The Idler

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.