The Idler

Country Diary 80

IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN, not much is happening apart from nasturtiums. There are nasturtiums everywhere: yellow, red and orange. Such a fantastic flower. Very easy to grow, nice to look at and delicious to eat. The pods can be pickled in jam jars for a caper substitute. And at a time when there is little happening in the garden, they give a mass of joyous colour. They are also good for the bees, and I‘ve seen a few little buzzers flying in and out of the flowers.

HAVING FAILED to grow any brassicas from seed, I went down to the nursery and bought a few purple sprouting broccoli plants and planted them. Richard at the nursery also gave me a few overgrown cabbages plants to bung in – he thought they might provide a good few leaves even if they never turned into proper cabbages. I also got a big bunch of leek plants from Juliet, 28 or so of which I have so far planted. So there are now four empty beds (empty apart from the nasturtiums). One bed is for broad beans. This year I just left many of the broad bean pods to dry on the plants. My plan was to collect the seeds and keep them in an envelop ready for sowing. But last week, when went to collect them, all the pods had exploded. That presumably means that there is a whole bunch of broad bean seeds in the ground. So I am considering letting nature take its course, and seeing if the seeds germinate, which would be rather wonderful. But I may sow a whole load as well as a backup. So that leaves three beds. I think I will sow a load of cabbage seed on one, and maybe plant a load of garlic on another. Another will be for leeks. Another possibility is overwintering onions, but we shall see.

I HAVE BEEN renovating a wood-burning stove for my study. In previous years, I have relied on either those hideous and pricey gas bottle heaters which produce a damp, smelly heat, or a feeble electric radiator to keep me warm. Both terrible ideas in comparison to the wood burner. But these wood-burners seemed to be very pricey: £300 is the absolute cheapest, and most are around £500 or more. So I asked around (“asking around” was the old Internet), and found an old one in a friend’s barn. It looked pretty rusty, and all the glass was broken, but it had a nice carving of a lion on it. It was fifty quid. took it home to test whether could make it work. A month later, we have a nice-looking wood burner, ready to attach to the chimney. It is an Efel Kamina, a Belgian stove, probably about twenty years old and no longer manufactured.

IN THE WEEKS that followed, I have twice wavered on the project. The first time was when I tried to unscrew the screws that held the glass door in. They simply snapped off. What the hell was I to do now? Maybe, thought, it would be more sensible just to buy a new one, rather than throwing good money after bad. But luckily the man in the hardware shop had recently been through the same process of renovating an old wood burner. For twenty quid, he filed down the old screws and drilled new threaded holes. I took the thing home and scrubbed off all the rust with a wire brush and wire wool. Then I sprayed it with stove paint. It looked like new. I ordered a piece of stove glass from the local stove shop. That cost around fifty quid, but the blokes in there sent me into a pit of despondency. “I would have walked away from it, mate,” they said, when I described the stove and showed them my sketch of it (they’d asked for a photo, but since we don’t have a digital camera, I sketched it instead, which was much more satisfying). “It’s a Kamina and you can’t get parts for them,” they said. I would need firebricks, they said, otherwise the stove would collapse. They would cost another sixty quid or so, and would have to cut them with a special saw to make them fit. Luckily another staff member suggested I just put a layer of sand in the bottom. I drove home though in a state of great despondency. I was spending more and more on this stove, and it was old and crap. “Throwing good money after bad,” was the expression that popped into my mind.

HOWEVER, when we got home and put the new pane of glass in, the stove looked very handsome. Arthur brought a bucketful of sand in from the children’s sand pit. We glued two strips of fire rope onto the door with special wood stove glue. I was beginning to feel quite proud of the project. After all, the total spend was still under £150, and stoves of this size in the stove centre were at least £700. And they were nothing like as nice. No lion motif, for one thing. So the next step is to get the chimney swept. Then my friend Howard is going to come round with his fire cement. There is already an elbow of flue in the bricked up fireplace, but it needs moving. He thinks this is a relatively easy job. Then I will light a glorious fire. I am inspired in all this, by the way, by the late, great Roger Deakin, who writes that the wood burner is a real friend to the writer. During a thinking pause,you can go and attend to it, feed it wood, or poke around. It produces a lovely heat and the smell of burning wood is wonderful also. There is a new book out from Roger Deakin called Notes From Walnut Tree Farm. It’s a selection from his diaries and has been compiled by his friend the writer Terence Blacker, and is a wonderful read: beautiful observed, witty, genial and anarchic.