The Idler

A Country Diary 83

MAY HAS come at last, the merry month of May, and I have bought a copy of Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, first published in the 16th century. Tusser himself was rather a comical and even sad character. He was a failed farmer and it was said of him that never was there a greater gulf between the practice and the theory. Nevertheless, his rhyming husbandry guide was a Tudor bestseller. I suppose you could say he was the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of his day, although of course back then, before the Enclosures, there were many more small farmers and mixed farms than today. This is a situation that I’d like to see reversed, hence my plans for a new website called Land For All, which aims to being together groups who would like to buy small areas of land for cultivation and recreation.

When I contemplate my own vegetable patch, it comforts me that Tusser was a failed farmer. My little wilderness leaves a lot to be desired. I grew six courgette plants and four pumpkin plants from seed on the kitchen windowsill, with seeming great success. When they were big enough, I planted them carefully in one of the raised beds, digging a hole for each and filling it with manure. A month later, and all bar one of the plants has fallen over and died. I don’t know whether to blame the hens, who have been scratching around up there, or slugs, or my own undue haste: maybe the plants needed to be hardened off for longer before being planted out.

Chickens and vegetable patches are not traditionally friends, and conscientious gardeners would customarily keep them out with wire fences, therefore I was pleased and fascinated to read an article in the Daily Telegraph that showed you how to harmonize the two. The writer pointed out that chickens are excellent slug killers. They will also do weeding for you by eating tiny seedlings. They manure the ground and scratch it up, a kind of gentle digging. For these reasons they can be welcomed by the idle gardener into the allotment. However, it is undeniably true that they will cause damage, particularly to things like lettuce seedlings and younger plants (though they never touched my broad beans). Therefore protection is in order for the little plants. In my own case, I have used cut up plastic milk bottles as cloches. I have used spiky twigs and branches laid across the newly sown bed. This of course mimics nature’s system: tree seedlings are protected by brambles when small and vulnerable. You can also keep chickens and other pests away with bits of chicken wire arched over the rows. Or you can drive stakes into the ground and suspend netting from them in th manner of a fruit cage. In all cases, you can often use stuff that is already lying around, rather than going out and buying custom-made equipment.

This year I am growing far more to eat in pots by the front door. Previously I have been mean about buying compost, and have tried to avoid it, but this year I thought I would indulge in three bags. With this lovely stuff I have filled a butler sink and a host of pots, and sowed salad mix and rocket, and peas in the deeper pots. It is one of the Permaculture principles to grow the most attention-needy crops as near the back or front door as possible, to make your life easier, and this has been very true in my case. Sometimes you just can’t be bothered to wander up to the veg patch, and the beauty of Permaculture is that it accepts human failings and works with them, rather than other systems which seek to transform the flawed human being into some sort of super-person, and so necessarily make you feel like a failure.

I made the mistake again of over-ordering seeds. I now have packets of carrot seeds and beetroot seeds and pea seeds that I have not had to room to sow. The problem is that when ordering, you start to enter a fantasy of the future: “ooh, that sounds nice,” you think. “I’ll try sea kale this year.” But then the reality is that you have limited space and limited inclination, and so the reality always falls short of the plan. And in the process, you have wasted money. I suppose what I should do is give the seeds away to someone who wants them, or of course many can be saved for next year. Parsnip seed I seem to remember does not keep, but most others do.

The biggest excitement of our experiments in husbandry has been Victoria’s bee-keeping success. Twice a week she goes to meetings at the local association, and has ordered a second hive. No honey yet, but we should be able to steal a goodly amount come the summer. The world of the honeybee is endlessly fascinating, and to keep bees, whether in populous city pent or in the suburbs or out in the sticks, is a palpably good idea in so many ways. Well, the bees are definitely buzzing, and on sunny days it is a joy to watch the hive as the little harrier jump jets spiral into the sky or fly back into the hive, their back legs yellow with pollen.

TH, MAY 2009