Horticultural

Monbiot joins the allotmenteers

So it turns out that Guardian columnist George Monbiot is an allotmenteer (sorry, I've only just spotted this piece from a while ago). He sounds as if he's gone hell for leather, renting several plots and shelling out for fruit trees, cloches and equipment galore to get started.

I admire his dedication and enthusiasm, but suspect most of us would be a bit daunted by the commitment of time and money required to get his plots up and running so quickly. If you're anything like me, the first couple of years consist of rapid yoyoing between delight at managing to grow something and horror at the amount of work it takes to get the plot in a reasonable shape and keep the rising tide of weeds at bay. I also feel a bit of plot envy: any chance I can borrow your plot, George?!

I personally wouldn't like to plant a lot of fruit trees on my plot because I don't plan to be staying in the area I live in for longer than a few more years. Fruit bushes, on the other hand, I have planted, because they're easier to transplant. My blackcurrants were inherited from my Dad when he moved, and survived the first year in a puddle of water on my badly drained plot. They produced a bumper harvest the following summer. Go figure.

'Banana shallots changed my life'

There's a great piece in the Guardian's Weekend magazine today about a struggling Somerset-based farmer who switched to growing "unusual" vegetables  - most of which will be familiar to allotmenteers - as a new way of making a living. It's inspiring stuff.

And who knew that cornflowers are edible?

Blooming in the shadows

I've been meaning to link to this since the weekend: a n inspirational piece in the Guardian's Weekend mag by Barney Bardsley about how her allotment provided sanctuary and inspiration when her husband became ill:

The garden was a blank canvas when we arrived, just a few wallflowers in narrow borders around a patch of grass. I could fill it with anything I wanted, and did. Gradually, the tiny shrubs I had bought so haphazardly, always on the cheap, began to grow and flourish. From the start, I broke all the rules. Small garden, small plants? I have monsters in my borders: bracing rosemary and spiky purple berberis; palm-leaved rheum and towering plume poppy; copper-leaved cotinus; bamboo and billowing butterfly bush. Also, two apple trees, a sumach, a little weeping pear tree; an arch and a pergola covered with the scrambling excesses of ivy, Clematis montana, honeysuckle and red jasmine, which the bees adore. Everything jostles for space, creating a shade-filled, secret jungle, no more than 20 yards by 10. Whenever the walls of the house close in on me, this garden has offered fragrance and freshness of spirit. It has set me free.

 

Here's your reading list, chaps. Enjoy

• Pass the Miracle Gro - Guardian feature about an abandoned allotment being turned into a theatre
• Catering with a conscience - Guardian feature about restaurants that source food locally
• Bird's-eye views - Guardian feature (it's a hat trick) about green roofs
• Trouble at the allotments over £7m windfall - Telegraph story about stubborn allotmenteers who are refusing to sell their plots to developers (registration needed)
• Surviving the summer without a garden - BBC Online

Biodynamics

I don't know much about biodynamic farming, but I know a lot more than I did having read this article in today's Guardian.

I don't think I'll give it a go, though. It's enough hard work sticking to organic principles.  And I suspect that burying a cow horn filled with manure in my garden would only help to enhance my reputation with my neighbours as - how can I put it politely - a little eccentric.

Links roundup number one

I've been meaning for some time to write a regular list of gardening articles that have caught my attention. Here's the first:

Foster's Online (US)- gardening a harrowing experience
What happens when you undertake a horticultural marathon

Belfast Telegraph: the heat is on
How to keep your greenhouse in tiptiop condition in hot weather

Telegraph: the lady is a champ
Using ladybirds as a biological control

Guardian: the expert gardener
The superlative Christopher Lloyd on creating a tropical garden

Organic Gardening (US) - tomato care
How to get a healthy tomato crop - organically

Is this kind of list useful to you? I won't be writing it in place of any of my own advice or other writing, but as an extra Horticultural feature to help out you, faithful readers.  Let me know what you make of it ...

The Hugh Romantics

I read this piece in the travel section of the Guardian about fans of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall ("the Hugh Romantics") and realised that Simon Mills, the writer, had well and truly got my number:

To them Hugh was the anti-Harriot (as in Ainsley). The real deal. He was, they explained, everything that is good about meat-eating, welly-wearing libertarianism - an effortlessly affable and unassailably aspirational, hand-reared and organically fed figurehead who, having upped sticks from the grey city, was now pursuing an enviably gluttonous, simple life of big meals and big skies in Thomas Hardy country.

He's right. I do envy HFW's lifestyle: reading his first River Cottage book has made me yearn for some chickens (I was also inspired by the funny Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance); oh yes, and a huge vegetable plot and a cavernous kitchen with an aga and a few sheep and ... well, you know what I mean.

The reality for most of us is that we simply couldn't do our jobs if we lived in a rural idyll like Hugh, although that may change as technology advances. But in the meantime, and unless and until I win the lottery (must start buying some tickets ...) I have enjoyed incorporating small parts of Hugh's approach into my own way of doing things: his glutney recipe is an essential part of making good use of my summer produce, for instance. And one day, when I have a bigger garden, I will have some chickens.

Garden dreams

The problem with reading the fabulous Monty Don on why quinces are wonderful is that it makes me hanker after a garden large enough to accommodate a few fruit trees...