The Idler

Country Diary: 9

The Idler’s Editor, Tom Hodgkinson, has retired to a Devon Farmhouse to write a book, here’s the ninth part of his diary.

DEATH, PAIN AND THE NETTLE QUANDARY

June 2003

MY SEED PROPOGATION experiments have not been a great success. I noticed the other day that the little plants, which I had grown from seed on my windowsill, looked practically dead. The Nigella and Californian Poppies were wilting and turning brown. Millions of greenfly covered the stems of the sunflowers. Blackfly covered the leaves. I think I had let them grow too long indoors before transferring them to the garden. I may also have been a llittle remiss when it came to regular watering. I made an emergency transfer to the flowerbeds outside, which I first had to turn over, hoe and add compost to. This took about three hours, and the planting out a further two. I had forgotten that gardening requires constant and steady application, rather than the occasional blitz followed by a long period of doing nothing, which is the way I like to work. While planting out my flowers (not that they have any flowers yet), I noticed that out of the 500 Californian poppy seeds I had planted outside in March, only one had grown. Now the flowerbeds are dotted by little droopy plants and I am praying that they will take root and flower. The sunflowers have already wilted completely, which is sad as I was looking forward to witnessing their joyful flowering and they had started so well.

THE GERANIUMS are not much better. I planted loads two months ago in pots and they seem to have frozen in time. They don’t appear to be actually dead, but then they haven’t grown at all, either. Their leaves have turned an autumnal brownish red. I think I might have put too many in a single pot. Out of the 48 I planted a mere two look relatively healthy. I was planning to have loads of them for a sort of Italian look in the yard but no such luck.

OUR KITTENS, Milly and Mandy, who were quite fun at first, have turned into a bit of a problem. They’ve been forgetting to use their litter tray. The kitchen and the whole ground floor started to stink of cat urine, one of the most sick-making smells in the world. Whole bottles of disinfectant were brought out to try and eliminate the odour. All we ended up with was a new smell, a mix of cat piss and disinfectant. The supposedly odour-eating litter in their litter tray does not seem to eat any odour at all. And the cats seem to enjoy leaving deposits on the floor in the downstairs loo. When I get up in the morning and see the little discreet piles of poo, I experience Dad rage, Ozzy Osbourne style. We have tried rubbing their noses in it but to no avail. They are playful, I suppose, but in a cruel, cold way. As I write one of them is clawing its way up my leg. Yesterday it clawed its way up my leg without taking into account the fact that I was wearing shorts: very painful. They seem to be almost as much work as small children, both of whom have been severely scratched by the kittens. When they are a bit older I am going to banish them from the house. They can eat rats and live in the barn. I might even do the same thing with the cats.

THE LAWN is getting back to the fashionable meadow look, which I achieve by the simple expedient of not mowing it. The Daisies, Campion, Dandelion, Dog Violet and Nettles look good, I think. And I have found a superb book that cheers me up when I start to worry about the scruffiness of the garden. Called Weeds: The Country Way by Robin Page, it puts the case for encouraging weeds most persuasively. “If people would only look atthe weeds in their gardens,” Page insists, “they would see that they already have many free and attractive flowers.” Page quotes the following lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins as poetic justification for his weedy philosophy:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet
Long live the weeds and wilderness yet.

THE YARD is getting completely overgrown with Clover and Nettles. I purchased a machete and occasionally I stride in and hack a few nettles down so that the children can at least see their sandpit and swings through the jungle. The machete is really a manual strimmer, and I am still holding out against the effeminacy of the modern version. But it’s bloody knackering, the hacking. And so most of the hacking remains undone. I suppose I will give in to a strimmer eventually, not that I have any spare cash, having spent all my money on childcare and beer.

I REALLY OUGHT to keep the Nettles, though. The bourgeois in me wants to remove this unsightly and painful weed, but according to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his superb River Cottage books, and also Robin Page, nettles are incredibly useful and versatile. They apparently enrich the soil and can be used for soup, cheese, salads, making beer,washing windows, warding away evil spirits and even curing the common cold. Butterflies lay their eggs on them, too. But you should only use young nettle tops, and as I have no idea how to identify the age of a nettle or where its top ends and its bottom begins, I have given up and instead hacked them down and stuffed them in the compost bin, which is now full. So what do I do with new composting materials? Do I have to buy another bin? And how are we ever going to manage to keep chickens and pigs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall if I can’t even grow a sunflower (the tomato plants died, too, by the way, But on the plus side, I did manage to fillet a mackerel last night). Luckily we have had some lovely days so I’ve been able to escape all this gardening stress and spend the late afternoon and early evening loafing about on the beach with the family. Soon, I hope, I will be able to recline happily in the garden like the author of the following poem:

Idly I’ve watched the small green shimmering moth
At eventide skimming the silver froth
Of lady’s bedstraw on the forest floors,
While fairyland has opened all its doors
On the enchanted spires and citadels
Of spotted foxgloves growing under spells -
never such magic did my labours bless
As I have found in summer idleness.