17/04/2010 by andy.

If you live in the UK, or anywhere in much of northern Europe for that matter, chances are you’re enjoying a fine and unusually quiet morning today. The reason for this is the closure of your airspace to civilian air traffic, leaving the sky empty for the first time since KLM commenced operations in 1920. Thanks to an Icelandic volcano, we have our first glimpse of a world without air travel.

Under the flightpath at Heathrow, householders are finding out what it’s like to be able to leave windows open; in Manchester, one anxious lady complained to local radio that she’s had to leave her radio on loud because the quiet is scaring her; and in many supermarkets the shelves are already emptying of perishable items as supplies of airfreighted food dry up. Since 95% of us shop at supermarkets*, it’s the last one that should really scare you. If you’re one of the people who scoffed at Lord Cameron’s ‘nine meals from anarchy’ observation in 2007, it may be time to think again.

Predictions about how long the ash cloud will last vary, and media coverage still seems to be concentrating on the poor souls whose holidays are being disrupted, but it’s worthwhile reflecting that the last eruption at Eyjafjallajokull lasted for two years (1821-1823). What would it mean for Europe if chunks of airspace had to be closed every time the wind blew from the north for a few days?

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, going green is a journey, not a destination. If your own journey has not yet included growing some of your own food, or at least starting to eat seasonally, then this might be a good time to consider it.

*Source: UK Food Standards Agency, 2001

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02/04/2010 by andy.

Aiding carbon sequestration, providing a valuable growing medium and reducing landfill all in one, compost making is the original Black Art and local councils are very keen that more of us should be doing it. But what makes the difference between two hundred litres of dark crumbly goodness and a bin full of smelly old muck? Nicky Scott breaks it down for us.

I’m terrible at making compost - there, I’ve said it. It’s not for want of trying, though. Within my first few years of composting I’d read five books on the subject, and each one left me more confused than the last. Would this book be my salvation?

After a fairly technical and slightly daunting introduction the book settles down into the familiar instructions of how to make good compost. To my surprise, however, the how-to chapter is very short at just six pages which, to be frank, is probably all the space that the guts of this very simple process needs. Other authors have taken half a book to cover the same ground (perhaps that’s why it can seem so confusing) but Scott pushes on immediately to discuss types of bins, making leaf mould and composting with worms. There is also a detailed section on how to use your finished compost (an option curiously overlooked in some books), including simple recipes for making up potting mix, cutting mix and seedling compost.

Throughout, Scott takes a refreshing pros-and-cons approach which points out the drawbacks of each option as well as the benefits, and although commercial options are discussed thoroughly the build-it-yourself option is never overlooked. In keeping with Green Books’ ethical stance there are also sections on large-scale composting, community composting schemes and composting in schools. There is also an A to Z which, although perhaps not terribly useful given that the book is indexed, is worth looking through for a few gems that weren’t included elsewhere in the text (such as how to compost old cooking oil, and the fact that custard is one of the most difficult materials to compost).

Unlike the other composting titles I have read, Scott’s unusually thoughtful treatment of this well-trodden subject has not made me feel enthused and ashamed that I am not composting every scrap of material from my home and garden. Instead I feel enlightened and ready to replace my monster bin with something more suitable, to rethink my worm bins, and to take a more realistic attitude to how I make compost. There’s a difference.

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01/04/2010 by andy.

… I think.

So! More than a year of work comes to a close - the second book is finished. It’s been retitled - it’s now How to Grow Food in your Polytunnel, which is hardly going to tempt the Booker, methinks (although at least it won’t attract the attention of the bods who give out the Diagram Prize). I don’t mind, really - I think the title and cover of non-fiction books are really the territory of publishers and marketing folks, and just try not to get in their way much. They know their job, I’m sure.

I’m a bit shell-shocked tonight, since the actual writing of the book has taken two months, including two weeks of round-the-clock slog at the end, which seems to be an inevitable consequence of collaboration. Or maybe it’s just me being pants, who knows?

I took Witchypoo and the Sons out for dinner last night to celebrate the End Of The Book, and then had to come back and work to midnight to actually finish it (the 31st was the deadline and we got it in 20 minutes before midnight) - but I have a bit more time for other things now. I’ll get a book review up in the next few days which I’ve been feeling guilty about for a while, and then I’m going to do some things that I’ve not had much time for lately like playing with children, watching TV and sleeping.

Oh, and working in the polytunnel. Even that’s been neglected…

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09/02/2009 by andy.

So. Spring is just around the corner (all evidence to the contrary) and I’ve just taken delivery of a truckload of compost which is currently hiding under a tarpaulin on the driveway, awaiting my pleasure. Compost isn’t cheap to buy in, largely because of haulage charges, but I’ve got no choice this year; I have an area of about 20′ (7m) square to bring into cultivation in a hurry and various patches of ground where I’m still trying to build up fertility. Then there’s the regular stuff – the raised and flat vegetable beds, and the polytunnel. But herein lies the problem of no-dig gardening; the Hollow Garden itself only produces enough compost to cap the rasied beds. If I’m going to be able to practice no-dig sustainably, I need to take a serious look at how I make compost.

There are two sorts of composting people, apparently; utility composters like myself who make compost as a way of recycling kitchen and garden waste, and fertility composters who see compost as an end rather than a means. Gardeners who are lucky enough to live very close to a ready source of organic material (spent hops and coffee ground are favourite old chestnuts from permaculture books) can compost these, but there are no obvious green waste-producing businesses around here so I’m going to have to get creative.

Growing green manures will only take me so far. We already compost every scrap of kitchen and garden waste, except the woody stuff (which goes into the dead hedge) and weedy material. Weedy stuff needs hot composting, and up to now I’ve not been running a hot heap. This has to change, as my next obvious source of organic material is the abundant supply of chocolate-covered sludge formed by the action of traffic on the edges of the shared roadway that links the Hollow Garden with the rest of the world. Made up of leaf fall and weedy growth, it’s lovely stuff - but full of viable seeds.

A regular hot heap is, I’m afraid, not for me. Ingredients have to be collected in piles and kept dryish until they are mixed, and the heap mixed several times to keep the heat up for as long as possible. In my heap things arrive as and when, and mixing largely happens to other people - but there is another way to end up with a hot heap, and that’s to add fresh manure balanced with untreated sawdust (next to free from a nearby sawmill). And the handiest source around is…

Well, have a look at this book and you’ll see what I mean. A little unplumbing and a modicum of carpentry, and we should be in business; that’s my target for 2009!

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19/01/2009 by andy.

Dealing with rodents in the home is part and parcel of life. Way back when Ceres first popped a handful of grains into her satchel</a>, there was a mouse watching her from the shadows and thinking ‘A-ha.’* Ever since then, mice and rats have kept us company everywhere we’ve gone (except perhaps to Marks and Spencers, where they don’t encourage that sort of thing).

You might think that having a cat would put a stop to rodent problems forever, but I’m afraid you’d be wrong. Infestations do tend to be very short when there’s a decent moggie around, but they also tend to be rather more frequent as they have a habit of catching mice outside and bringing them in for a bit of a chat and a spot of tea. And then losing them. Witness Number Two Cat sitting on the upstairs landing last week, looking a bit perplexed.

What was I doing again? his expression said. I’m sure I was doing something a minute ago. Was I looking for something? …oh, never mind. It’ll be teatime in a minute.

On Friday morning, Number Two Son pointed out a superficial wound on his big toe, in tones that implied it was somehow my fault (for some reason it always seems to be my fault). I cleaned said toe and advised him to stop running around in bare feet, for the child is a hobbit. It then transpired that the poorly toe had woken him up, and that he had seen a mouse in his room.**

I checked, and sure enough there were signs of recent mousy activity; the draw-string for his blinds (nylon, inedible) had been nibbled on and there were spots of mouse juice on nearby surfaces. The most notable casualty of the incursion though was that large patches of skin had been chewed off N2S’s half-finished model dragon. The skin was a synthetic clay; clearly this was a pretty desperate mouse. I set a trap with a tiny bit of chocolate in it, and waited for the crack. It generally takes around 20 minutes.

But nothing happened. Odd, thought I. Perhaps mouse is sleeping.

Twelve hours later and with still nary a mouse in the trap, it was time for Number Two Son to go to bed. He was a bit wary about going to sleep with a potential mouse in the room, and I was jollying him along trying not to make a big deal about it - until I swept the duvet off his bed to give it a good shake.

Ah. Mouse is dead, in bed, mafia-style. All becomes clear - the wretched thing must have crept into N2S’s bed for purposes unknown, got rolled on, and bitten his toe as a last gesture of defiance. It’s not the first time mice have bitten back either - so moggies, beware!

*And unknown to the mouse, a cat was watching it and thinking ‘O-ho.’

**Behold the homesteading child, who sees a mouse in his room and waits until morning to alert a grown-up; a similar incident when I was his age resulted in me declaring a state of national emergency, causing my father to come upstairs armed with a shovel, and with trousers tucked into his socks, while our large and highly-trained guard dog hid under the kitchen table until someone told him it was safe to come out.

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18/01/2009 by andy.

Okay, so. It’s odd, but since I’ve had more time to write I actually seem to be doing less of it than previously - instead I find myself trying to undo the evils wrought by five years of not having time to finish anything, ever. I’m answering e-mails, filing paperwork, posting seeds to people, and generally Catching Up. This can by definition only be a temporary state of affairs, unless I move seamlessly onto Taking Too Much On again, which is always a possibility. Last night was a case in point.

Last night was, in fact, a fairly large county-wide meeting concerning a new piece of UK legislation, the Sustainable Communities Act. This has two prongs; the first is that it forces Whitehall (the seat of our hideously powerful, permanent and unelected Civil Service) to publish details of what exactly it spends our money on, broken down into areas. This starts in April, and it’s going to be one of those things that would be funny if only it wasn’t so damned serious.

The second prong is that Citizens’ Panels get to look at this information, and propose changes to the particularly nutty pieces of the fruit cake. That’s not new of course; the new bit is that the local authorities have to reach agreement with the panels about these proposals, and then central government has to reach agreement with the local authorities. Government can get off the hook using various arguments, but the more local authorities are pressing them on a particular issue the more embarrassing and damaging this will be. There’s the theory, as I understand it. It could be tremendously useful for the Transition movement, but as Whitehall will drag its feet over things and anyway there’s no extra money to fund any of this, it’s likely to be something of a slow-burning fuse.

The reason I mention all this is that, owing to my not stepping back smartly enough when volunteers were called for, I ended up being the token local celebrity at the event and had to make a short speech (The Transition Economy at the Level of a Radish). I’m not used to public speaking but I did OK, and the diarrhoea has nearly stopped now so thanks for asking. What I hadn’t been warned about was that I’d actually be nailed to a podium with the head of the County Council, a local MP, and the head of Local Works who helped to draft the Act. In other words, three chaps who understood what was going on a hell of a lot better than I did. And then people asked us questions for an hour. The next time anyone uses the word panel I will know exactly what it means.

Things went swimmingly for a while as I simply kept my mouth shut, but inevitably questions started to come up that none of the others fancied, so guess who got them? Bingo. Then came a doozie.

“What is the panel’s idea of Utopia?”

A microphone appeared in my hand and I gazed at it stupidly for a moment. “Er…”

Of course, now I realise that I should have just turned the question back on itself. What my idea of Utopia was didn’t matter a damn - it was the questioner’s idea of Utopia that was relevant to the question. I should have just asked him what it was, and then the question would have been useful. But I didn’t think of that at the time - my mind was a blur featuring hammocks, organic fields as far as the eye could see, eternal summer and Scottish fudge. Hey, he asked.

My mouth opened, and then I closed it again. It had been about to say “I strongly suspect that what’s coming will be no-one’s vision of Utopia”, but my mouth has a very long history of saying things that I haven’t told it to, and this simply wasn’t the time or place to bring people down. Instead I opined that we couldn’t just try to turn the clocks back to 1930 but we were going to have to bring parts of that era back, and mentioned working horses as an example. Some of the audience looked baffled.

But I think this may be true. In Cuba’s ’special period’, where they had to reduce their fuel usage in a big hurry because the Soviet Union was no longer exporting to them, they found that tractors quickly became too unreliable for many uses. The problem wasn’t fuelling them - you can reserve fuel for that - it was that when they suffered a minor breakdown you had to wait a hell of a long time for parts to be found and shipped to where they were needed. You can’t reserve fuel for that sort of contingency, you see, and you can’t have a time-critical crop like wheat depending on a machine that only works when it feels like it.

This is only one example, and it may take a long time for it to happen, but the reaction of the audience told me that there’s still a lot of work for the Transition Network to do. The people in that hall were there to discuss an Act which has come into being because our way of life is unsustainable, but a few of them didn’t really seem to grasp that unsustainable actually means ‘not possible to continue’ or ‘doomed in its present form’.

Interesting times, indeed.

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24/09/2008 by andy.

I may not have got most of the infrastructure work I’d hoped to done in the garden this year, owing to awful weather and too much work, but at least I haven’t fallen behind on my planting. On Sunday I finally managed to get the winter planting done for the polytunnel (high tunnel), which will be crucial for the cold weather and for next year’s hungry gap (that’s the name given to the period from March to May, when very few crops are ready to harvest).

One of the problems faced by tunnel growers is the dilemma of summer versus winter planting. Polytunnels are fabulous growing tools, and act pretty much like a greenhouse throughout the summer for a fraction of the price. The trouble is that if you want to, you can still be cutting cucumbers through October, and it could be Hallowe’en before you decide to cut your losses and make chutney out of any tomatoes that didn’t quite make it to ripeness; and by then, of course, it’s too late to plant most things. Harvesting from a high tunnel all year round requires a few compromises.

When you hit the last planting date for the tunnel in your area – and here in Dorset that’s about now – then it’s time to make a few hard choices. On Sunday I took out three melons that were going to achieve nothing more, poor things, and planted corn salad (aka lamb’s lettuce, machê) in their slot. I gave the cucumbers a long, meaningful look before taking all the leaves off to a height of 2′, allowing me to plant rocket – a hugely important ingredient of our winter salads - underneath them.

The remaining tomatoes likewise had their pyjama bottoms stolen before being undersown with vast quantities of spring onions, and so it went on. Other winter planting that got shoehorned in included two types of lettuce, radish, perpetual spinach (pre-grown in modules), peppery mizuna, vast quantities of carrots, a couple of cauliflower, and a few mooli. Everything there will play an important part in our diet through winter and spring (except possibly the mooli, which I should really make more of an effort with). Although the tunnel’s looking very gappy now, getting the autumn planting done is one of the times of the year where I give a happy…

…Ahhhhh.

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