The Idler

A Country Diary - 44

24 April 2006

EVERY NOW AND THEN you read a book which is so inspiring and such a pleasure to read that you feel impelled to buy multiple copies, give them to your friends, and stride down Barnstaple High Street shouting “read this!”. You want to tell your girlfriend, the postman, the landlord and your neighbour. Well, I’ve just read The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, and I urge everyone to buy or borrow a copy without delay. Published in 1978, it’s one of the books that inspired the Permaculture movement. It is a description of one man’s simple farming methods during a period when farming in Japan, as in this country, was becoming more and more industrialised and chemical-based. He calls his approach “do-nothing farming”, and it really is the idler’s way. Instead of using chemical fertilisers or digging or ploughing, or even bothering to make compost, he simply spreads straw and poultry manure around the rice and barley, and lets clover grow in the winter. He just throws vegetable seeds onto the ground higgledy-piggledy and lets them get on with it. Following these methods his yields of rice and barley are equal to anything produced either by chemical farming or by traditional farming, and the quality is superior. His thesis is that most of the world’s problems arise from man’s insatiable urge to meddle, tamper and improve. Much better, he argues, and much easier, to let nature get on with it, and therefore to refrain from interference as far as possible. He goes far beyond the idea of organic farming and the all the try-hard effort that various farming systems involve. His system is a no-system, and like the Tao, he goes beyond trying to do anything or making an effort and instead just lets things happen.

FUKUOKA’s approach to life, a sort of joyful nihilism, came to him when he was a 25 year old chemist, working by day and gadding about in the nightclubs by night. All this activity made him ill and he was confined to hospital. On his release he took to night-wandering, and one night he collapsed and experienced a flash of insight, which he puts into the following words: “Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.” Proceeding from this basic thought came his theory of “do-nothing” farming: sit back and watch nature do the work.

A NEW SET of hens are installed. We have a Dorking cock called Combusken, and three hens which are called Blaziken, Torchic 1 and Torchic 2. Any readers with young sons will instantly recognise that these are all names of chicken-like characters from Pokemon, the Japanese trading card game. Dorkings as a breed are an ancient one, apparently dating from Roman times. They are not copious layers but are a hardy breed that will last long, and according to Fearnley-Whittingstall, they make good eating. Meanwhile our neighbour has rescued ten battery hens and installed a cock called Helleborus. This means that there are hens and eggs everywhere.

THERE IS also straw and poultry manure everywhere. I suddenly realised that everything we needed to begin to implement the spirit of The One-Straw Revolution is on our doorstep. I gathered up barrowfuls of straw from the floor of the hen-house, and spread it all around the strawberries and fruit trees on the vegetable patch. I also spread it around my new lettuce and strawberry bed. I dug out a ring of turf around a tree stump on the front lawn, and forked in a couple of barrowloads of straw and cow manure. Then I transplanted nine strawberry plants into this ring. In this task I was helped by our visitor, Mr John Moore. Well, when I say “helped”, he actually just watched me work while he leaned on gates, smoked roll-ups and made sarcastic quips about me not being an idler. I suppose he didn’t want to get his white suit and kid leather loafers dirty., Anyway, there is now a nice ring of strawberry plants, and in between each of these I have planted a lettuce seedling, and over each lettuce seedling I have placed a jam jar for a cloche. So far this has been a success and the seedlings are undamaged by slugs. My idea is that the lettuces will come out at a point when the strawberry plants need the space. And in the meantime this practically motivated move has the welcome side-effect of looking quite pretty. It has inspired me to dig up more of the lawn and plant more vegetables and salad.

HAVING FELT LIBERATED by The One-Straw Revolution, I wandered up to the vegetable patch with a pile of seed packets and no particular plan. I sowed a short row each of radish, turnip, beetroot and carrot. At the bottom of the tin there was an assortment of seeds which had fallen out of the packets over the years. So I simply scattered them on the surface of one of the beds, and look forward to seeing what sort of vegetable jungle - if any - emerges. I inspected the peas and was delighted to find that they have all germinated. So I dug a second trench and filled it with unrotted waste from the compost heap, and covered it with a layer of soil. Then I scattered some more pea seeds on top. I had a packet of sunflower seeds, so I went around making little holes in random spots and dropping one or two seeds in each hole. I sowed a few among the potatoes along the side bed. I sowed some among the weeds at the foot of the wall. I sowed some near the composting bins. It will be interesting to see where they come up and how they fare. Finally, I went around making little holes with a finger and dropping leaf beet seeds in them. I’ve already forgotten where they are so again we’re in for some nice surprises come the summer. Idle farming here we come.

THE FRUIT TREES and raspberries all appear to be growing. They have all sprouted and now boast a few little leaves. I put more straw and manure around the base of each plant. Despite his loud vocal protests, I managed to get John Moore to help me lug a load of uncomposted nappies form one side of the patch to the other so with any luck they do not wreck the view. “The gypsy encampment” is what my mother called our place on her last visit three weeks ago. In between hoovering and telling the children to go to bed, she helped turn the Green Man, which she called the “worst pub in the world” into a music room. We had taken delivery of a great old honky-tonk piano and put it in the pub. My mother cleaned it out and we put down some of that coconut matting flooring. Now it looks quite smart and what’s more, there is a view out to the sea from its little old wooden window. Now I love to sit there in the evening, with a bottle of Adnams, and a roll-up, and gently strum my ukulele as the sun goes down. Yes, the ukulele. I was inspired by a correspondent to take up this easy little instrument, and I was given one, costing just ten pounds, for my birthday. To add the joy, the brand name is “Lazy”. Once you get the hang of the tuning, they’re terribly easy to play and they’re the idler’s instrument par excellence: cheap, portable and fun. Don�’t get me an i-Pod, get me a ukulele. We are going to go big on ukuleles in the Autumn issue of the Idler.

POSTSCRIPT

LAST WEEK we heard the very sad news that our friend Jago Eliot has died aged 40. “Only the good die young,” they say, and Jago was one of the good guys, a great supporter, patron and instigator of avant-garde cultural activity and weirdness. A positive force, in other words, in the tradition of grand and generous bohemians.

A Country Diary - 43

5 April 2006

AT LONG LAST Spring has arrived. We were beginning to think it would never come. The winter seemed to last for five months. It is still a bit cold, in fact there was a frost last night, and my toes are cold, but the sun is shining.

WE HAD a very enjoyable and instructive visit in March from Permaculture teacher and Idler gardening writer Graham Burnett and his wife Debbie. Permaculture is really about evolving your own set of rules for growing things and for running your everyday life in a way that suits you. It is a low work, low impact, and high yield approach to life. One simple suggestion Graham made was to keep the plants that are likely to be attacked by slugs, like lettuces and strawberries, as near the front door as possible. Because they are near the kitchen you will look after them better. If they are sited away on the veg patch you might not bother to go up there for a few days in a row and then the slugs have the time to wreck all your work. “The best fertiliser is the gardener’s shadow,” the Chinese say, so keep high-maintenance things near where you are. Graham also suggested turning a little bit of wasteland near the pond into a fruit garden, a suggestion which I have put to our landlord and to which he has agreed.

WITH SOME OLD friends I took three days off and walked the Coleridge Way, from Nether Stowey to Porlock. The walk is around 36 miles and we stayed at B&Bs and pubs along the route. It takes you across the Quantocks, where the Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Thelwall were wont to ramble in the late 18th century. There was less a pastoral vibe to our jaunt, however, than a piss-taking one, as well as a hell of a lot of good chat. What you are really doing on a walking holiday is talking and thinking and what a luxury that is. On the final day, which involved a lot of climbing, it rained and rained and we trudged through deep mud and finally our boots became sodden. We arrived in Porlock exhausted. But it didn’t matter: in such good company, anything would have been enjoyable. In fact, we could almost as happily been taking a tour of the roundabouts of Slough in the driving sleet, although to wander through the pretty Somerset villages, to stroll among the gambolling new born lambs on the sloping combes and to stop off at local hostelries for pints of local ale did without doubt enhance the experience.

I HAVE STARTED sowing. It’s difficult to get the timing right. A friend nearby said, “yes, we’ve got our potatoes in, red peppers, onions, shallots, carrots�” and so on. I think he may even have mentioned pineapples. So I thought I’d better get a move on. But then another friend said to me as we waited to our collect our kids form school: “oh no, you don’t want to be sowing now. We’re a month behind everyone now.” Well, I sowed some carrots, beetroot and peas and bunged some garlic cloves into the ground. Then of course there was a frost. Does that mean that my peas will die? Someone tell me.

ONCE A MONTH the local rubbish dump opens. We generally take some old stuff along to dump. But then we come back with someone else’s rubbish. The man in charge of the dump has a little side line selling rubbish to rubbish-dumpers. This time he had five nice big sash windows for sale. Presumably someone had dumped them after having their windows replaced with those horrible plastic things that are the scourge of Blighty, our house included. We bought them for a tenner and I have been using them as cold frames, to heat up the soil for the carrot sowing. Unfortunately, I left one of them leaning against a fence, where it blew over in the wind and smashed into a million pieces. That was unlucky, I thought, and propped up a second window in the same way. The next night, that window blew over and smashed into a thousand pieces. Why can I not learn from my mistakes?

WELL, I’M trying tomatoes again. This time, I am growing just twelve plants, of the beefsteak variety. I’ve realised that I don’t really like tomatoes, at least not those sharp little mouth-burners you get from the supermarket. But those big ones, as found in California and Spain, they are a different thing entirely. So we will see. I’ve also grown some marigolds from seed on the windowsill, the idea being that I will plant them all over the vegetable patch, which, by the way, has become a total eyesore and I’m surprised I haven’t been fined by the local constables. One of the bedrooms from the neighbouring hotel appears to overlook it and surely that customer is going to want their money back, having been sold wonderful views across Exmoor and the sea. For one thing the patch is covered in composting nappies that never composted. It’s really quite disgusting but I can’t quite work out what to do with the unrotted things. Right now I have an plastic bin full of them and the rest are spilling out of a sort of plastic bread tray. They are full of worms, which is good, but I think the worms will need about another ten years to break the nappies down. One idea is to create a wormery. Apparently these are an excellent thing and produce good compost very quickly. That’s what people say, anyway. In the meantime I should maybe plant a hedge around the patch, or get some of those windbreak things. It was Graham’s opinion that my brassica failures could be largely accounted for by wind. One side of the patch is completely unsheltered, and it’s the side that the prevailing wind whistles in. This would have meant that for the entire winter, the brassicas would have been constantly whipped by freezing winds, so it’s no wonder that they didn’t do well, particularly when you take into account the sheep attacks.