The Edible Hedge

All righty then. I've decided to use the blog as a notepad during the designing process, so if edible hedging doesn't interest you then skip this post all together. But really, there's nothing all that special about them and they could potentially be used in any situation that calls for a hedge, provided you don't mind a bit of extra width compared to a privet.

A hedgerow is more than a line of single plants. Take a look at one in the countryside and you'll see that that's usually how they started, but since they were put in nature has forced some changes. Some of the original plants have died, and their places have been taken by self-seeding local shrubs like elder. These plants have become gappy over time too, and so opportunists like bramble have scrambled up into the holes. As the hedge matured the canopy raised, so allowing smaller or slower-growing shrubs like blackthorn to gain a toehold in some places; and underneath the whole thing there's a vegetable layer of bulbs and herbs, growing when light levels allow. The hedge has got wider too unless the farmer has been ruthless, and that width has allowed a rich variety of animals and birds to colonize it.

In designing an edible hedge you have to mimic that arrangement with edible or otherwise useful plants, using as many native plants as possible since they're the ones which will attract the most wildlife. That's not just some laudable concept on an ecological level either, since the more varied the ecosystem of your area is the more robust it is, which in gardening terms translates to fewer problems with pest population booms. You might think your single garden can't possibly make a difference to the balance of species in your neighbourhood, particularly if you're in a built-up area, but you'd be wrong - but more of that in a later post about wildlife gardening.

Okay, down to brass tacks. This means, first and foremost, choosing a "backbone" of tall shrubs and small trees which will grow to a height that's not far off the eventual height of the hedge. Getting the heights right at this stage is important, as otherwise the hedge will either not fill out (if they're too small) or will need contant hacking back (if they're too large). In most places in my hedge I'll want things that grow fairly quickly, since the visual screening aspect is important to me. The site is sloping, so the first thing I need to do is go out there with a bamboo cane marked with half-metre increments, and measure the height I want at intervals across the garden; I want to screen off the "working garden" from the patio without losing the view of the woods. Tricky. Twenty minutes and one car alarm incident* later, I have my measurements.

The hedge site, and plan. The developing desire line for the
path to the tunnel is just visible.

That's a bit of a shock - I thought I had more height to play with and several of my shortlisted plants have had to be ruled out straight away, but never mind. For reasons of economy I've decided to order all the plants for this stage from a single source, Buckingham Nurseries; another alternative, brought lately to my attention, is Ashridge Trees who offer a better range of hedging packs. I will also look at the Agroforestry Research Trust since I'm giving them an order for an apple tree in the autumn. They're more use with the shrub and vegetable layers in any case. As I go I'm also cross-referencing with the Plants For A Future database, which is hugely useful; sadly they don't sell the plants and their list of suppliers is (and always has been) very poorly maintained. Time to measure my hedge run, which I can do off the plan for ease - it's about seventeen metres. We decided to do it without the diddly bit to screen off the whirly line on the right hand side for the moment, by the way, since it's going to be a while before I get round to setting that area up.

Now it's time to work out my shortlist, which I shan't bore you with. Suffice it to say that I've drawn a line representing my hedge, with approximate heights marked along it. Under that I'm putting plant names, marking their minimum and maximum heights against the line; minimum heights obviously means more trimming. I'm looking in particular for nitrogen fixers (although these can be introduced in the lower layers too) and things that will cross-pollinate the other fruit trees and shrubs in the garden. These "wild cousins", if I can include them, may actually increase yield in their cultivated relatives. There's probably no mileage in including any nut trees because of our local tree-rat population, which is voracious - although I might sneak one in and see how long it takes them to notice it...

All done. In the end, all the plants I wanted were in stock at Buckingham Nurseries and it cost me £45 + £5 post and packing. Not as bad as I had feared, and it would have been cheaper if I hadn't wanted a couple of the taller plants. At any rate, the backbone of the hedge is ordered and I'll post more about my choices when I plant them up. The next stage is to get hold of smaller shrubs for the middle layer, and a mix of plants for the vegetable layer; I have a few tasty candidates lined up, but I'm out of time for now. Back soon!

*Why do these things even exist? I have never heard of anyone being alerted to the presence of a thief by their car alarm. The seem to exist only to annoy neighbours and therefore, by extension, me. Same goes for house alarms. Grr!

>> next Edible Hedge post

Everything I Need (Almost)

As Bart Simpson said (of Dr Cheeks), I'm a little behind. This is no great surprise really - when you set yourself a list to be accomplished on a certain day there's a fair bet something will take longer than it should, or a new task will materialize, or an old one from further down your list will jump up and bite you on the arse. It's called life, I believe. In this case it was called parsnips, which Witchypoo reminded me were so firmly embedded in the roots bed that they put me in mind of Stephanie Sleith* when I was in sixth form - delectable, but almost impossible to pull.

Anyway, after a not inconsiderable effort my mission was accomplished and she they were trimmed and tucked away in sand for storage, with the ones with a little rot right at the top to be used later this week. I'm less than pleased with the wet sand storage thing actually, since it's a pain to wash the stuff off and the garden is sandy enough, thank you. Next year I'll either try dry sand or dry potting compost, which at least can be used for something else later.

The main thing that put the kibosh on completing my list, however, was Number One Son who has managed to catch the flu at school. Not a cold, not even man flu - the real, jelly-legs and begging-for-death deal. Number One Son has mild Aspergers Syndrome, one manifestation of which in his case is that he is prone to panic about injuries and illness (only his own, mind - other people may die if they wish, so long as they do it quietly) and so requires frequent reassurance that he is not actually dying.

It's no joke though, is flu - I can remember tottering along the corridor to the loo at age 14, steadying myself against the wall in case I fell, and then sitting on the toilet for ages just wondering how in the hell I was going to get back to my bed without help. Urgh. Anyway, his appetite is returning a little today and his temperature has come down from the eyebrow-raising 39.8C it was a couple of days ago. The corner has officially been turned.

Where was I? Oh yes. Everything on my list at the end of last week is done except for ordering the edible hedge and fruit trees, and doing year 3 of the remedial pruning of the established apples. The newer fruit trees have been done, but gazing at the Don King's hairstyle of whippy growth of the established trees, I realised I was going to have to do a little reading to remind myself of how to prune to stop an unwanted leader from regrowing. And stuff. A job for today, methinks!

*not her real name. Probably.

The January Rush

Thanks for the well-wishes for my test - it turns out that for pH measurements the doctors only need to use a thin, whippy probe which is a lot less, er, probey than the hentai-inspired armoured tentacle-cum-periscope thing that they use for endoscopy, so I had a comparatively easy morning of it. That point of view depends on what you're comparing it to, obviously; compared to an endoscopy it was painless, but compared to - oh, I don't know, not having 62cm of plastic-coated wire rammed up your nose, it was a bit traumatic. Still, it's gone now and all that remains is to attempt to avoid being shirty with my nearest and dearest until the inflammation subsides and I stop feeling like I want to *gack*. Onward.

Tuesday saw me trying to dig the second veg bed while trying not to be sick because of the probe, which wasn't a great success and I only managed half of it. By rights I should have come home once the probe was out the next day and got stuck in, but I was fed up and decided to treat myself to an afternoon metal detecting instead. A self-sufficient(ish) hobby, since now and again you find something quite valuable. An anorak's hobby too, I hear you cry, and up to six months ago I would have agreed with you - until Digiveg took me out with a spare detector and I discovered the appeal. It's the hunting thing, I'm afraid - the lure of the find, and exactly the same thrill that I get looking for mushrooms. The whole point of detecting is that moment when a clod of earth breaks neatly along the plane of a shiny silver coin, and suddenly you're gazing at something nobody's seen since before Cromwell's barber said "Do you fancy something a bit different this time?"

I've never been particularly interested in history (largely due to the fact that my history teachers were never particularly interested in history, or teaching, or me), but detecting puts a different spin on things somehow. Yesterday was a case in point. After two hours pulling nothing more exciting than penicillin tubes out of the ground, which sadly tend to give readings very similar to silver coins, I found a tiny disc of silver no wider than my little fingernail. A tentative clean showed detailing; a coin, then. I know better than to try to wipe coins clean in the field, so it went solo into a pouch on my bum bag for later examination. I have yet to clean up the artifacts I found (largely because I doubt any of them are exciting), but I did clean up that little bit of silver. It was... puzzling, in EF condition (read "excellent"), didn't feature in my coin ID books, and took some internet work to identify.

I had found a Venetian soldino, minted during the rule of Agostino Barbarigo between 1486 - 1501, which left me wondering - how and why did it come to be in a field in rural Dorset? The answer, after some more reading, is that for political reasons low-value silver coinage in the late fifteenth century was undervalued; in other words, worth less than the silver it was made out of. For that reason large amounts of it made its way to the continent where it would be melted down and struck into local currency - a Middle Ages money-laundering operation. This left commoners in England without enough coins to go round. Venetian sailors soon found that innkeepers were only too ready to accept their soldinos as if they were english halfpennies (despite it being illegal because their value was closer to a farthing), and they became known as "galley ha'pennies". It's a funny feeling, holding a coin that's made that kind of journey and then spent five hundred years waiting for you.

But taking an afternoon off from your labours is not without its price. It's happening again; January is the time when there's not a lot going on in the garden, and so you can catch up with all the less urgent repair and construction jobs. Or, if you're me, you can suddenly find you're in danger of not having enough days left before the whole planting and weeding thing starts off again. I'm determined not to end up doing everything a few weeks too late this year (not having the excuse of builders, although they are still lurking in the background alleging that they'll call early next week), so it's time to take stock of the jobs I need to do.

Hmm. Proritizing this lot is going to be tricky. Seeds to be ordered, that's got to be a must. Perhaps I can get it done tonight so that it's off my mind. "Thank you" letters to seed-swap people would be another good thing that doesn't take much time, but that's all I'll get through tonight. Also on the desk front, I need to finish the planting plan for the edible hedge and order the plants, along with the remaining fruit trees.

While I think of fruit trees, I've once again been thwarted in ordering a very late apple named Tommy Knight from the Agroforestry Research Trust. They only have so many available each year and by the time I remember about it, they're gone - so to be sure to get one this year I'm going to ring them and pre-order for the autumn. This might sound like a lot of trouble, but apples from this tree are picked sour to sweeten on storage, and are eaten up to the following June. That's right - June. With our earliest apple (George Cage) ready to pick in late July, that means we may potentially have apples almost the whole year round. At least, that's the plan...

Back to the list. Outside there are the remaining veg beds to do, but it's probably more urgent to sow the first of the cauliflower into a seed-bed in the tunnel. Also, the electric fence for the chooks needs to be weed-free and retensioned, and the fruit trees need their winter prune - all three jobs are the work of an afternoon. Then there's still leylandii branches to burn, which are at least not soggy right now. That's Saturday taken care of, I think!

Whatever the weather

Billy Connolly once famously said "There's no such thing as bad weather; only bad clothes", although a quick websearch shows that it's actually an old Swedish saying. Regardless, it's absolutely true. The weather for the next few days is bright and clear, with a 10 knot breeze, but struggling to get much above freezing. In other words, winter has arrived at last. This is a good thing, because even here in Dorset where we don't get much in the way of snow, a decent cold snap is essential to maintain the balance between various components of the ecosystem.

It's also a good thing because Hedgewizard has to dig tomorrow. I say "has to" because I'm off to the hosp in the morning for someone to ram a bloody great tube down my throat something called an endoscopy, so that they can decide if I'm suitable for a minor op to repair the valve that keeps what's in my stomach, in my stomach. The Hedgewizard runs a bit acid at the moment, you see, and has had a sore throat since September 2005. It would be nice to be rid of it.

Anyway, the wonderfully instructive booklet the hosp sent me (which isn't entitled Noddy gets a bloody great tube rammed down his throat but might as well have been) says I have to be as "active as possible" for the 24 hours that I have to keep this thing in my throat. They want me to have symptoms, apparently, and nothing brings on acid indigestion if you're prone to it like hard work. Except possibly my beech leaf liqueur, so I might have to have some of that as well. Frankly, this sounds like an excellent opportunity for me to take a day off work (because I'm obviously not well enough to wear a suit and deal with elderly people) and spend it digging out the second of the five new veg beds.

I love digging when it's cold. In the summer it's killing work; you spend half of your time gasping and wiping away sweat while the biteyflies feast on any exposed part of you that you haven't drenched with something poisonous, and at the end of the day you're a dangerous boiled-lobster colour and too painful to touch. And you smell. In winter, on the other hand, you peel off your layers one by one as you warm up until eventually you're in your summer clothes anyway, and then you have to keep going because if you stop for more than a minute you start to get cold. It's exactly that sort of impersonal cruelty that motivates a chap, and I should know. Have I ever mentioned my ex-wife?

Shelving and stir-fries

Well, it's finally done; using nothing more than four hooks and a length of nylon cord, the polytunnel now has a 15' scaffold board as a suspended shelf hanging over the central bed. This should make quite a difference for tender plants in winter, since the still air inside a closed polytunnel at night can often be several degrees warmer at the top than at the bottom. It gives me a lot more workbench space too, which is at a definite premium when I'm raising young seedlings for early planting in the spring.

Since I was in there I lifted a few bits and bobs for a stir fry for lunch (pictured); a few scraggy mange-tout, some early carrots, a bit of spring onion and a mooli. That's the mooli in the background looking like it might be ready to assault an adulterous Greek. These are monstrous Japanese radish, which in the tunnel are actually pushing themselves out of the ground, so big have they grown. I wasn't expecting them to get to this size, so grew lots... thankfully No. 2 Son has been chomping his way through them raw, so I hopefully won't be forced to get creative. Er. Moving swiftly on...

That's the last of the scrawny mange-tout, so I've lifted the plants and moved the supports over to the overwintering peas which grabbed on gratefully despite the cold. Not really worth the trouble as a winter crop, I think, and the jury's still out on the broad beans which are flowering now, but have nothing to pollinate them. They do self-pollinate, but only yield about 30% as much when there are no insects around. I'd thought they'd wait until spring to flower! Where's that paintbrush?

I've finally taken the plunge and made a start with the last and hardest bit of digging, so the first of the five new veg beds is in place. Naturally it turns out that my previously sand-rich garden gives way to heavy clay just there, but heck - I'll put in oodles of compost and it'll need less watering. He says, hopefully. Digging at least gives me something to do with the kitchen waste, which as I've mentioned before can't be composted right now - but I can bury it at the bottom of the new beds!

Thinking Inside the Box

Okay, so here's a little fact for you. If you're a fairly typical food shopper, ten per cent of your annual carbon deficit is down to the transport of your food. Got that? 10 per cent. And that's not growing it either - it's just packaging it up and getting it to you. I didn't know that when I started out on this road, but I had a suspicion that it was something I'd rather not know, and I was right.

It started with a "mange-tout moment" (a phrase coined by the environmentalist and columnist Leo Hickman) as I grumbled my way around the supermarket on the Isle of Man about five years ago. The IoM imports most of its food in any case, but being one of seventy thousand drunks clinging to a rock in the middle of the Irish Sea did highlight exactly what I was seeing; Peruvian strawberries in January. I blinked. It's not as if I didn't know that food is routinely air-freighted around the world, and of course the produce itself hadn't changed, but I'd been listening to Mr Hickman on the radio saying that when you buy a pack of mange-tout peas from Thailand (for example), it's cost more than the weight of the fruit in aviation fuel to get it to you.

I remember thinking "gosh" and carrying on as normal, but the thought must have been rattling around somewhere in my subconscious for a few days because here I was a week later, in a supermarket on a small island in the Irish Sea, staring at a plastic punnet of strawberries from South America*. And then all of sudden I looked around the shelves and it was like a magic eye picture; once I'd really seen this little label suddenly I was surrounded by them. South Africa. New Zealand. USA and - yes - Thailand.

From there on, it's been a journey. Trying to eat only seasonal fruit and vegetables on the Isle of Man is not to be recommended by the way, unless you're really fond of cabbage. I knew instinctively that the very best way to reduce the energy costs of food was to grow as much of it myself as possible, and organically to boot. For this reason (and many, many others) it was back to the UK for us, and (eventually) a home with a garden where we could grow our own food. The property price differential between IoM and the UK worked in our favour, and so we could afford to buy in Dorset where the climate makes things so much easier than further north; we are, shamelessly, Soft Southern Bastids.

But of course, you can't just wave a magic wand and suddenly be producing all your own fruit and veg in one year. This meant that we were always going to spend a period of time "in conversion" to grow-your-own, and were keen to find an alternative to the under-ripe, over-stored, over-packaged crap that all the major supermarkets are so keen to sell us. First that took us to farm shops, but we quickly realised that they were buying most of their produce from f&v wholesalers which made it not a lot different from the supermarket stuff in terms of quality (okay, I realize there are some very notable exceptions out there, but I'm speaking from my own personal experience). It was then that we stumbled on box schemes.

Various local box schemes came and went, but friends pointed us in the direction of Riverford Organic Vegetables which was already delivering locally. This is a co-operative of 13 family-run farms in South Devon which pool their resources and together produce a very wide variety of fruit and veg - a much better selection than any individual box scheme. Now as I write we're largely self-sufficient in vegetables (we have a lot of stored produce from the summer, and we're still picking quite a bit of fresh stuff even now, thanks to the polytunnel), but fruit takes longer. This year we'll have a few strawberries and raspberries with full production starting in 2008, with apples, pears, peaches, cherries and kiwis following on another year or two after that - so the Riverford fruit box is definitely in order for the moment, with extra f&v items as and when we need them. We also buy the week's milk from them, since the only local organic milk producer only packages in plastic, cannot deliver, and suffers in the shops from an extortionate markup (it's the word "organic" that does it, I'm sure). Shame.

One other point that bears mentioning is the fairly recent news that the Riverford model is slowly being rolled out across the country, with River Swale already running in the north-east and River Nene just about ready to go in the east.

Even including the fact that the stuff is delivered to your door, schemes like Riverford work out cheaper than buying organic produce from the supermarkets. Garden Organic is doing some research in 2007 on exactly how vegebox schemes influence the local economy; everyone expects the results to be positive since the money isn't going into the pocket of Tesco & Co, but it's important to challenge these things to be sure there aren't any nasty surprises. With a likewise open and questioning manner Riverford are waiting for the results of their own environmental audit, but one very clear finding so far is that (surprisingly enough) the economies of scale mean that Riverford can get food to anywhere in their delivery area for less carbon and money than it takes you to drive to the supermarket and back. No question.

And before anyone says "ah, but you're driving to the supermarket just as often anyway", no I'm not. With all our fresh produce coming from Riverford or our own garden, why would I?


*Which, by the way, are invariably horrible. The only way to eat strawberries is to pick them yourself and scoff one for every two that make it into the punnet. And for the record, those Thai mange-tout? They're not supposed to taste like old leather.

Say No to 0870!

No, not supermarkets today. Today I thought I'd make a short post - a blogette, if you will - to tell you how to save a few pennies when you're forced to deal with that most insidious of modern evils, the Call Centre.

Now, pretty much every big company uses a call centre, in some cases simply so that they don't have to deal with you. They charge you for the honour of calling them, by using a dialling prefix such as 0845 or 0870. This helps them to offset the cost of the service, and by and large I don't have a problem with the concept of paying a premium to access a modern, well-run, streamlined system which can help you first time, every time. Trouble is, it isn't usually like that. More often than not you wait listening to recorded announcements for thirty minutes (often at 20p/min) until finally you're put through to a gibbon. In the wrong department.

TalkTalk has been my worst experience of this. They gave me a reasonable calls and broadband service, until the day I did something complicated; I moved house. That was ten months ago now, and they still haven't been able to process my change of address and are threatening to take me to court for non-payment of bills for the service after I'd actually moved. We're now doing everything by post because I refuse to deal with their call centre, ever since a memorable two-hour telephone call which saw me chatting to people in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Delhi and somewhere that refused to identify itself. Mainly I just listened to muzak and a recorded voice telling me that, contrary to all appearances, my call was important to them; it's just that they were experiencing abnormally high call volume that day. As they had been doing on every single day I'd ever had reason to call them. I couldn't call from my TalkTalk line as they'd failed to reconnect me, so I had to call from a landline at (I think) 10p/min, so the call cost me £12. Lovely people.

But there is a way round it. Although you are supplied with an 0870 number or similar, the actual connection is only to a standard landline. If you can find the number of that landline, you're only charged for a standard telephone call. And there is a service called Say No To 0870 that gathers and compiles that information. And it works! Apparently this has been website of the day on Miles Mendoza's slot on Radio 2, but I got this tip from the Weymouth and Portland Metal Detecting Society. See? It's amazing what you can dig up.

Don't say I'm not good to you.

Supermarkets: a modern problem

I don't normally comment much on environmental news, taking the view that although individual action is important at a personal level, only society-wide action makes any actual difference. However, I've been reading up on the concept of memes after Mel mentioned them on Beansprouts, and perhaps it's time to start.

Having listened last week to two Government ministers giving speeches, one on "encouraging consumers to ask questions about where their food is sourced" (which I suppose is a euro-friendly and completely pants way to say "Buy British") and another on "encouraging consumers to buy less packaging" (as if they did it on purpose). It struck me immediately that there was one word missing from each of these monologs, and both ministers were avoiding it. That word is "supermarkets". This tells me that the Government is at least wary of upsetting the supermarkets, if not actually afraid of them. I'm not surprised.

I'm not going to go into the whole anti-supermarket thing (other than to point you in the direction of the self-sufficientish forum; just stick the word "tesco" (for example) in there and you'll soon see what I mean), but the big supermarkets by and large ARE the nation's shopping habits. At the very least they collude with consumers in these two environmental crimes, and if I'm less than charitable (and I generally am) they actually drive them. After all, the public wants what the public gets.

However the supermarkets (along with the petrochemical companies, food giants and so forth) can bring a large amount of pressure to bear on governments, and their executives are members of that rarified overpaid business elite to which government ministers hope, one day, to belong. You don't tell these people what to do if you want to stay in office. But what's this? A glimmer of hope, as yesterday Marks and Sparks have announced that they intend to be be carbon-neutral by 2012.

Okay M&S aren't exactly a supermarket and it would be nice if they could do it quicker, but it's a move in the right direction. It might be a co-incidence, but this can't have come out of the blue. I expect this is a project that's been on the cards for a while and has now been pulled forward in response to the Government's rumblings, but the impetus for them to carry out the feasability studies in the first place must have come from customers, shareholders, or both. And therein lies the key.

The only thing that most big businesses actually listen to is money; you can write as many letters of protest as you like, but if the demand is there the companies will carry on regardless. Nestlé is a prime example, as a quick look at the Baby Milk Action website will soon show you. We've been an active part of the boycott for some three years now, but nothing happens until the money moves.

And move it can. This morning Tesco released its latest set of figures, and shows a 5.9% growth on last year's Xmas period overall, but a 39% growth in the sale of organic produce. At last, the money is moving and you can see the first signs of it in the stores - although meat is a long way behind and manufactured goods are still pretty much nowhere, with companies like Nestle holding firmly onto the reins. A word of caution, though - in the UK the word organic has no meaning in law unless it's backed up by independant accreditation, so always look for the Soil Association logo when you want to buy organic. And don't forget, organic baby sweetcorn grown in Thailand has still been flown halfway round the world to end up on your plate so as far as the environment is concerned you're pissing into the wind. Particularly if getting it to you in good condition involves beating a baby bush to death and encasing the corpse in plastic with the legend "recycleable where facilities exist" (i.e. not).

So what am I trying to say, after all of this? Well, I wish I could coin some pithy phrase like the flawed "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra, but I fear that simply won't do because there are far too many issues. I'd say read; papers, editorials, blogs like Beansprouts, Musings from a Stonehead, and this one of course. We're not an organisation and have no axes to grind; we're just people trying to make sense of what we see. Learn and understand the consequences of your actions, and little by little you can begin to accept responsibility for what you do and then decide what changes you are prepared to make. You'll be surprised, in time, what you might achieve. One thing's for sure, and that's that denial is not an option. Wait, what did I say about pithy phrases?

Denial is not an option.

Oh yes, and I want as many people as possible to read this post so I should Google some in. Therefore, with apologies, shaved pussy.

Freecycle

At last, after a fairly long hibernation, Hedgewizard has re-emerged blinking into the garden and got a bit of digging done. Apart from the day I savaged the leylandii I think that's the only fair day there's been since before Yule, so I seized my chance and guilted Son No. 1 into having a bit of a bonfire (getting rid of around half the felled wood, very little of which is savable) while I sallied forth and tackled all the things I've been itching to do for weeks.

Or not. First, of course, there were other jobs to tackle - car washing, drive clearing and things of that ilk, and cleaning off some patio slabs that someone of Freecycle was asking for. This is probably as good a time as any to rattle on about Freecycle for a minute; I'm assuming that anyone who actually goes to the trouble of reading the blog is already the kind of person who knows about things like Freecycle, but just on the offchance this is news to anyone I'll explain the principle.


When you have stuff you don't want any more, but which might be of use to someone, your choices are to sell it (often tedious), charity shop it (laudable, but poorly targeted and I can tell you a lot of stuff just gets disposed of) or dumping it (environmentally reprehensible, but I guess it cuts out the middle man). Freecycle is a newer option. It's simply an internet board for your locality, run for free by volunteers, where you can sign up to receive daily digests by e-mail (the most sensible option IMHO). When you have something you don't want, you send a post; "Offered: ten 20cm square concrete paving slabs in fair condition. Dorchester" will cover it nicely. Any interested forum members just click on the "reply by web post" (usually) option to ask if they can come and collect, whereon you tell them your address and number. There are rules and regs, but the most important one is that everything has to be FREE.

Since starting with Freecycle I've picked up a perfectly good filing cabinet, a box of clean jam jars, and a cup of worms. Oh yes. I've also offloaded a perfectly functionable boy's bike (which never the less would have fetched no more than five quid if I'd gone to the trouble of selling it), a box of baby clothes and the paving slabs. There's also a chance someone may come and take away some of the builders' rubble from round the back as a base for a new shed. I've also met a few interesting folks, because doing Freecycle is one way of interacting with folks who are basically like minded. I can't recommend the system enough!

Anyway, once all those jobs were out of the way I was able to get down to a bit of digging and finished off the final raspberry bed, a weight off my mind as the plants could turn up any day now. The next digging job will be to start cutting the remainder of the new veg beds into the lawn, which will be backbreaking and take about a day per bed. Not looking forward to that I can tell you, but there's not re-e-ally all that many days between here and late February when the planting starts... eek! And I haven't pruned the fruit trees yet...

The Great Dorset Seed Hunt

Equipment; Open-toed sandals, khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt, water canteen, rescue remedy, pith helmet, pencil, paper, seed catalogues, butterfly net (large), elephant gun. White socks (optional)*.

If you can’t already tell, I really look forward to my annual seed puchase. That’s because, Hedgewizard being Hedgewizard, I can get quite a bit of fun out of it. First of all I write down all the things that I want to grow, going through the catalogues and my ice-cream tub of seeds to see what’s getting a bit old. Then I go through Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library catalogue and seed swapper lists, to see what I can get there and also what I can send to other people.

Once that’s done, it’s time to make out my bed-plan-cum-sowing-schedule. This is a bit technical, as I mentioned before, since I try to have full bed occupancy the whole time. This means that instead of considering a bed as a single-year entity (let’s say “peas and broad beans”) I have to look at what’s been overwintering there and when it comes out, what soil improvements have to happen and when, and what’s going to go in when the peasenbeans come out. Any gaps more than six weeks long get filled in with green manures (typically rye or clover). Ordinarily any gaps in the growing season itself would be used for fast-growing catch crops like lettuce or radish, but the polytunnel produces that kind of thing faster than HFW** can gut a squirrel, so there doesn’t seem much point for me from a cropping perspective.

Last year I presented the bed plans as if they were a picture of the bed crossways, but a graph against time lengthways. This caused Witchypoo some problems, but not half as much as the fact that I never got round to producing a legible version, and didn’t entirely stick to it anyway… but I learned a lot from doing it. If I can just find a way to get the information out of my head and onto paper in a way that doesn’t give everybody else a headache, I’ll be onto a winner. Answers on a postcard please!

Anyway, it’s this bed planning that decides what I can and cannot fit into the garden each year. I have plenty of space in the garden, but not necessarily as much vegetable plot space as we ideally need. Different gardeners sacrifice different crops when this happens – HFW says onions were the first to go in his plot, since they’re always cheap and fairly edible in the shops. I’d be interested to hear which veg any of you have had to give the heave-ho to in your planting plans!

*Comfortable, but not recommended in combination with the sandals lest you attract the attention of the Fashion Police.

**HFW, the new God of Self-Sufficiency, who slew the old God Richard Briers in the great cataclysm of the Nineties, the same battle that saw Jamie Oliver disembowel Delia Smith***. Interestingly the Goddess of Self-Sufficiency (Felicity Kendall) was never overthrown, but instead voluntarily changed to become the Goddess of Being Horribly Killed While Admiring A Previously Uncatalogued Strain of Tulip. The casual barbarity of the periodic succession of the gods is known as “downlisting”, with the losing deity either disappearing completely or, more often, being sucked into a vortex of increasing futility, the hellish singularity of which is Celebrity Big Brother.****
Scholars of the arcane are divided as to whether “downlisting” is evidence that the pantheon is evolving, or whether if just means that old Gods can only be recycled a finite number of times before they get a bit shabby and worn out in the crotch. Readers who are occasionally bothered by the smug posing and primping of Gods currently in the ascendant should glean some measure of comfort in this fact; with the possible exception of the mantle of God of Radio 2, Godhood is a temporary gig. Regardless, the throne of the Goddess of SS is currently unoccupied, and so Felicity Kendall has retained the post’s major perk, the Divine Bottom.

***…and serve her liver (on bruschetta) to a horde of screaming fourteen-year-olds. The Gods can be very cruel. And yes, I know I’ve stolen the dropped text conceit from Terry Pratchett, and I don’t care. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to comic timing.

****If George Orwell had known that his treatise on the control of the minds of the proletariat would have its title used for something designed to tranquillize the minds of the proletariat, I’m inclined to think he would have ended it all a lot sooner. I’m also absolutely certain that the irony of that is very well understood by Peter Bazalgette, the "Chief Creative Officer" of the company which makes Celebrity Big Brother. In a further irony, Bazalgette’s great-grandfather was the illustrious Joseph Bazalgette, who pioneered and constructed London’s great Victorian sewerage system, which means that in four generations the Bazalgette family has changed from piping crap out of people’s houses to piping it back in again.

Tagged!

Where's Wally?

It occurs to me that I've not updated the Diary for a bit. This isn't because I've been a lazy Hedgewizard, though (although I have) - it's because there's not a lot going on outside at the moment because Dorset has been perpetually under a few inches of water. The only outside time I've managed to grab between showers was spent felling the penultimate leylandii, which was just getting past the 20' mark and was a good eight feet thick. It's a complete mystery to me how people can be short-sighted enough to put these trees where there isn't room for them, given just how quickly they grow, but there you are. My mate Digiveg has recently had to grub out a row of these beasts that the previous owners had planted just south of their vegetable plot, presumably to act as a fast-growing windbreak. Like, duh.

I won't bang on about the horrors these trees can cause because better writers than me have commented on them before (oh, and the Daily Mail hacks) but let me just say I have never seen a garden that wasn't better off without them. There we are. We are now the proud possessors of a small patio that we scarcely knew we had; the elderly couple we bought the place from said how nice it was to breakfast out there in the summer, but we just raised our eyebrows because nary a sunbeam penetrated there. Ever. It turns out that they should have said how nice it used to be to breakfast out there; now that the leylandii is gone the spot gets sun from first light until around eleven. Nice.

Anyway, I have started to go through my planting lists for next year to see what seed I need to buy. Thankfully, there isn't much but it's still a useful exercise to do because it points out which seed is getting a bit old, and gives me a chance to consider if those plants are suitable for seed-saving. Depending on how organised I get, I may go on to put my sowing schedule onto paper and stick a few reminders into the Cardex of Destiny. It also encouraged me to look at my bed planner, which Witchypoo complained was incomprehensible last year, so I really must try to work out a simpler way to present it. If only I was less muddle-headed about what I get up to!

Finally, let me just mention Self-Sufficient(ish) as a splendid resource if you find yourself off the beaten track in terms of the questions you ask yourself. There are plenty of books that explain how to set up raised beds with or without "hard" edges, but try finding one that tells you how to space fixed beds in a conventional row system... it's such a basic question that it's rarely addressed. For this kind of thing and more esoteric questions such as "do any UK amateurs actually grow their own ginger?" or "can somebody identify this photo of the funny black things that are eating my brassicas?", the Self-Sufficient(ish) forum is a wonderful way to ask the panel, and it's very friendly to newcomers.

Right then, back to my seed packets...