The Green Grey Conrete Grass of Home



Dorking from space

Not so very long ago in the classified section of our local newspaper, The Dorking Advertiser, there was for sale three acres of pastureland some miles south of us. The asking price was £70.000 and no doubt it was snapped up immediately. What's remarkable about this is that the average value of agricultural land for England in 2013 was £10.300 an acre and this parcel, being in the greenbelt, was most definitely agricultural and therefore never likely to get planning permission. Or so it used to be!
You see, if you can get planning permission its value goes up and in 2013 the average cost per acre for building land was £33.300 and even higher, I would think, in the south east.

So what on earth is happening? Well the Government is the answer. It has ordered all local authorities to identify areas of green belt on which new homes could be built, although it is doubtful it is in anyway for the benefit of locals who could not afford the £550.000 most affordable new builds go for around here. I fear it is more to do with intense lobbying by developers who have been feeling the pinch in the recession with low profits. Much the same way the lobbying of oil industry led to that unedifying spectacle of Tony Blair kissing the mad dog Kadafi in order to secure a £billion oil deal for BP.

Mole Valley District Council response was to start a consultation (which is now half way through) on a document called 'the Housing and Travellers Sites Plan' where developers were invited to submit their investments for housing. Sixty sites are in the plan but once the consultation began a further twenty were quickly added as speculators suddenly realised the significance of the document. It seems that this is the new Klondike, that there is gold in them thar Surrey Hills, that those that are not chosen for development this time around will be first in line for the next wave, for as the document states 'saying NO is not an option'. Not that taking part seems that easy either as one action group has been set up to help objectors phrase their responses in the 'councilese' favoured by all officials unable to understand plain English and another action group to simply say NO.

The Green Belt was born in post war Britain when the 'tide of London development' had got to the point where London was not a nice place to live. I know, I grew up there, and remember clearly going to school in those infamous London smogs that were so thick that busses had to crawl along searching for the kerb with powerful fog lights. The town planners answer was to throw a green lung around London, a line in the sand if you will, and say, no more development - this land is inviolate. And with 9 out of 10 people in Britain now living in urban areas those green lungs are becoming precious for our health, wellbeing and sanity.

There was a television programme on recently called 'New Lives in the Wild' where Ben Fogle spent a week living in the Himalayan Foothills with the most marvellously eccentric character Steve Lall, former Indian Air Force fighter pilot and contrarian kicked out for refusing orders, who ran an isolated hill station with his wife. Totally isolated they resisted all inroads into their way of life chasing off trespassers taking fodder and wood. When Ben asked if he felt sympathy for the villagers Steve said 'pick up a handful of soil, that inch you hold has taken a thousand years to form and when its gone its gone forever'. Why must we go to the Himalayas for wisdom?

Dorking - a unique Town

Boys and their Toys

Now Christmas is over and the wrapping paper recycled boys can now start playing with their new toys, not that big boys ever needed Christmas as an excuse to get a new toy. Perhaps you should really read tool for toy and bloke for boy for if there is anything more 'Blokey' it is the absolute need that before any new task is embarked upon you must first get the right tool for the job, even if what you have will do the job just as well. I guess every 'better half' will recognise this peculiar trait in the Bloke of the species as if it were a genetic tick, rather like if the Bloke driving from A to B takes a wrong turn but rather than turn around just puts his foot down in the belief that eventually you will end up on the road to B. Well okay maybe that's getting a bit too close for comfort, but really I did need that tool and we did get there in the end.

This rather curious preamble is because some time ago at an open day on the allotment, and after a series of thefts from plot holders tool boxes, I did a little talk about what tools were really necessary and what were not. Basically all you need is a spade, fork, hoe and rake with a trowel for planting. Simple portable and if of the best quality you can afford, durable. In fact rather than go to the garden centre and spend a fortune, try the local car boot sale were you can pick up a top quality items for a fraction of the price. Just because it is old will not mean it's knackered, rather, think that it has already lasted someone a lifetime and will probably last yours as well.

After the talk and quite unashamedly, I thought to my self  "I'm the last person in the world to do what I preach", the damn things are spilling out everywhere. In my defence it maybe because I have a reluctance to throw things away and, as I learn more and get older, there is the realisation that an old hand tool is often better than the raucous smelly 2-stroke that looked the ticket in that catalogue. I have to admit to a shed full of petrol tools of which the lawn mower is the only one now in use. The strimmer is now superseded by a scythe and a sickle, the hedge trimmer by adjustable shears and the chainsaw by a 3' bow saw that cost me £1 a foot down the car boot.

          

The other thing I have are shelves full of books on allotments, gardening and the way it 'used to be done'. The forgotten Arts (John Seymour), The Victorian Kitchen Garden (Jennifer Davies), Old Garden tools (Kan N Sanecki) or The Kitchen Gardens at Heligan (Tom Petherick) where they garden as if it was still 1870. What comes across most clearly are the number of similar looking but very different tools each designed to do a specific job (can you see a link to the 'bloke' thing here) but strip away the regional differences and what you have are tools that are designed do the job, efficiently. It is at this point that you realise power tools are a bit of a blunt instrument who's only saving grace is speed, and that over accuracy.

                                  

Take for instance the spade. Once made from wood (which was a significant improvement over the antler) now in its metal form can be for heavy digging or delicate border work or as a shovel to move loose material. The fork, which surprisingly was not really developed until the 1860's, does much the same task but is better for lifting root crops with one just for potatoes. Then you get the crossover tools like the adze hoe and Canterbury hoe which can be used to dig or hoe, and then the hoe itself which of all tools appears in more shapes than you can shake a stick at. As a narrow onion hoe or as a draw hoe for ridging potatoes, as a dutch hoe for weeding or oscillating for both push and pull. Rakes by and large are rakes but I have long handled draw hook (for pulling dung from carts) which is used like a rake so I keep off the beds.

                 

The last set of tools that I can't be without are for cutting. Bill hooks for coppicing and chopping (the smaller the bits that go in the compost bin on the allotment the better) sickles for the grass paths (I cleared my last plot using a reaping hook from a boot sale) and now the scythe which came about after watching youtube and reading The Scythe Book (David Tresemer) which is brilliant for large areas but requires a knack in using it and sharpening it (you use a hammer! and its called peening) but the swish and rhythm of cutting is a pleasure and the speed at which it cut down the wild flower meadow at home - amazing.

As I mentioned before these tools have been given or bought from boot sales for sometimes as little as a £1, others such as the scythe and oscillating hoe were quite expensive but all together they probably would seem a bargain. What I ask myself is - would I have heard the three buzzards mewing over head at the allotments if I had been using a power tool.



Composting Anoraks

Anorak:- 1. type of coat with a hood often lined with fake fur.

Anorak:- 2. British slang:- a person who has a very strong interest, perhaps obsessive,  in a niche subject not understood by the general public.

 

Never enough

 

So, OK, I admit it, I'm a composting anorak. After all if you want the soil to feed you then first you must feed the soil and the best and only way as far as I'm concerned, is to add plenty of compost. What you should aim for is the creation of humus, which by the way is not compost but the complex decomposition of organic matter within the soil by living organisms. But composting will speed up the process with a sort of preliminary burn, if you like. This is not new, it has been going on for millennia and has been adopted by man since he stopped roaming around killing mammoths and started growing grass seed for a living.

In Medieval England it went something like this; first the oats/barley/wheat is cut with a sickle leaving a long stalk, then the poor folk come in to glean any ears missed. Next the geese were let into the field to pick up any grain left followed by cows to eat the stalks and field weeds and finally the sheep to close crop what remained. What was left was manure that was then ploughed in for the next crop to feed on. All very 'holistic' (I do hate that word) and as far removed from modern farming as you can get with its reliance on the petro-chemical industry, just think of cereal bowl to dust bowl! Being as we are time rich, and or, cash poor, and not needing to meet the repayments on a tractor than cost as much as our house we can instead return to the 'old ways' and feed the soil and ourselves with goodness.

You can pretty much compost anything, and with anaerobic digestion that means a lot of 'organic' stuff the home composter should not, but garden clippings, mown grass and kitchen peelings are fine. In fact you should try and aim for about half brown woody material (carbon) and half green soft material (nitrogen). Too much of either can really affect the results but if the grass turns to slime then mix in some woody bits or cardboard and if the woody stuff look like its going nowhere add some greenery. Its a bit trial and error and I don't think that there is any right way to go about it but when the heat starts to build in the heap then you know your on the right track. You can of course kick start it into action in a number of ways such as going to the garden centre and actually buying something, but why do that when there is so much that is free. The leaves of comfrey and nettle  are rich in nitrogen as is the liquor from the wormery, if you have one, as well as chicken manure and urea. Now that's a whole subject on its own!

The heat in the heap depends on its size, the time of the year, and the bacteria. In winter your heap will not get 'hot' but it is still working as the psychrophiles tick over at about 13oC. When it gets warmer so will the heap as the next set of bacteria the mesophiles bring it up to 20-30oC, but it is the mesophilic group of bacteria that do most of the decomposing as the temperature continues to rise, at between 40-70oC the thermophiles start their work and things can then get very hot indeed. I tested my heap this summer and it read 78oC and was steaming but I've never got it hot enough to kill the weed seeds unfortunately.

the trusty quiet shredder

So how do I go about it. Firstly you are never going to make enough from your own garden so I get a friendly local gardener to drop off her clippings once a week (thankyou Susan) and I will pursue others who may be clipping a neighbours hedge on the odd occasion - odd as in the look they give me when I ask! This is all gathered together until it is worth while to get the shredder out. My shredder crushes rather than chips and does the job just as well with the added bonus that it is a lot quieter. There are four wooden bins in which the initial composting is done, the first two hold the freshly crushed material. Bin three is slightly larger and takes bins one and two when they heat up and reduce enough to fill it. It is here that it gets hot! and  when it in turn has reduced, gets put into bin four to reduce even further. If you think about it, two heaped bins become one about two thirds full, and in the summer months this can take only six weeks.

the power house

But we are still not finished. In addition to the four wooden bins there are eight plastic 'daleks,' as I like to call then, which are filled in turn as I need the space to continue composting. These too reduce as a whole new bunch of critters get to work on them. Brandling worms suddenly appear from nowhere and go into a reproduction spree until there are so many they form writhing knots on the surface. Woodlice and centipedes help out so that after a year from start to finish I am left with the most fantastic compost and although difficult to measure I estimate the amount at about 2500 litres. It is good enough for potting compost but to make that I will mix with leaf mould.

Any one who dose not gather his leaves in the autumn, or even worse, gathers them and burns them, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Each autumn I fill five one tonne builders bags with leaves which stay there till the following autumn at which point they are emptied into a large leaf bin for a further year. What's left over gets dug into the soil or laid as a mulch around the shrubs. My two year old leaf mould and one year old compost can then be sieved, through various gauges, and mixed with grit it fills all my needs from seed sowing through to the potato bags and greenhouse tomatoes and more.

I mentioned earlier the wormery which we got years ago at a Chelsea Flower Show and carried home on the tube, now that's a daft thing to do!, and has quietly sat in the garden being filled with peelings from the kitchen and providing an awful lot of liquid but not that much brown stuff, so that too eventually finds its way into the compost bins. Wormeries are one of those good ideas at the time jobs. I once sat through a talk and slide show given by the top honcho from the Bookam Potager that showed one complete side of a large polytunnel  filled with wormeries that their owners had fallen out of love with and donated to the project.

Composting on the allotment is slightly different as there is plenty of stable manure available for the taking and a good lot of leaf mould and wood chips from the communal bins, but I still compost the green 'bits' in wooden bins (which does not come to much) and I do fill four builders bulk bags with alternating layers of stable manure and leaves. Done early enough in the year it is ready use on the plot by winter. So there you have it, everyone should try and compost rather than pay £70 for the councils green waste bin to be taken away; now there is a thought, what if I charged my neighbours..........

composting on the lolltie

Books worth reading:-
Compost by Clare Foster, published by Cassel Illustrated
Composting with Worms by George Pilkington, published by eco-logic books
The way to healthy Garden Soil by Peter Davies, Amazon Kindle
Liquid Gold by Carol Steinfeld, published by Green Books



 

Serendipity

 

When I took on the second plot on Ranmore Allotments I had no hesitation in dedicating it entirely to fruit. This first year has allowed those young bushes to grow strong roots and I was not concerned that any fruit that did form was taken by birds long before it was ripe. Next year all the soft fruit will need netting. I knew this when I started, but how and what with, and at what cost, kind of got lost in a haze of enthusiasm. Now it hits me with a punch to the wallet that this is going to be expensive to the point that the red, white and black currants as well as the gooseberries will be the most deliciously expensive fruit that I will ever enjoy.

 

Allotment ethos is one of make do and mend, and recycling, which by and large means finding bits and bobs and odds and ends in skips ready for landfill. Great for the odd raised bed or patch work shed but when it comes to large numbers of long uniform timber then we wait in the hope of something turning up. And turn up it did when the house at the bottom of our road decided to have a loft extension. First a hard hat was thrown over the building and the old roof completely removed with (joy oh joy) the rafters stacked in the drive. Guess who was first to be knocking on the door only to be told I'll let you know. It seems that there were several interested parties but he did get back to me with a 'you better get in quick' - it seems with the popularity of wood stoves it was wanted for fuel.

 

first get uniform - if not square!

It has turned out to be a happy and unexpected discovery (serendipity) and was quickly cut to size, treated, transported and transformed to make the bulk of the cages. Still a bit to do but who knows - something will turn up, but alas I will have to buy the netting. It is curious that despite the care I took in marking out the beds that now I'm cutting the timber every side is a different length!

 

Oh! I do like allotments.

 



now to brace it

know anyone with a job lot of netting?

Giving a fig

 

Many years ago when I walked the streets of Roehampton in South London delivering the mail (in those days that was twice a day) there was a house in Westmead that had a fig growing against its south wall. It was large and I was impressed every time I saw it but as at the time I was not that interested in growing anything let along a fig it must have got stored away in that dysfunctional filing system that is my brain. It was therefore a surprise when it resurfaced on reading The British Gardener blog on figs and became a 'must do', and I had the perfect place it could go.

 

When we moved to Dorking 14 years ago there was growing on the south wall a winter jasmine that looked very unhappy. It hung loosely from wires obviously placed there to train it but was all stalk with not much it the way of leaves and little if anything in the way of flowers and they barely smelt of jasmine and even after the sort of pruning that shouts 'shape up or ship out' refused to improve. So it went.

 

In its place came a fremontodenron or California Glory which was in every sense glorious. It loved the sun and the warmth of the south wall and the pitifully poor soil it sat in and grew prodigiously, so much so that it received a severe prune each autumn or the path would have been impassable. The next year it bounced back stronger than ever and so was pruned again, and that became its downfall. California Glory is covered in fine hairs that brush off getting under cloths, up noses, and down throats, leaving you coughing and spluttering with eyes watering and heading for the shower. With our first Grandchild on his way it was clearly not a plant for him to brush against, or more likely fall in to, so it too went.

 

The spot lay empty for a while until we had a couple of very dry summers and the gardening pundits warned us all of the need to conserve water and plant Mediterranean style or see our gardens shrivel up. I sometimes wonder if those pundits ever look back on what they write and grimace in much the same way as a 40 something does at mullet hair styles and Duran Duran. However we were spurred into placing six water buts about the garden with one on that south wall.

 

I decided on a sort of rustic stand for the butt built of broken paving stone and rammed rubble down for the base but a strange thing happened, the more that was rammed in the more was needed all the while the ground rippled as if it were liquid. This was worrying, was there spring next to the house, was there a broken pipe soaking in to the foundations? The answer turned out to be geological. This part of Dorking is greensand yet sits beneath the chalk hills we can see from our windows, in fact in some of the fields its not unusual to see flint and ironstone side by side. To the east running through Riegate and Redhill, and south to Nutfield there are deposits of Fullers Earth, which was still mined at Redhill as late as 2000. Fullers Earth is a highly plastic sedimentary clay of the Lower Greensand and was used from the Medieval period to remove lanoline from wool in the fulling process, hence the name. A nice story is that in Riegate, because the mineral was valuable and anyway belonged to the Crown, householders would dig it out of their cellars to sell secretly. Some cellars were said to be so big they stretched right under the high street!

 

So what is all this to do with a fig I here you ask. Well, it is recommended that the roots of a fig should be contained to encourage fruiting and that gave me the opportunity to dig a big hole next to the water butt before lining the pit with paving slabs. The clay that came out was quite unlike any other part of the garden, and very fine. The planting hole was filled with spent compost and lots of grit, and around the slabs was filled with sharp sand to comply with the figs other requirements of free draining and poor soil. The fig itself is a Brown Turkey which is probably the best outdoor variety for the UK and has the RHS merit badge and if all goes well will give both interest and fruit - unless the roots escape of course!...........Now where can I put that Mulberry Tree I've always wanted.

 

 

 

  

 

Pumpkins for ever and ever......after!

Alaster, the man who started it all

The Pumpkin show is over but first let us start at the beginning. Six years ago Alaster, Dorkings's pumpkin guru, suggested to the Dorking Allotment Holders Association that what it needed was a show case for that very versatile vegetable, the pumpkin. Being of a fertile and imaginative mind he came up with a theme that would make it both interesting and fun, so being keen on movies we have had such titles as 'the gourd the big and the ugly', 'the wizard of squash' and 'pumpkins of the Caribbean'. Corny but you get the idea. Each year it has got bigger and better and this year I would say it has been the best of all with '2013, A Squash Odyssey'.

 

Admittedly since getting a couple of firsts four years ago I have become hooked and tried each year to do better especially after seeing the shields and cups being awarded. To tell the truth it's not that difficult as a quick walk round soon showed up the categories not entered or with only one exhibit so just entering will get you the extra points needed. So the next year got me the RHS Banksian medal, after Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, (which you get to keep). And the year after the Pumpkin Pie cup, in the culinary class, and the DAHA Mole Valley Arts Alive Trophy.

 

Alaster in character

So what to do this year? First was to watch 2001 again and realise that despite it being ground breaking in 1968 it was rather boring by today's standards. Based on a short story by Arthur C Clark and a script co-written with Stanley Kubrick it used little dialogue and large music to tell a tale of monoliths apes and space missions to Jupiter. Hmmm. Anyway the central character of a computer called HAL was a good starting point and the monolith would have to come in somewhere, anything else just needed to be space orientated. Growing the pumpkins came first so as to have enough to enter each section in each of the three weight classes, that's 12 and a total of 26 pumpkins. Then 10 for the decorative section and rest for 'choosing the best of' and cooking for the culinary section. To say pumpkins were taking over the front room is an understatement.

 

 

 A Squash Orrory

was evolution of the pumpkin influenced?

One category calls for a hanging decoration and has been largely ignored by most entrants as problematic but I was fascinated by those planetary models called orraries and so constructed one out of bent wire styrene balls and of course a pumpkin suspended from above and labelled it '2013, A Squash Orrory' as a play on words. Another category that needed thought was the Arts Alive which required an 'object', Ah ha, the monolith with one of my carved wooden pumpkins, and a 'document' what better than Galactic title deed for a section of lunar pumpkin. The painting would have to be HAL of course and the photograph, well a photograph.

fun in deed

 

pumpkin hal

So all was ready and the bulkier pumpkins set up the evening before the show leaving only the foodie bits and artwork (that's a laugh) to be arranged before the judging takes place. The show opened to the public in the afternoon and is free to all, which is a nice way to get people in, especially when girls dressed in green and orange go up and down the High Street offering pumpkin bites on a tray. Alaster has of course gone all out dressed in a space suit with exhibits showing how pumpkins conquered the galaxy. I particularly like the pumpkin moon landings in the 'Sea of Fecundity' from the recently declassified photographs taken by Neil 'butternut' Armstrong. I said he had a fertile imagination.

 

Well, how did I do. Don't know yet as the competition was strong this year but I did get best in show with an arrangement of three pumpkins and as that is a trophy I've not had I'll be well pleased. As for next year it has already been slipped that 'Frankinsquash' will be the theme. Let the fun begin.

 

 

The pumpkin girls

flowers of a pumpkin called Metro

Best in show

One of many tables

Entry in the children's section

Sea of fecundity

 

 

 

My Old Broom

 

Let me tell you about my old broom. I have had my old broom neigh on twenty years and in all that time it has never let me down. Sitting outside the back door it has been on constant call when ever needed. To sweep away debris from the summer rains the leaves from the autumn storm and snow from winter paths. Always it has done a good job at whatever task it is called on to perform, a faithful tool, an extension to my arm, and after five new heads and two handles it is as good today as when I bought it all those years ago.

 

(with a passing nod to Edward Lear)