The Idler

Country Diary 97

THE VEGETABLE GARDEN continues to thrive. We have feasted endlessly on new potatoes, beetroot, carrots, peas, broad beans, saladings of all sorts and the biggest cabbages you have ever seen. Truly, labor omnia vicit. Now the climbing French beans and the bush beans are beginning to flower. I harvested the last of the broad beans. There were over 20 lbs of them. I podded them, bagged them up, and froze them. Hugh F-W says that they freeze well. And talking of Hugh F-W, I met him last Friday at the Port Eliot Festival. He demonstrated how to bake bread and cook mackerel at your camp fire on stage, and I was his straight man. Hugh was very affable and we made a curiously entertaining double act. I was also able to meet another hero over the weekend, and that was Simon Fairlie, who came to give a scything course as part of the Idler’s Academy. The sight of eight men and women swishing away at the lawns of Port Eliot with their scythes was one to remember. And I learned that I’d been scything all wrong: I’d been hacking away rather than sliding the blade along the surface of the earth.

Everything grows so fast at this time of year that to leave the garden for just a few days means that you return to a wilderness. So I tidied up with the shears. It’s actually amazing how much you can do with a pair of shears, and very quickly too. I edged the paths with the spade and things looked much better. I’m particularly delighted by the parsnip patch. I allowed three or four radish plants to go to seed, and they spread right out over the parsnips, and produced pretty little purple and white flowers. These flowers turned into gorgeous little seed pods, shaped like scimitars. I hope to collect the seeds. It really is truly remarkable, how one seed can produce hundreds or thousands of new ones, and in doing so makes beautiful and unique shapes. The flowers and seed pods of vegetables would make a fascinating area of study in themselves, and in fact I call for a new movement, Vegetable Art, where artists will paint and sculpt from nature’s miraculous creations.

THE HENS HAVE started to lay, and we are getting five or six eggs a day out of ten hens, which ain’t bad. We have also bought ten small hens for meat purposes: it makes sense, while we are keeping hens, to raise our own organic, free range chickens.

VICTORIA HAS PURCHASED a colony of bees, and a nucleus. Roy and Tony came round to install them in their hives, and the whole process went very smoothly. The bees seemed to be unangered by the move, and swiftly started to explore their new habitat. This is Victoria’s second attempt at bee-keeping, the first lot having died over the winter. She is now a soberer and wiser bee-keeper, and will be helped in the process by Tony, with whom we shall share the produce of the hives, the honey and wax. In fact he is going to show us how to make candles. And so it is that we will benefit from those immortal gifts of the bees: sweetness and light.

ENDS

First Term At The Idler’s Academy

Miss Smith's Design For Our Sign

WE HAVE now finalized the timetable for the first term at the Idler’s Academy, taking place this year at the Port Eliot Festival, 23-25 July. New additions to the faculty are Mr Charles Hazlewood, our choirmaster, Mr Ian Bone and Mr Ray Roughler-Jones, who are giving a careers advice talk, Mr Justin Welch, who will be leading a drumming masterclass, and Mr John Moore, who will be teaching us how to play the saw. I’d remind you also that Mr William Peers, the famous sculptor, will be running a sculpture workshop, and Mr Bill Drummond, our woodwork master, will be building a bed without the use of power tools.

Our new crest, complete with our motto, ‘Libertas per Cultum’, meaning ‘freedom through education’, has been designed by Miss Alice Smith of Rochdale. TH