Back to the Garden

Today, my shadow touched the garden after four weeks’ absence. That’s a long time in human affairs, but in January, barely worth two summer days of  plant growth. That’s a pretty good exchange rate: I’ve been spending some time abroad.

After the festive season, this year’s winter break was spent in warmer climes. The official line is that this allows me to be outside amongst plants that are active, though sceptics might wryly note  the “topped up” status of my sun tan.

Andalucia, in Southern Spain, has a rich, living horticultural tradition. We stayed at Chris and Terry’s Finca Colina in Barranca. Not far inland from the dense golden honey pot of the Costa del Sol, it’s a tranquil tapestry of smallholdings, shielded from unbalanced development by its sheer topography. Each lime-washed house balances among its steep few acres of extensive olive and almonds. Extensive, as the relative financial returns on such land is too low now for most, except the goat herders, to work it full time.

This presumably assists the wild plants of the understory, so that on my kernel-warming wanderings under almond blossom I would meet more salad burnet, mountain thyme, apple mint, fennel and navelwort than I could hope to use.

One of the magics of real travel, or just stopping still to see things differently, is the surprise of the familiar, like the common-or-garden plants listed above – interlaced with the bafflingly exotic. Out of this foreign language of flowers emerged some moments of enlightenment: an endemic thorny specimen was pointed out as wild asparagus, the shoots of which we later found in abundance at Algeciras market. The larger of the many cork-skinned evergreens in this dry land identified itself as a carob: by their fruits shall thee know them.

On the track homewards, the many railside cultivations looked like allotments, only different. The town of Ronda was a leader, but not unique, in lining its streets with orange trees. From bitter experience, I can confirm these to be marmalade, rather than desert, types. In Madrid, Emilio, a founder member of OrganicLea, tried to dispel any romantic notions that the citizens or council might have utilised these as an urban harvest; he also bemoaned the lack of organic vegetables – this in spite (or even because?!) of  fairly healthy food, and radical political, cultures.

So the journey ended, as I had a hunch it might, with a familiar riddle: how to construct the rainbow bridge that should only connect [as EM Forster might have it] our brave crazy human race with food, land, nature, each other…with wonder.

And so, back to the job in hand: a year at the urban market garden.

As promised, I come bearing seed, notably a fine chilli cultivar, “Bolivian Rainbow”, courtesy of the Finca Colina Chilli Patch. But seeing the amount of work that has gone on in my absence, I feel more prodigal son than returning hero.

Dreaming Garden Beds

Covering the glasshouse salads with a cosy blanket of horticultural fleece last week, gave a real sense of putting the garden to bed for the midwinter. The same fleece draped over the containers and trollies of chillies and figs, however,  lends the warehouse a Dickensian feel, though more Great Expectations than Christmas Carol: shrouded in white web, they are ghost plants in purgatory, waiting to see whether Jack Frost pushes through the walls this year.

Our vegeboxes today carry the real gifts of our potatoes, chilli garlands and salad bags to our members. “This is as bad as it gets”, I told Mary, our new grower, as we picked and packed chilled salad with frozen fingers last week. Possibly it isn’t: but still, I am grateful we won’t be doing it in January. Harvesting will cease; there will be an inward focus; and I’ll be away for a while, the earthing of Christmas and New Year with kith and kin followed by roamings in Andalucia, in search of almond blossom, lost settlements of inspiration, perhaps a promising chilli cultivar.

The Hawkwood midwinter celebration on Tuesday was a merry occasion, with almost sixty of the volunteer team in attendance. Alongside great food, song, speeches and forest escapades, was “The Ghost of Hawkwood Future”, a guided unveiling of the 2012 planting plans. After three years, it’s good to be at a point where we’ve sort of worked out what works out. So next year we look forward to tweaks rather than wholesale changes. There will be a couple of trial tomato cultivars alongside the firm favourites; squash again, some with a twist;  potatoes “Arran Victory” make a triumphant return; and we hope to be awash with salad leaves.

So much to look forward to: new faces; mainly old friends. Happy New Year.

 

The Pondering Season

I have a tea tray at home, illustrated with all manner of garden paraphernalia, bearing the legend “A Gardener’s Work Is Never At An End”, repeated around the lip. Some have taken tea with me and flinched at this idea. But unlike “a woman’s work is never done”, that phrase that sums up the endless drudgery of the undervalued housewife, I think  positive interpretations can be made.

For one, the tray depicts a room where gardening tools are displayed resplendent on walls, gardening books adorn the shelves, and the tables are brimming with flowers and vegetables. The message is that gardening isn’t work which you drag yourself out to, and come home to recover from:  it is something you bring back, to decorate, restore and feed the home and mind environment. Secondly, unlike so much contemporary work and thinking, gardening is essentially cyclical, rather than linear. The gardening day, week, season, year, life, contains cycles within cycles. Under every moon there is something needing sowing or planting, but the where and the when is constantly changing.

This is the time of year when I come closest to feeling that the work is done. Last week I congratulated Elith and Gertraud on completing the last planting of the year – the second spring garlic bed under glass. Yet, in my mind’s eye, the spring garlic has greened and gone to climbing beans: that morning I had unveiled/ dished out the draft  planting plans, after a six week process of review, consultation and pondering, alone and with co-op members and our catering partners.

Pondering is a vital part of the gardener’ work. Often it is performed “on the job”, though the importance of giving dedicated time to high intensity pondering should never be underestimated. And we are coming up to  slap bang in the middle of  the pondering season.

As the verb suggests, liquids can be well employed as pondering aids, notably seasonal fermentations of plant extracts. But they are not the only tools of the job. The gorgeous low light in the pondering season is highly conducive to inner reflection, as are the long nights, the humming fires.

I don’t want to waste them: with the planting plans done, the seed catalogues will be mulled like wine, and Resolutions made to change the substrate recipe, tweak  the apprenticeship  programme.  We will meet up in warmth to chew dreams and schemes for alternative local food systems, and relish the scarce bright hours in which we can get our ponderings out in the open, spade or secateurs in hand, never at an end.

Cold At Bay

Last year a sharp snap, this year an easy gentleness in November’s setting. There will be no mad, doomed rush to hold back the tide of frost from sun worshipping crops. The peppers have been permitted to fully ripen, and will this week join their squash, tomato and sweetcorn sisters in the compost heap of rest, after fruitful lives well spent.

The borderline “winter” salads – “Lattuginho”, escarole, parsley – have already given of enough leaf this clement autumn to justify their selection, whatever happens from now on in. The outdoor sowings of beans, field and broad; garlic; and agricultural mustard, have all been permitted to lift their heads above the parapet, a reflection of their roots’ extension. This will allow them to protect soil structure and fertility from the coming cruel months.

Especially enlivening has been the rich river of glistening veg that has continued to flow from the Great Outdoors and settle in the packing station – the central reservoir between the classroom, kitchen, tool shed and office – before flowing out into the unnumbered kitchens beyond. Rainbow chard, perpetual spinach , Chioggia beetroot, kales black and curly, cabbage, jerusalem artichoke – it has been a delight.

Urban market gardening is but one element of the “alternative food system”, and the emphasis is naturally on “just in time” ultra-fresh produce. Consequently, the low season means lean pickings, and a welcome opportunity for rest, reflection and planning; the provision of winter supplies, from store or large field, has been the preserve of those hardened hands out in the sticks. But as I ponder the draft planting plans for 02012, I can see an emotional, as well as an economic, case for extending our cold menu range.

In doing so, we may rediscover again that there are degrees of hardiness. Last year the Red Russian kale froze to death at -10, whilst Pentland Brigg, from the Scottich uplands, stood as unruffled as curly kale can.

After a quiet year, the mild damp has brought the slug multitudes out from all over the terrace. A few hard frosts should see to them, soon. But not yet. Not. Just. Yet.

 

Field Day

At the “fag end of the year”(as one John Moore termed it), comes the light at the end of a long journey in the Entrance Field. This was the week the sheet mulch finally reached the swale.

The Entrance Field looms kindly down on everyone who passes through the nursery gates. It’s just shy of an acre, leans west-southwest, and is the fabled “open, sheltered site” of gardening text book mythology. It’s a far cry from the same literature’s “fertile, free draining, moisture retentive soil” though. Nonetheless, it has been selected as our main area of field vegetable production, due largely to its proximity to the glasshouse and warehouse – the centres of energy; but with some consideration for the pleasing sensation an acre of mixed vegetables might create in people who two seconds ago were in London town.

The standard method of converting pasture/ meadow to annual plants would be to get in a man with heavy machinery to plough it up. But this takes its toll on soil structure, plus we like to Do It Ourselves here. Instead, we opted for the permaculture method of sheet mulching. In this instance, this involves laying sheets of cardboard on top of the grass, laying a couple of inches of green waste compost over it; adding a layer of time – six to twelve months; then planting through the mulch into the dead and rotted lawn beneath.

Two other ingredients are essential: crazed cardboard collectors called Forest Recycling Project, and a small village worth of hands. It was one Open Day in summer 2009, when Growing Communities’ grower Sara Davies and her visiting cousin, Robyn, began clearing the field, covering one small corner of a vast expanse. It took a good few trips back and forth from the far-flung compost pile to achieve this drop in the ocean, in the same time one man and his machine might have taken to turn half the field under.

But gradually, each month in the quieter seasons has seen the dark band of soil improver bleed gently up the hill, ushering up more rife vegetables and green manures as each year heats up.

As well as associated techniques such as sheet mulching, permaculture has a set of principles, based on observation of natural systems. “Use small and slow solutions” is one; “Everything gardens” another. Over two years after Sara & Robyn’s first small step for vegetable kind, Stefan and Jo stood at the top corner, and rolled out the final strip of black carpet. The bit in between was done by dozens of people of all ages, nations, abilities, walks of life, boot sizes and wheelbarrow driving styles. Very few people have set foot in Hawkwood in the last three autumns, and managed to leave without being pressed into peeling parcel tape from cardboard boxes, or schlepping a barrowful of green waste up a slippery slope. All to a soundtrack of bird song, heavy breathing, and laughter.

The Entrance Field, its beautifully darkened skin streaked green with agricultural mustard and cavallo nero, now stands as a monument to People Power. Of all the powers that be, this one holds my hopes for the future.

 

 

 

Picking Patient Peppers

The changes have been ringing around the glasshouse this last couple of weeks. The sheer green curtains of tomatoes and beans – seasonal furniture – have been drawn away, and we are reduced to the slight carpet of winter salads.

The tomatoes have been a particular triumph of interior design this year, situated as they have been in the north bed of the West Wing, peering, directly and curiously, in on the organised chaos that is the nursery office. So throughout the season, as the workers have gone about their admin, the cordons have crept up the view, ultimately filling it and pressing their red cheeks against the glass, like out-of-time Christmas trees with bawbels across the room. The room that is barer now, no matter what screen saver we might load onto the computers.

From difficult beginnings, the “Kew Blue” climbing french beans (beans which, our Parisian volunteer Paco assures me, the French seldom eat) quickly screened off the potting benches from the rest of the glasshouse, had a fine year, and were received well wherever they went. As we unwound the crispening haulm from their string supports,  we were able to retrieve enough ripe seed for planting next year;  some for eating as a pulse – for ourselves if not the market; and a few for seed swaps, to get this rare and beautiful heritage cultivar disseminated wider.

The only  survivors from the sub-tropics are the peppers, which just keep on, slowly but surely, until the hard frosts come. The sweet peppers have been in the wars: rats gorged themselves on them for a while, and blossom end rot has been an ongoing problem, in spite of redoubling our efforts to get the irrigation levels right. So yields have been low and some time ago I largely wrote them off, deciding to focus time and attention on more promising candidates.

Then last week, on the last note of the tomatoes’ swan song, the peppers piped up with a good crateful of red fruit to brighten the farmers’ market stall on a chilly Sunday in November.

Autumn, or rather, every season in the garden brings such reminders of how fundamental  patience, alongside responsiveness, is in this game.  And this was one of the subtexts of OrganicLea’s tenth birthday party and awards ceremony last week. Introducing the awards , Clare likened the project’s growth to that of an apple tree: we are now  fruiting, but only after much patient plodding and formative pruning. It also takes a long time to grow old friends, as they say, and there were a heart-warming number of those in evidence on the night. At the Occupy London Stock Exchange on Tuesday night, Reverend Billy preached on the “radical patience” required to build communities of resistance.

Maybe time is on our side after all.

 

No Has-Bean

“An old man is setting a row of broad beans. So small a row, so shakily, dibbing a hole for each by jiggling a twig in the ground until it has made a space large enough. His allotment runs to the narrow verge between the cliff of chalk and the sunk road; right on the edge of an arm of the cove where the lorrries enter. Balanced up there he sets his broad beans, while many shovels eat away at the ground below him. In three months they have taken this huge bite out of the hill: it will take three months from now for his beans just to be in bloom. Once he was a ploughman driving a team over a hill. Now, shakily on this little remnant of allotment, he sets a few beans. Because it is the time of year: it is time to sow beans”.

- Adrian Bell, Men Of The Fields, 1936

I mean to enrich, rather than make light of, the above quotation, when I say that, whilst the myriad of diverse gardening philosophies and techniques can appear bewildering, one basic line in the loam can be drawn: there are those that sow their broad beans before winter, and those that set them after it. My old man is of the latter school, whereas I have since gone over to the dark side.

This week, the focus of energy at Hawkwood makes one of those decisive seasonal shifts, from nurturing annual plants to maintaining  and developing the woody plant stock and garden infrastructure. Good timing, if I say so myself, for a punctuation mark in the form of a week’s leave. So I return to the family home, and a concerted attack on the ivy choking the old Prunus hedges. Somehow, though, I couldn’t clock out without getting a first sowing of “SuperAquadulce” beans into the Old Kitchen Garden.

When I was growing up, I spent most of my time in the front garden, where ball sports were permitted. The back garden, in contrast, was put down to vegetables, fruit and herbs. Every main meal would have some homegrown component: perpetual spinach fresh from the ground, or summer fruits back from the freezer. There was no fanfare, this was just something you did. If you had a bit of ground, it was – and remains – simple common sense to utilise a portion of it for the kitchen.

Now us kids have flown, my mum continues to rise to the challenge of ensuring the bounty of plums, apples and goosegogs are picked, stewed, frozen and consumed just in time for the next annual round of picking. The old man, on the other hand, has in recent times made into a New Years’ ritual, the declaration, “well, I’m giving up on the garden this year”. Each year, given his waning health, it seems a reasonable decision. Each year, as spring peers closer in, a packet of bean seed appears from nowhere on the sideboard, then you’ll spot a few pots in a makeshift cold frame or a string line erected out the back, annotated with the label “BBEAN FEB”. No fanfare, no U-Turn, it’s just what you do.

What unites the two sides in the Great Bean Divide is that they both regard the sowing of these Vicia faba as a rite of passage. It’s either the very end, or the very start, of the season. And either way, when it’s time, it’s time. Seize the day.

Lost And Found

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race” – HG Wells

There is something uniquely wonderful about bicycles, and Hawkwood Community Nursery depends on them for transportation of many of its workers and produce. Yet I believe this sense of redemption expressed by HG can be experienced by gazing at any well made, human powered tool. Secateurs, for instance.

I pretty much always have a pair about my person when on site. To the casual observer, wearing a blade in a holster whilst performing admin tasks may seem like an affectation. But if I were to disarm, invariably I would soon find myself in the garden or glasshouse, naked: in nature, there’s always something in need of a passing prune.

I use Felco No.8s. There’s a pair I’ve had for eight years or so. They are mainly used for harvesting cut-and-come-again salads. Some folk use scissors for this task, but then you can’t also use scissors for fruit tree pruning, clearing paths of bramble runners, severing cabbage heads, executing slugs, slicing cucumbers, opening parcels, cutting wire, scoring benchmarks, tightening jubilee clips, shortening irrigation pipe AND hammering in metal stakes. To be fair, you can’t really use secateurs for the latter either, though a brave attempt to do so has lent my pair its distinctive appearance. Such scarring has, as in all human-tool romances, deepened our bond. The point comes when a piece of equipment feels akin to an extension, if not a part, of one’s own body. Some might say that’s a good point to try making do without.

This summer, I lost my Felcos. I’ve dropped them, and misplaced them, many times before, but this time they never came back when they were called. It may be foolish to grieve over inert material objects but, to lose something you are –literally – attached to, can only be a loss. And with it, I lost my sense of place in the garden. For, after my senses, almost equal to my hands, by-pass pruners are my main instrument of interaction.

I had to buy another pair of No.8s. Brilliant, but they felt like an expensive, glitzy parody of the Old Faithfuls. Still, they cut lambs lettuce keen enough, and began to warm to my hand as the sun lowered into the October mist.

This Thursday in the Entrance Field, sowing field beans, performing a final weed and tidy, picking through the old squash bed. Whose leaves, once so broad and green, now dry and shriveled, shrunk to reveal three missed orange  fruit, and the exposed red and silver – and new rusty mottling – of my original gardeners’ best friend, back from the dead.

Mourn not for the end of summer! here, at least,  it took a bit of death to retrieve something precious.

A Light Chilli

The season’s gone out in a blaze of glory: thirty degrees of roasting October. Across the country, folk seized the summer swansong by the throat, getting out to light barbeques, jump into water, or just do a spot of beer gardening. Thankfully, the mutterings of a tiny minority of misery gutses, moaning about their winter salads bolting prematurely, were not able to dampen the festivities.

I’m not proud to be that guy, though I’m now pleased to report that, whilst the heat has not been typically autumnal, the misty dews have: keeping the soil moisture levels up and helping to stem the feared splitting of leaves to the flowering side.

Plus, as any other New Town boy could tell you, it’s all roundabouts. And swings. The tomatoes keep rolling out of the glasshouse like spilt drops of sun, and the Indian summer has coloured the cheeks of many of the pot-grown chillies. The latter are a sideline that have taken up far more of my attention this year than sidelines are really entitled to. But after the January trip to Mexico, I returned a hot head, determined to make Hawkwood a Centre of Chilli Excellence.

The Mexican “Jalapeno”, the “Hungarian Hot Wax” and “Ring of Fire” (a feisty little number, weighing in at 80,000 “Scoville Heat Units” (SHUs)), are expected to do well, under protection, in Southern England, and so they have. This week they were abundant and red-ripe, as Jazz and I picked to fulfill the box scheme’s annual spice allowance. But now, the more marginal cultivars are starting to ignite, like “Serrano”, brought back from the highlands around Puebla, now close to cropping in our little London valley. At 8,000 SHUs, it’s mild enough to have room to pack some flavour with its punch, and  some Mexicans eat it raw as you or I would an apple.

Rising up the scale is  Scotch Bonnet “Safi”, and Shazida’s Bengali variety, a birds eye type. Ready, but we haven’t yet dared to. Only the “Chocolate Habanero” looks in danger of failing to provide any decent fruit whatsoever. Our headline act, “Bhut Jolokia”, officially the world’s hottest pepper at over one million SHUs (about half the strength of pepper spray), are rising by the day. Still green, but it’s only a matter of time…

From being pots in the corner, dwarfed to insignificance by the summer beans and cucurbits, the glassshouse is now all about these bright little capsicums. There’s something about sliding into the year’s dusk with flames in our eyes and fires in our bellies. And, to misquote the Dalai Lama, if you think you’re too small to make a difference, try eating a raw chilli.

Autumn Leaves

So much seasonal excitement that it’s easy to take some things, like your heart and your breath, for granted. That’s what this time is for: Autumn Equinox. Harvestide. A time of thanksgiving for the many wonderful people and plants that have appeared at the nursery and given their all. This equinox, I choose a perch above the West Bank salad terrace as my “sit spot” to reflect on the fading growing season.

It’s not the most picturesque location. Tucked at the lower end of the site, it doesn’t command the sweeping forest and cityscape views of the vineyard or Poets Corner above the Entrance Field. There’s still a lot of dirty black plastic keeping the horsetail down. And the concrete paths that define the terraces, a legacy of the council bedding bays, lend the space a harder, more artificial flavour than the curving swards of the Orchard or Old Kitchen Garden.

But it’s those same cement slabs and level terra firma that made the West Bank the obvious choice for intensively managed,  garden scale,  raised beds of leaves.

Here, on Tuesday mornings, come rain – or, more often – shine, you will find many of the aforementioned wonderful people , carrying out all the planting, weeding, picking and troubleshooting that goes into our signature product – mixed salad leaves.

This year, our mix has featured 37 different leaves; 48 different plant cultivars; and seven different edible flowers. Not all have been triumphs, and still, more often than not, the blend, or the quality, is imperfect. But no excuses or complaints: I can’t imagine a better growing season for salad.

That hot, dry April and May brought out glorious swansongs in the winter lettuce and rocket, whilst getting the spring-sown freshers to maturity, quickly and slug-free. Then, in the ensuing warmth and moisture, they just got on with it. The shade cloths and seep hose barely called into action: all the hard graft Huf, Ed and Sonny put into overhauling the irrigation systemwas repaid elsewhere: under glass, and on thirsty apple maidens.

We’ll be getting salad off the terraces and, even at sub-zero, out of the glasshouse, almost every week of the year. So, as we ponder the dark times ahead, we can console ourselves with the thought that the young chicories, mizunas, endives, winter purslanes et al will be a constant source of freshness through the winter; a bridge between the lost summer and the distant horizon of spring; colour in the absence of broadleaves and flowers.

Cold snaps will make their texture tougher, but also convert some of their starches into sugars. Autumn and winter: I’ll take them hard, sweet, dependable: and be thankful.