The Idler

A Country Diary - 39

7 February 2006

THIS WEEK I have been mainly mulching. I bought a superb book called Organic Gardening by the appropriately and alliterativeley named Pauline Pears and Sue Stickland (Mitchell Beazley, £8.99). The authors are from the wonderful Henry Doubleday Research Centre, the organic gardening association started by the pionering Laurence D. Holmes. Brilliantly written and with lots of clear diagrams for beginners like me, it’s been an inspiration.

The best thing about the book is that it’s anti-digging. The authors don’t like digging because they say, it destroys the soil structure and accelerates the loss of organic materials in the soil. This is all excellent news for the idle gardener. Digging is extremely hard work, such hard work that I can easily imagine the prospect of it putting some of us off gardening all together.

Mulching, on the other hand, simply involves chucking loads of useful stuff on the soil. I made a mulch of cow manure, straw, old chopped up leaves and sawdust and threw it down around the roses and hellebores in the front garden. I also went to the hen house. Underneath the straw was a layer of powdery stuff, presumably a mix of rotted straw and chicken dung. I threw this on the vegetable beds. No digging! The idea is that you are imitating what happens in nature on the forest floor: those giant trees are never dug around. They have fed on the animal manure, dead animals, rotted leaves and rotted twigs and flowers and old plants that have fallen to the ground. Because the soil is covered, nutrients are less likely to be cleared away by rain, and also the worms love it: they smell the stuff on the surface, or sense it in some way, and come to the top and start diggin it in for you. No-dig is win-win as far as I can see.

MY BRASSICAS are very depressing. Limp and virtually leafless, I am wondering whether it is even worth hoping that they will recover. The kale plants are mere vertical twigs. The purple sprouting plants droop. I got so fed up with the Brussels sprouts that I pulled them up and threw them away. I went to J’s garden. She had told me that her brassicas, too, were stunted. But they looked like 400 year-old oak trees compared to my withered stumps. We know about the sheep attac earlier in the year. But I wonder whether there is something else wrong. Club root? Pigeon attacks? Hard to tell. Maybe I should rip them all out of the ground and put the whole sorry episode behind me. Ten months’ work down the tubes.

I SENT OFF A draft of my book last Friday. In celebration I helped out at the slide show at the village hall, serving cheese and wine to the one hundred or so people who came to see the phots of a renowned local rock climber. Another successful event.

I WENT horse-riding again yesterday and managed a couple of canters, which was thrilling. We went up through a new bridleway. It seems that there really is a concerted effort locally to open up more riding paths through field and moor. This is wonderful because being on a horse is a fantastic way of getting to know the are in which you live, how everything connects up. In general we see life from the roads and have a little idea of really what lies between us and a village three miles away. However, looking after horses is an awful lot of work, as we have discovered. I am starting to go off the idea of replacing the car with a horse. I thought that maybe a donkey might be more straightforward. I could get a cart and take ten children down to the beach. Or just sit on the back of the donkey and stroll into town, like a Mexican.

THE TULIPS and crocuses are pushing through the earth. It’s been very dry lately, though, so while snwodrops are to be seen, things are growing slowly. I was even considering watering the earth, but then I thought that it might cool it down too much, or maybe even freeze. There was supposed to be rain today but as yet, no sign. I planted a red currant bush yesterday, and decided to water that before applying the mulch of manure and straw. For the first time I realised that it was quicker to take a bucket to the stream and fill it up rather than going back to the house and using the tap. And maybe the water is better? I really must get some rain water collection system going. I remember reading that rain water is better than tap water for the plants although I forget why.

I’M DEVELOPING a hatred of firelighters. We often have them and I often use them, but I don’t like their smell and I don’t like the way they light or don’t light fires. They seem particularly ridiculous when you realise that a pile of twigs does the job much more efficiently. Last night I lit a fire with a firelighter. Eventually I achieved a little red glow in the middle of the fire, and it was only after an hour or two of occasional poking and adding more firelighters that I managed to get a decent fire going. This morning we ran out of the poisonous little blocks of evil, and I was forced to leave the house and pick up some sticks. Then I laid a proper fire: newspaper, piles of twigs and faggots, large kindling bits and then small logs. One match and five minutes later and we had a nice generous blaze roaring in the grate. And I had started it at no cost! A firelighter is merely an expensive and not very good twig. What a con.