WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Blowin' in the Wind

I’ve waded in gorgeous rusty leaves and trotted my way through banks of rainfall. The trusty scarf has made an appearance on more than one occasion as well, as have the fingerless mittens. It is now officially Autumn – I would say the Fall but that sounds a wee bit too Biblical and Apocalyptic for my liking. We are now approaching The Fall – no thank you.

If I Had a Hammer

Here I am in Ye Jolly Olde UK, looking out my window at a glorious Halloween morning with its varied hues of orange and red, crisp leaves on the ground, bright snap in the air. Autumn in England is a beautiful thing – when you’re watching one of those old Pathe newsreels where people talk like posh Cockneys and everyone has the Blitz spirit of cheer and gumption.

In reality, it’s raining, grey, cold and decidedly miserable out there. I don’t mean to spoil any of your forthcoming dream holiday plans, but there you go. We live in a temperate climate, which sounds rather lovely and mild on paper, but is actually just cold and damp. Very cold and very damp.

Things Can Only Get Better

I've had a pretty shit week if I'm honest with you. One funeral, one anniversary of a friend's death, and the news that another friend was murdered have left me feeling as low as it's possible to feel. There have been days when I didn't even want to get out of bed. I felt like a shadow was hanging over me all the time.

Cat Scratch Fever (yes, this is a real post)

To the casual observer, this may look like a newly dug plot that’s waiting for vegetable seedlings. To a cat, it resembles nothing more than a Hilton-style litter tray, complete with grass to eat and regurgitate later. Over the space of a week, I managed to collect two small plastic buckets of cat poo. I’m not happy.

Salt of the Earth (Part 2)

The Victorians were happy and so were the people – sort of. An estimated 243,000 allotments by 1873 meant that one in three labourers had a piece of land to grow vegetables amongst the Dark Satanic Mills. The other two out of three no doubt continued to fight, steal and starve, as the clergy who pushed for land reforms always feared they would.

Altruism,eccentricity and social reform aside, you can count on the British for two things: the weather is our number one topic of conversation, and we think there’s nothing quite like a good war to sort things out. Franz Ferdinand did more than launch a World War: he also thrust the carrot, the parsnip and the cabbage into the limelight.

Wars send young men off to a foreign field to knock seven shades of shit out of each other,leaving behind women, children and old geezers with empty fields, empty shelves and no handy banana boats for their dinner. Cue the First World War Victory Gardens, when the UK Government commissioned 1,500,000 back gardens and allotments to grow food for the masses.

It was a huge patriotic success with everyone doing his or her bit for the war effort. Hooray for vegetables and three cheers to the masses! And then the war ended and the Government quietly took all the land back whilst everyone Charlestoned and bobbed their way into the Jazz Age. Who needs patriotism when the Great War was the war to end all wars? Flowers are far prettier after all, and one Austrian a century is quite enough upheaval for anyone.

To be fair to the British Government they did pass a series of Parliamentary Acts in the 20s to strengthen the allotment – provision for annual rents, jurisdiction in the form of committees and local authority responsibility. From the 20s onwards you could keep hens and rabbits on your allotment and put up a shed. The shed is a wonderful place to listen to the radio of a wet autumn afternoon, particularly when the second Austrian of the century decides to turn the world on its head.

With German U-boats on the shore and rationing removing the daily egg and bacon for breakfast, the allotment once more was a saviour for the masses. There were nearly 2 million Dig for Victory allotments during the Second World War,producing a staggering 1,300,000 tonnes of food per year. And once again, the Government took back the extra allotments after the war.

The Act states that local councils must provide alternate land if they take allotment space back. Most allotments in the UK are on the side of a hill or down by the railway cuttings – they were never going to be prime real estate in the first place – and “replacement land” doesn’t specify the actual presence of earth. There are an awful lot of deserted car parks and bombsites in the UK...

Salt of the Earth (Part 1)

During National Allotment Week, a Guardian Online article claimed that allotment waiting lists in Greater London were up to a staggering 40 years. This is partly due to an increase in demand from the swelling Grow Your Own movement, and partly due to the dire shortage of plots nationwide. The waiting list here in Brighton is a cautiously optimistic 2 years, but for the 85 allotments in the city; 2,000 people are standing in line.

Allotments are a terribly British thing, with a rich history of the working man versus the landed gentry,riots, uprisings and angry letters to The Times. Over 400+ years there’s been enough blood and bone meal shed to raise a healthy crop of vegetables in the pursuit of “free land for all”. Allotments lay somewhere between guerrilla gardening and community gardens.

Free Fallin'

It’s a common misconception that the garden in winter resembles Abney Park in Stoke Newington with requisite teen Goths lurking in every shady nook. My mum has witnessed over two decades of gardening mania with my dad, and even she thinks of the winter plot as a sad and barren thing. Postcards featuring charming frosted landscapes don’t help garden PR and neither do freakish and garish poinsettias every Yule.

We all remember science lessons at school and learning about photosynthesis. Most of us can’t recall our own zip code or location of our car keys, but we know with absolute certainty that sunlight is necessary for plant growth. Unless you are one of the aforementioned Goths, it’s quite important for humans as well. Along with the term photosynthesis, we can also rattle Seasonally Affected Disorder off our tongues.

According to mythology, Orpheus (the King of the Emos) lured Persephone into the Underworld where she chowed down on pomegranates, a mystical and cost-effective marriage ceremony. Her grieving and slightly scary mum, Hecate, held dominion over the grain and bargained with Orpheus for Persephone’s safe return above ground six months of the year. Sunshine, fat tomatoes and skin cancer represent her joy, whilst her sorrow is in the form of dark days, barren fields and galoshes.

Whilst Dr. Phil would have a lot to say about Empty Nest Syndrome, our perceptions of a bleak winter are rooted in this mythology. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst summer exhales and hands us leaves, fruits and flowers, winter inhales and concentrates its energy. Rather like Persephone’s life, there’s a lot of activity underground between September and February. For starters, root vegetables thrive in the cold and the dark.

Some gardeners believe that frost improves the flavour of parsnips and most gardeners advocate planting garlic, onions and potatoes in the cold of January for harvesting in the spring. Horticulture fleece, cloches and polytunnels go a long way towards warming the soil if you’re at all worried about ground temperature. Seed catalogues and nurseries offer many autumn varieties of seeds for September and October shipping including:

• Potatoes
• Leeks
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Turnips
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Rocket
• Broad beans
• Spinach

Rocket and spinach are possibly the most versatile of all, as they can grow in shallow soil on a sunny windowsill or under horticultural fleece outside. A yearlong supply of greens is infinitely achievable.

Don’t forget your green manure either. Planting mustard or fenugreek in late autumn will give you nitrogen-rich material to dig into the soil before the first frosts kick in. Frost has the added benefit of breaking compacted clods of earth down to a fine, rich soil ready for spring planting. Winter is so much more than cleaning tools in the shed!

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Part of me that thinks bio-dynamics is a bit weird. Part of me also thinks there might be something in it after all. I seem to be vacillating between the two poles right now. One biodynamic notion that makes me prick up my ears is the semi homeopathic approach to weed control. Not all weeds are bad; nettles are an excellent fertilizer and dandelions are useful as a compost accelerant.

Weeds are also unbelievably bloody hardy. Along with cockroaches, there is no doubt in my mind that weeds would survive a nuclear holocaust. I used a weed flame gun on a patch of dandelions on the Green Centre’s garden path about a month ago. It took me half an hour to incinerate the little bastards and dig out their charred corpses. They came back to haunt me about three weeks later, as green and tough as ever.

Earth Song

Some weeks back, I talked about setting up an apartment friendly compost bin. The basic premise is simple. You need a plastic container with some holes punched in for drainage, kitchen scraps, shredded paper and some urine.

I know that we drew something of a discreet veil over the urine part, but it is quite important to the overall plan.

Many books will tell you that you cannot call yourself a gardener unless you make your own compost. I’d like to add that you couldn’t call yourself a gardener until you become so obsessed with making compost that you bore the living arse off anyone within a five-mile radius.

God bless Twitter and Facebook: I am that compost bore.

After the Rain

It rained on Thursday night.

The temperature had been in the high 80s to low 90s all week, which to a Brit is rather like standing in a satanic sauna fuelled by hot mildew. We don’t do dry heat.

Work was slow yet steady up at Dave interspersed with lashing of Hibiscus tea and gallons of Evian. I was tired, hot and grumpy.

I kept having these weird dreams about my former job. These were confused, unfathomable images and although my life is good, I felt flat and restless.

What Am I Doing Hanging 'Round?

There are a number of upside-down tomato planters on the market. The principle is sound: tomatoes are vine plants and a combination of gravity and weight stops their natural inclination to grow up towards the sun. This gives you a hanging arrangement which is excellent for limited space such as balconies and lets the tomatoes get maximum sunlight.

Unfortunately, they're not cheap, but this is where our junk gardening comes into play using only a wooden hatstand scored from Freecycle and an old soda bottle.

Junk

I was adamant from the outset that Sam on the balcony, and later Dave up at The Green Centre, had to include artwork and specifically artwork made from urban junk.

The shape wasn’t immediately apparent. I just knew that it needed to be like that.

I already use found objects in my mixed media collages and include rusted and flattened bottle tops, ring pulls and assorted ephemera. Now it was time to make the art bigger, rustier and a heck of a lot more found.

We Can Work It Out

Dave has plants now!

In the preface to his wonderful book, An Ear to the Ground: Garden Science for Ordinary Mortals, Ken Thompson describes a garden as “a large, unplanned and slightly out-of-control scientific experiment”.

Part of the way through last week I had the sudden dreadful feeling that I’d bitten off more than I could chew; if I had any vegetables of any magnitude to chew that is.

The problem was that I’d started out with three packets of seeds and a balcony and there was no pressure. I didn’t even mind blogging about it; some junk finds here, a few seedlings there.

It was fun.

Can You Dig It?

As with most things in life, preparation is the key.

When you’re starting a vegetable plot, you generally have three options; a non-earthed area such as a balcony or windowsill, a garden or patch of ground in a community area, or an allotment.

If you’re lucky, any earthed areas that you inherit contain the right soil; not too sandy, not too moist, and free from stones.

Most of the time you end up with a builder’s graveyard – and Dave is no exception.

Time of the Season

As gung-ho as I come across in these posts, the sensible side of me realises that this first year of my avant gardening journey is an experiment.

Let's Get It Started

I have this strange kink in that I can never do anything without reading a book about it first. I suffer from "get it right first time" syndrome and it isn't pretty.

Now the thing about gardening, is that there are as many gardening books as there are gardeners, if not more when you consider how many star gardeners there are on the market. And, for a newbie that's really quite bewildering.

The problem is also compounded by books never quite giving me exactly what I need to know. Container books talk about flowers. Vegetable books detail allotments and smallholdings. Organic books assume that you own Kent.

I live in a city, in an apartment and I want to grow vegetables and herbs. Oh, and I'm poor. Where's my book?

Stormy Weather

There are many things to take into account when you become serious and/or addicted to gardening: light, food, warmth, water, soil, seed. Every single one of the billion and two books on the market go into various amounts of detail about all of these points. Some have flowery descriptions. Many have photos.

Books about growing flowers are not so detailed. Books about growing vegetables are more detailed because growing vegetables tends to be a serious business. You're making food after all.

Which is why the one glaring omission from every single sodding book is a complete mystery to me. The one vital ingredient that every vegetable gardener on the planet should be intimately aware of.

Failure.

Davy's On The Road Again

Meet Dave, my 13 foot by 11 foot vegetable patch-to-be.

I Can Hear The Grass Grow

I was intrigued by Jrld's comment last week that "maybe we might have some WFMUcentric posts about music/sound/plant growth next?"

He even mentioned "The Secret Life of Plants", Peter Tompkins' and Christopher Bird's bestseller from a decade of equally weird and wonderful bestsellers like Erick von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods". Was God an alien? Can plants think and feel? Would that macrame plant holder look better next to the black light poster or over by the pet rock?

An entire generation waited with bated, bancha tea scented breath.

Under a Raging Moon

The moon is many things: made of green cheese, responsible for crime sprees, blue, a recurring character in "The Mighty Boosh"; and it's also good for planting out your vegetables by.

Lunar planting, or bio-dynamics, is no new thing. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy and the Steiner system of education, was an advocate of gardening according to lunar phases and did a lot to spread the knowledge.

I'll admit that it sounds a little bit like hippie twaddle on the surface but the basic principles are largely sound.