On the edge of success

A picture speeded up; summer’s exudation of greenery – leaves, tendrils, stalks, flowers, fruit, pods, tubers and all I define as weeds – burgeoning, profuse, like descriptions of far greater heat in Lampedusa's novel of Sicily which I read long long ago - the sun like a lion, the oestrus mares in the palace stables. It makes winter scenery unimaginable – as in winter, this summer abundance is remote. Yet I’m not content. 

The pleasure of my allotment is being shared with a snails, slugs and caterpillars. Pigeons and magpies drop in to enjoy the feast. On a Facebook site devoted to allotments the administrator has been asked to censor the next member who posts a clip of killing slugs; 

Yet again certain people still find great pleasure in posting slug and snail killing pictures. You should be band!!!! You know who you are and so do we. There is no need for it. Personally I don't want see It!! And sure that most other people don't want to either. Thought we had moved on!!! Admin need to step in.

We’ve had human thieves on Victoria Jubilee. They clambered over the site’s metal railings at night, looking for power tools. Nothing from us, since we have none. They borrowed a hammer of mine to break into a neighbour’s shed, leaving it on the ground outside. No-one accuses me. They broke into our shed. I’ve repaired their damage. Oliver helped. Winnie restored order inside; tidying their strewing. The police have other priorities. It's mostly forgotten already. 

Instead of just rejoicing inwardly at the progress I’ve made, learning about working an allotment, slowly but steadily transforming unpromising boulder clay, I and other plot-holders inherited in 2010, into something like fertile loam, laboriously eliminating vestiges of the couch grass that invaded the 200 square metre plot, teasing out its nutrient leaching rhizomes, spreading and pegging weed suppressing textile on a grid of paths to make it easy to work on 24 separate beds without standing on working soil, erecting a shed, adding a veranda and extra bamboo supports for a hardy fertile vine, putting up a second hand wood frame greenhouse, designing a large fruit cage that stands up to gales, laying out alternating compost bays, and getting the bees back in abundance, but as Winnie observes now and then “You’re not happy, Simon!” 

I’m overwhelmed by how much I don’t know, having learned from late experience, and reading, that this little plot is as unfathomable as the universe. It’s the site of a universe. 

“Did you know” said my friend Ziggi who works an allotment in London “There are as many micro-organisms in one spoon of soil as people on earth?” 

How on earth – literally – do I gauge what plants need? What different plants need? 

I’ve arrived at a grasp of Ph values in the earth – even bought litmus paper - but I’m stumped when it comes to reckoning how plants and weather, along with chemical, physical, organic composition makes change in the soil through the seasons. Having invested in several tons of black gold two years ago, are parts of the plot too rich now? Some cultivators start again every year, investing in sacks of laboratory collected compost and top soil. I want to know how to maintain the soil’s equilibrium, to keep it working, with minimal recourse to garden centres and internet products pandering to my anxieties like cosmetics to their consumers.
As it is, I am almost convinced now that the site's original boulder clay - described, in a geological survey, as 'natural sandy clay with pebbles', is slowly reasserting itself

The soil on Plot 14 in 2013

 - wormless, cloggy in the wet and tending to produce fist-sized hardened lumps in the dry. Difficult to fork, impossible to spade. I had hoped the soil, treated with compost, especially black gold, some manure and wood chip mulch, would stay as good as it's been the last two years, but I don't believe this is the case. I shall now consider investing in more 'black gold' and even manure if I can get it from a reliable source. 

“Simon! Have faith” urges Winnie

“Yes but look what the birds and slugs have done to the Brussels sprouts that I hoped to get right for Christmas this year. The cauliflowers have bolted again. 

The same’s going to happen to the cabbage. See how all the cherries on both the cherry trees have been taken by birds. The plum and the pear yet again, haven’t even blossomed.”

My friend Ziggi reminds me “Nature lacks uniformity. For three years in a row your tomatoes come in abundance. Then they don’t. It happens.”

But as if this unpredictability, this indeterminacy, weren’t a vexation there’s another challenge. Growing crops and bringing them home when they are needed;...

... when Lin’s prepared to cook them for supper. She can't be doing with gluts. 

“There’s only so much you can parboil and store in the freezer.” 

She doesn’t do chutney and jam - not right now with the time given to caring for her mum. There’s a proportion I can give away – to Amy, Richard; to Jo and John, friends and neighbours.

“You need to grow things in succession” says Lin; this. while I’m still celebrating the abundance of a particular crop.

“What do you expect me to do with this lot?” 
Potatoes and onions tilled on Plot 14 lie in the veg cupboard beside stock Lin's bought from Morrison’s or Lidl; my scruffy vegetables, shedding earth, sitting gawkily beside unflawed produce from over the till. The other day Oliver discovered and harvested a large aubergine...

...His sunflowers have been a success. Winnie's Dennis also grew sunflowers on the plot. When, as requested, he potted up one of these and brought it in to his school, his was so much taller than the other childrens', one small girl cried and Winnie whispered to her son not to show pride. 

In front of the 'sky-blue-white', Simon, Oscar, Oliver and Hannah beside sunflowers on Plot 14 (photo: Guy Hollier)

21st July: I was asked on FB yesterday 'do you follow much of a permaculture approach?'

I strive to understand the term permaculture on a 200 square metre plot. Its far-reaching philosophy and practice, such as I have picked up, makes plot 14 an impossible site on which to observe what approaches the new 'religion' [Google gives me 7,350,000 hits on the word in 0.41 seconds] that long ago my wise stepfather mused would one day attract the world. In permaculture terms I'm 'pre-scientific' - in the cargo cult stage, like those bewildered indigenous peoples, going slightly mad, on first encountering the technologies and unspoken values, of industrial populations. When an apple falls on my head - speaking hypothetically - I'm inclined to curse and rub my head. It takes a genius to be so rudely struck, and, amid the shock and pain, think 'gravity!'
It's true I've divorced my car. I cycle and walk - as much as possible - relying on Lin's car for emergency use. I do not use - since they are anyway forbidden on city plots - Bayer sourced herbicides or insecticides. I strive to compost and recycle amid the detritus of a consuming economy that allows me my cheap flights across Europe and beyond...I strive to understand what gardening interventions are workable in a medium of far greater complexity than I'd grasped when I first worked to prepare my plot with azada and fork, seeing the ground and what grew in it as hostile, understanding as never before the Biblical curse on Adam and Eve '“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” My family - the dearest to me in the world - are thoroughly embedded in the economic life of the present, only some of whose habits and attitudes, chime with the new life that is at the heart of a permacultural way of life. The only book that has ever worked for me - as a route into making sense of the earth - was written under war time conditions in 1945, and explains that environmentally sensible gardening is something that someone like me can do, since I'm not under the pressures placed on someone who must grow vegetables for a living - Gardener's Earth by Stanley Whitehead. I'm ever grateful for directions - further directions - but I suspect they are like the old Irish joke, where a local explains a route in great detail to a puzzled traveller only to end up saying, when sure they've grasped the directions, says "You don't go that way". I've come too far 'that way' to be very pleased about starting again 'the right way'. I'd almost rather keep banging my head against the wall - 'kicking against the pricks'. I approach my gardening almost as a penance and a therapy rather than as a seriously thoughtful steward of the land - which would perhaps make me a permaculturist. Your question is a good one. 

Digging the plot in 2012. Intended as a 'before' clip. 

Slugs

I've known slugs forever. They are interesting, sometimes exquisite, creatures - tweed patterned, perfect-pitch black; outsiders that now and then come indoors; disturbing to tread on one with a bare foot. Οnly since I've had an allotment has my relationship with them become personal - especially in a year notorious for their depredations on kitchen gardens - in this case on my cabbages. Their job in the order of things is to be 'decomposers', but too many of them are decomposing things we humans want to eat first.

An otherwise successful sequence of crops has been riddled. I'm privileged to be able in my old age to be working a plot on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments next to Handsworth Park in Birmingham.
This is my second year since the site opened in June 2010. The grubbing up of deep weeds, breaking up and turning the soil, laying of paths, arrival of a shed, sowing and harvesting a soil improving crop of potatoes and occasional scything of verges has happened. The hard work was what I expected. There's no question that I'm making progress - in part self-taught, in part tutored by more knowledgeable neighbours on the site. My back aches less after digging and weeding because the soil works easier and because I've become better at working with fork and spade and hoe.
In recent months, as well cropping as potatoes, I've been bringing home runner beans, broad beans, spring onions, brussel sprouts, onions, spinach, and - I'd like to claim - cabbages but for the slugs getting to them first. We're forbidden insecticide and non-organic slug pellets on the allotments - a policy I support - but so wet has been the weather that the organic slug pellets I put down were ineffectual. I couldn't even see the slugs that were causing the problem. Other gardeners complained of them too. This afternoon I picked two cabbages that looked as if they might be complete enough to be cookable. I removed their outer leaves finding slug after slug - often larger ones lodged in the damp spot where the leaves joined the stalk. At last I was seeing the cause of the problem.

CSI slugs

I found at least six slugs before I arrived at a centre that was unnibbled. I then selected a third smaller but well bunched cabbage perforated to the core; took it apart leaf by leaf removing ten slugs.
Andrew Simon, a friend, strolled round. I explained what I was doing with the plot; how it was 'coming along'. We spoke of the dearth of butterflies and watched bees - one solitary crawling drunk in the purple flowerhead of a thistle. I mentioned slugs.
"I put saucers of beer out. The slugs go in. You take them out a drop them into a moderate saline solution. It kills them almost at once."
Earlier Vanley had suggested I put a plastic bag on the soil beside the cabbages
"They crawl under it in the night and you can pick them off the next morning".
Later our friend Denise came round with her great-nephew, Dennis.
"Put out saucers of tinned cat-food. The slugs love it. That'll keep them off your cabbages and you can collect them up when you collect the saucers."
I made a deal with half a dozen slugs that I'd spare them if they spared my vegetables, wrapped them in a leaf and hurled them into the park. A friend in Essex emailed:

But the slugs will find their way back, Simon! and they will lay hundreds of eggs everywhere and they shall hatch into hundreds more for next year. They are hermaphrodite, did you know that? both male and female produce eggs I think. A slug can live three years - and a snail can live 10 years as they have their own houses! Sorry, no room whatever for clemency to slugs, the best I can do is not to kill them with salt which is a revolting death but to squash or spike them instantly. Has to be done!

I made a plea; the place of slugs in the great cycle...thinking of Amos Oz's character Fima conducting interior monologues which, I recall, included reluctance about using the heel of his shoe to bash cockroaches in his messy flat. The action brought to Fima's mind the image of a kneeling man being shot in the head:

...Yes indeed, if they did the job they were created for, we would value them like worms but alas they have fallen into sinful ways and prefer nice new seedlings etc to old stuff.

I've been so pleased to be getting greater control over my plot but I've overlooked the control of pests - especially slugs, so abundant this year. The next harvest, especially root vegetables and brassicas, will be getting far more attention. I will experiment; study the defence of my crops - now that I'm beginning to succeed in growing them.

Photo: Andrew Simon

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Meanwhile 2000 kilometres away in Ano Korakiana.....

Το βράδυ της Κυριακής, η Χορωδία μας οργάνωσε συνεύρεση των μελών της στο εκκλησάκι του, πάνω από τη Βενετιά, για το «κλείσιμο» της χορωδιακής χρονιάς.Οι σπιτικοί μεζέδες και το ντόπιο κρασί συνόδευσαν τους τρεις κιθαρωδούς και τις πολυφωνικές μελωδίες, έως αργά. Παρόντες και οι «δάσκαλοι» Γιώργος Άνθης,  Ευτυχία Βογιατζόγλου και Πέλυ Κοντογούρη.

Sunday evening in Ano Korakiana

This Sunday evening members of our choir came together in the courtyard at Ag. Siderou above Venetia (the eastern end of the village) for the 'final' concert of the year to enjoy mezes and village wine accompanied until late by three troubadours; everyone singing. The 'tutors' Georgios Anthis, Eftekhia Vogiatzoglou and Pely Kontogouris were there.