconnected bits back in the box and wait for another day.
• The big picture is there to help you.  So look at it.
• Persevere - it begins to get easier as more pieces fall into place.
• Appreciate the final result. Psalm 139:15 My frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.

Plastic

We are continuing to tidy up the allotments.  The skip has gone and so has the rubbish which overflowed its sides.  The next task was to push into undergrowth by the side of a communal path to clear bags, bottles, sweet papers and other garish pieces of litter blown on to the site.

Plastic stands out against soil and branches.  Plastic tangles in briars and blackthorn trees.  Plastic bottles, plastic netting, plastic bags.  The bright colours say buy me, eat me, drink me and throw me away.  But let's not become too judgemental - my sturdy blue plastic jacket protects me from the thorns that rasp on my sleeves as I go backwards into the bushes to protect my eyes.

Two robins fly down to see what I have unearthed during my litter pick.  They are cleaning up after me, heads cocked, on the look out for bugs and beasties.  See them, eat them and fly away.

Winter Birds

The fieldfares have disappeared, but they have not gone very far.  They stripped all the pyrecantha bushes around the allotment boundaries and then flew up the hill to find some more prickly shrubs.  Happy little flock - red berries in beak. 

The parakeets who fill the cemetery with their noise are silent.  But I am sure they are there feeding on the apples which hang, unpicked on the trees bordering the site.  These are not my apples.  Peck away, you hardy and glamourous exotics. 

The heron flew over my head on the way back from the shops.  Neck tucked in, big wings flapping slowly, heading out to the melting ice of some domestic pond.  Koi on the menu today?

And those darn pigeons.  I tell you, if there was a way to trampoline on black netting and peck at our curly kale they would find it.

A robin sings on the tree outside our window.  The sweetest winter song.

'Love Pigeons'

'Love pigeons' was the sobriquet given to us once by a friend whose second language is English.  I do not love pigeons, as readers will know, but I was amused to stand still and watch a pair of wood pigeons, on a snowy wall in the sunshine, engrossed in the preliminaries of courtship - much preening, ducking of heads under wings and literal 'billing and cooing'.  I passed on before it all reached its consummation. 

This crazy courting couple have evidently not heard of the traditional saying that every bird should take its mate on St Valentine's Day, as Chaucer tells us in his Parliament of Fowls.  If you can find his poem in translation it is well worth a read.

And right at the end of Chaucer's stanzas, listing all the birds he saw gathered before Nature, comes 'The throstil old; the frosty feldefare'.  How accurate Chaucer is in his observation.  On our allotments, among the blackbirds and throstles (thrushes) the fieldfares are gathered in loose flocks like the birds that illustrate this blog.   They have come down from the north, compelled by the snowy weather to seek their sustenance here.

I think we have lost some of the wonder and delight in the natural world that Chaucer knew and relished.  I think also that many of the Twenty First Century no longer believe, as he did that Nature is 'the vicaire of the almyghty Lord'.  I am still considering what this meant this poet of the Fourteenth.  Meantime, let the birds sing happily at the poem's close:

"Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!"

Cold snaps

Cold snaps the switches on our fruit trees.  Without this frosted blanket of snow they would not blossom and bear fruit.  However much I sigh for the spring and long for the blossom, this period of dormancy is vital and necessary.  There will be plenty of time, I tell myself.  They are pruned (lightly) and mulched with good compost.  They are waiting for the warm winds from across the sea to blow on them.

Some verses from Psalm 147:16-18

He gives snow like wool;
he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.
He casts forth his ice like morsels;
who can stand before his cold?
He sends forth his word and melts them;
he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.

And a prayer. 

Lord, help me to see that the wintry days are as necessary to my trees as the warmth of spring.  Send out your word and your wind at the right season.  Amen

Strata

Last week I bought a jigsaw of the Grand Canyon from my favourite charity shop.  The sticker next to the price tag, informed me that it was complete.  I've now begun to piece it together.
As I looked at the magnificent contours of this great national park my mind went from the macro to the micro; from the canyon to the communal compost heap where I have been barrowing out the lovely stuff.

Like the canyon, our compost heap is arranged in strata.  At the top is a matted mass of grass and other vegetation, still in the process of decomposition.  Further down is a layer of dry-ish, russet coloured, strawy stuff.  Particles of fine soil fall from this in little cascades whenever I hit it with the spade.

But lower down is the compacted treasure waiting to be dug out - dark and rich.  Real compost.

Buried among the strata are evidences of human and animal activity.  I will not detain you with the human stuff.  Sufficient to say that despite the optimism of fellow allotmenteers, it will not break down.  The biodegredable is mainly yellow and brown snail shells, empty, delicate and easily crushed.  There is also plenty of invertebrate life busily digesting the vegetation: writhing worms towards the top of the heap, and centipedes and woodlice scurrying to the crevices for shelter .

So I imagine asking a sentient centipede - how long has this been here?  Millennia in insect memory, it replies.  Yet I remember how it was before.  The first heap we dug out completely when we arrived here, before starting afresh in the empty hole - packing in weeds, vine branches, carrot tops, piling it high and then waiting until the right time to start all over again.

I might have the picture, but when I cannot see God as Creator, it's like trying to fit the pieces of an incomplete jigsaw.  God said to Job, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4)