Denatured - and the darkest of dark arts..?

Mars is a hot coal in the now-autumn sky. Nearer to us than it will be for fifteen years.

Cider apples

A kestrel has included us in its beat and perches on the trunk of a tall dead pine, scanning the as yet uncut meadow. Deciduous trees are still heavy with leaf. Dusky pink sedum flowers thrive in the prairie beds and asters have risen to splash the border with purple-blue. 

The flush of growth and cropping in the vegetable garden has slowed but it is still giving carrots, beetroots, leeks, tomatoes, chard, salads, kale and spring onions. Wigwams of beans, heavy with pods now wait as we will harvest their seeds as dried beans. Fat winter squash wallow, ripening when the pale sun appears. Cannonballs of hearted red cabbage ready to harvest.

Racks of apples have been stored. Their delicious scent fills our store. Once again I have borrowed Kevin’s apple press in the hope of making cider. Our first modest cider apple tree crop will be added to the crab apples and windfall cookers.

Potatoes & winter squash are stored, with onions & garlic. The freezer fills with green beans, calabrese, roasted tomatoes and soft fruit. The pantry shelves lined with jams and marmalade.

Garage roof rainwater is also stored now. Our sandy soil on a windy hilltop on the dry side of England is always thirsty. Old IBC containers from the farm have been set upon surplus stone-filled gabions to give us 3000 litres of rainwater storage. They are filled to the brim already - with their overflow into a small bog garden. Next year we hope to be able to keep our beds irrigated from the water tanks.

And preparations for the winter are in place with overwinter garlic and onions due to be planted. 

Our no-mow areas of lawn were filled with native flowers this year. To add to this floral diversity we’re going out in five minutes to plant 300 mixed crocus into the lawn. Beautiful for us to see in the spring but a real boost for early spring-flying pollinators.

That all this effort would be seen as quaint, old-fashioned or indelibly middle-class like the craze for sourdough bread or fermented vegetables tells us how far from living sustainably our society has become.

Vegetable and fruit growing, once the domain of the working family is now almost one of the dark arts. Eating seasonally is frankly mystifying. For many, asparagus can be bought throughout the year rather than being consumed in May and until 21 June when harvesting traditionally ends. Courgettes and fresh tomatoes available throughout the supermarket year for us are are eaten when in season.

Water storage

And if vegetable and fruit growing is a dark art, darker still is the world of preserving your own food. Our forebears had to develop a panoply of skills and knowledge to get their families fed through the winter and the ‘hungry gap’ that precedes early summer abundance. The super-abundance of plastic-wrapped frozen food has pushed this body of knowledge into the past. Sometimes I wonder whether Jill and I are seen as the British equivalent of the Amish or Mennonite communities? 

UK supermarkets are still rejecting hundreds of tonnes of perfectly good vegetables. The World Health Organisation estimates that a third of all food produced globally is thrown away - and yet we still poison the land with pesticidesand herbicides and pollute it with chemical fertilisers growing this waste. It is insanity. The age of mass-extinction is occurring on our watch. Can we not see how this will end?

My maternal great grandfather, Bill Wall, would have been mystified by this, keeping as he did an allotment in Nottingham’s Old Basford to feed his family of five. Four miles away from us as the crow flies. And more than an age away in terms of our custodianship of the world.

He would be puzzled by the no-dig methods we now employ, wedded as his generation was to turning the soil. Our practice is to lay two inches of well-rotted compost or manure onto the beds and to allow the soil fauna and flora to incorporate this - and in so doing making the soil healthy and productive. A growing body of evidence suggests that organic food that has had intimate contact with soil-based mycorrhizal fungi during its’ growth has greater health benefits than the vegetables produced in the de-natured world of modern intensive farming. No-dig also stores carbon in the soil rather than releasing it into our overheating world.

But now my job list is as long as my list of grumbles. I will begin or the tasks will remain unticked…