allotment

The Big Digger Driver And The Kindness Of Strangers

I think I’ve mentioned that here in Much Wenlock we’re in the throes of having a couple of attenuation ponds dug above the town – this in a bid to reduce flood risk. We are in what the Environment Agency calls a ‘Rapid Response Catchment Area’. This means that if a severe storm hits our part of Wenlock Edge, then we have about twenty minutes warning before a flash flood reaches the town. There are other factors involved too. Flash flooding is more likely if the ground is already sodden from periods of prolonged rainfall. Or if it is frozen hard.

Our last bad flood was in the summer of 2007 when over fifty homes were affected. Due to the steepness of our catchment, any flood is usually quick to leave, but even so, it can cause a lot of damage.

One of the attenuation ponds, currently nearing completion, is in the top corner of Townsend Meadow behind our house. Earlier in the year, and in preparation for the excavation work, a number of small trees were felled and shredded into heaps around the pond perimeter. Yippee, I thought on discovering them by the path on the long way round to the allotment. More chippings for paths and weed suppression.

I duly went to collect a few bags full, but it was harder work than I expected. For one thing there is quite a haul up the path from the pond, and then once at the top of the hill and into the wood, another haul down the field boundary to the allotment.

Meanwhile, my chippings collecting habit had not gone unnoticed. Late one afternoon in April, and after the working day was over, I was plodding up the path with a full bag when a truck pulled up on the field track that the construction crew were using. It was the digger driver in the photo. A very Welsh digger driver. At first I didn’t quite grasp what he was saying. I thought he’d come to tell me off. But that wasn’t it.

When I explained what I was doing and where I was going with the chippings, he said it would be no problem for him to move the chippings piles to the top of the hill. In fact I think he would have delivered them to the allotment if there had been suitable access. He drove off down the track, and I carried on with my bag, and rather forgot about the digger man.

Sometime later (I was pottering around in my polytunnel) fellow allotmenteer, Dave, came to tell me that he had been surprisingly hallooed from the neighbouring field by a very Welsh man who was going on about chippings and some woman he’d met on the path. After some thought, Dave had concluded I was the woman in question, and so we went up the field to investigate, and there at the top of the track was a huge pile of wood chips – enough for all my paths, and more to compost over the winter. There was no sign of the digger man. I expect he’d gone home for his tea, but Dave helped me fill my big blue IKEA bags and carry them back to the plot.

So lucky me! Two very kind men in one day. And a nice new path between the polytunnel raised beds, which incidentally were made by a third kind man who lives in my house.

Black & White Sunday: After and Before This week Paula asks us to give a colour shot a monochrome edit.

Solstice Sky And A Fine Quotation To Match

I dashed up to the allotment this afternoon while it was still fine. The weather forecast is promising us storms tomorrow so I thought I’d better get the Christmas parsnips dug up fast, and the Brussels sprouts and red cabbage gathered in. The ground was very water-logged and the plots looked dreary, and naturally there were no other mad gardeners around but me. But as the sun went down, just a fraction later after the shortest day, the light over the town was magical.

These photos were taken with lots of zoom, and in the next one the sky looks to be on fire.

All of which reminded me of an Albert Camus quote which I read on a writing blog earlier this week. It was so hope-inducing I thought I’d pass it on at the first opportunity. It’s especially apt for all you creative people out there, which would be every man Jack and Jill of you. More power to your making in 2017:

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

December Apples And Other News From The Allotment

These days it is usually dusk as I leave the allotment. I go there late afternoon to pick kale, carrots and parsnips. It has been too wet underfoot to do much work (our soil turns to glue in winter rain) but I have been making paths between the raised beds and behind the polytunnel. For the permanent paths I have laid membrane, for others whose location I may change, I’ve put down recycled cardboard. Then I’ve been covering both with wood chippings.

These last I am currently scavenging from a big heap left by the council beside the footpath not far from the allotment. It means a longer walk from the house. Instead of going south along the field path, I strike out west up the Sytche, where I fill two bags from the heap and then slither my way along a hedgerow track and into the wood before I can turn east and drop down on to the allotment. All a bit daft I know, but you get a fine view of the town along the way.

Back in the summer I was gathering chippings from the Linden Field and using them in a no-dig experiment. When I took over the polytunnel a couple of years ago, I also acquired half a plot that had been neglected for several seasons. Some of it I cleared by digging until I saw the error of my ways. The rest I divided into terraces using old planks, and then instead of hacking at the pernicious weeds (dandelion, buttercup, couch grass), I buried them in cardboard and several inches of chippings.

This is not fool-proof. You can’t keep a good weed down. And I’ve had to pull up a few young dandelions since, but they are easier to get a grip on through the chippings.

Eventually, when the worms and fungi have done their work, I should be able to plant into this mulch. Thereafter, it will be a matter of adding more layers of compost. AND NO DIGGING.

Now is also the season of leaf gathering. They do take a good year to eighteen months to rot down, though someone told me you could speed up the process by stirring in some grass mowings. The leaves I gathered last year are already breaking down into lovely crumbly loam which I’ll use for seed sowing in the spring. Leaf mould is low in nutrients, but it can be enriched with the addition of shredded comfrey leaves that rot down very quickly.

I make simple silos out of a rolls of chicken wire, but you can use black bin bags or leaf sacks.

And now I’ve lingered here long enough. The light is going, and it’s time to walk home across the field, the dusk lit by apples like lanterns along the allotment fence.

Watching The Clock: Black & White Sunday

Talk about conflicting interests. When I’m at work on my allotment I continuously wage war on dandelions. They are shown no mercy, bar resorting to pesticides. And yes, I know they are very helpful plants – the roots plunging deep into the soil strata and releasing otherwise inaccessible nutrients into the topsoil.

On the other hand, on the way to the allotment, camera to hand, I have a lot of time for them. They are of course in the farmer’s field, and not on my plot, which helps to foster a little appreciation. I find their seed-head ‘clocks’ endlessly photogenic. Looked at closely, they have a mysterious and mesmerizing quality: the perfect design of their parachutes, each one programmed for relentlessly unavoidable procreation.

And so, even as I feel my spade-hand twitching towards a ruthless uprooting, I’m also thinking ‘live and let live’. There are other good reasons to love dandelions. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that these plants possess great therapeutic qualities. Herbalists have long used the roots for healing liver conditions, while the leaves and flowers act more on the kidneys (not for nothing is the dandelion’s country name piss-in-the-bed.) You can use the young leaves in salads, while the roasted roots make a passable coffee. Meanwhile, the dandelion in the photo is also auditioning for a special effects role in Star Trek.

Black & White Sunday

Ode To Leaf Mould

With sack and rake

I harvest gold;

tree-leavings:

bird cherry, damson, lime;

cached to rot.

It’s a slow alchemy –

six seasons it takes me

to process gold to dirt,

giving me the earth.

For more leaf magic visit Verena at Festival of Leaves

Trying Not To Dig The Plot And 30 Minutes Of Weird Weather

On a very dull Tuesday afternoon I thought I’d brave the cold wind and walk across the field to the allotment. On went the woolly hat, quilted coat (over three layers) and the wellies.

Unsurprisingly I had the allotment to myself – not another mad gardener in sight. I set about emptying one of the compost bins, and spreading the contents (a hand’s width deep) over a metre wide stretch of ground that had been cleared of over-wintering sprouts and broccoli. It seemed a good day to do it, and I was glad I had prised myself from the house.

This year I’m experimenting with the ‘no dig’ system of cultivation, so apart from tweaking out one or two noxious weeds, I resisted the temptation to get out my favourite spade. The objective is to cover the soil with enough interesting organic matter to excite the worms in the soil below. They then do the digging, and other soil-friendly organisms get going too so that, hopefully, the later seasons’ crops – cabbages and sweet corn – can be planted out on the much improved, and better nourished ground.

I was thus in the middle of this very absorbing activity when someone upstairs switched off the lights and I turned to find a tempest sneaking up on me.

Yikes! By the time I had scooted across the plot to the shelter of my polytunnel, we were having a small, but very concentrated snow and hail blizzard. It was far too stormy to think of making for home. Instead, I pottered about in my tunnel sowing some purple Brussels sprouts seeds in modules, while trying to remain hopeful that this truly was a passing squall and not the heavens falling in as the heavyweight clouds suggested.

I forgot to record the actual blizzard that followed, so here are some Précoce de Louviers pointy spring cabbages that are growing most happily in the tunnel.

When I stuck my nose out of the tunnel some twenty minutes later, this was the view over Much Wenlock:

By which time it was too late, and the ground too wet to go back to compost spreading. As I walked home across the allotment, I watched strange, but less threatening clouds gather over the hills:

And when I stepped through the hedge into the wheat field behind our house, the sky looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth: snowstorm, what snowstorm?

Clearly the figment of a delusional, non-digging gardener then:

Oh, my love’s like a red, red…radish? Or the joy of growing one’s own dinner

Even if I say so myself, with radishes as beautiful as these, you can see why Mother of Rapunzel so craved them that she sent poor Father of Rapunzel scrabbling over the witch woman’s garden wall on nightly radish-scrumping missions.

We all know what trouble that led to, and hopefully there will be no similar repercussions (whether the enforced letting down of over-long hair from tall towers or the scratching out of princely eyes ) from eating these dear little Cherry Belle radishes. Because eaten them we have. They took pride of place in the salad that accompanied Friday night’s dinner.

And the secret of this particularly successful, if small-scale production, was to grow them in a large plastic flower pot inside my allotment polytunnel. You can see them growing in the bottom left-hand corner, along with the component parts of many other future dinners:

This week at the Daily Post photo challenge the theme is:
Dinnertime

Apologies to Robert Burns for the radish intrusion.

Also I don’t think Jude has yet featured radishes in her April garden close-ups challenge.

Not Something You Often Think Of ~ Self-Renewing Onions

Here are my allotment Welsh Onions as seen late last summer. They are simply bursting to make lots of little onions. The flowers are white, a good 2-3 centimeters across, and the stems are around half a meter tall. And so yes, they do look like giant chives, but with more vigour and verve. I anyway like their style (admittedly a little Triffid-like) as they try to outdo their globe artichoke neighbours.

The artichokes are also intent on self-renewal, and it’s often a toss up between eating them and wanting to enjoy their wonderful mauve flowers. But then this is what I love most about my allotment – the endless cycle of regeneration. It’s the same for the gardener too, in spirit, if not in body, though I often wonder if I might not respond well to a good dosing with liquid seaweed fertilizer – just about now I should think, with spring at last upon us.

This week’s guest challenge at Paula’s Lost in Translation is Renewal. Please follow the link to see some inspirational shots from Michelle Lunato.

Never Mind Warhol’s Banana…

…just look at my spuds!

This is my take on the Daily Post’s ‘life imitates art’ photo challenge – a posterized still-life of last summer’s allotment harvest. I suppose you could also call it a potato print. Anyway, it is my nod to Andy Warhol’s poster art:

Andy Warhol’s Banana

Of course, as a gardener, I regard anything I grow as a work of art. Coming up next are borlotti beans, corn, zinnias and dill – rendered on the kitchen table after the Flemish still-life school:

Looking ahead to this year’s garden ~~produce~~ art works, I’m just hoping that my asparagus beds might do something wonderful, then I could come up with something like this. I have the red currants:

Coorte, Adriaen: Dutch, active 1683 – 1707

Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants
1696: National Gallery on line editions; Life Imitates Art

Winter Garden From My Window

It’s the final week of Jude’s Winter Gardens challenge over at The Earth Laughs In Flowers. This, then, is the view of my garden captured on Saturday afternoon. It’s as much as I’m prepared to show you at the moment, so dreary is it after weeks of rain. Also there was a definite lack of gardener-input in the autumn. Things just kept on growing and it was hard to know when to chop them back.

So they didn’t get chopped, and the place now has the look of a garden version of Miss Haversham’s attic. But you may just spot (in the bottom right hand pane) a small clump of tete a tete daffodils. Even they aren’t planted, but are sitting on top of the soil. They were tipped out of a pot bought last spring, at which point I had every intention of re-planting them. Oh well. Neglect hasn’t stopped them thriving. They started flowering at the end of December.

I have to confess that I’m a fair-weather gardener, at least where dampness is concerned. And it really is too cosy indoors. Also unlike the garden, the house is now clean and tidy, which was the real reason I took the first two photos – to document that tidiness is possible. And I’m sharing the proof with the world in an attempt to stem backsliding tendencies.

But housework and fair-weather gardening aside, I am getting twinges of planters’ itch. My first delivery of vegetable seeds arrived earlier last week – all those crisp packets of pent-up potential, and now it is February. Hurray! Time to sow the peas and leeks in the allotment polytunnel, and start off the aubergines and sweet peppers at home.

And talking of sweet things, my first sowing of sweet peas on the kitchen window sill is already sprouting. So apologies to Jude for not quite sticking to the winter garden plot. I’m finishing this post with thoughts of summer, and deliciously scented blooms to come. And I know she won’t mind because she knows very well that it’s forward-dreaming that keeps gardeners going through the long winter season.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge