Edible Hedge, part the final

Finally. On a showery day like today having a shed is nice because it gives you somewhere to hide when the rain comes down, but having a greenhouse or polytunnel is even nicer because you don't have to stop gardening just because it's wet outside. Today was blustery too, and it was great to be able to step into a calm haven and do a bit of weeding, snack on a few salad leaves, and read the notes I use to remind myself what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.

Which today meant putting in lots of small plants, and then pruning them so hard that they were barely there any more - not terribly impressive on the photo I'm afraid, but just wait a couple of years! I opted to go for a semi-random arrangement of plants rather than simple block planting in the hope that it might look more natural, and I think it's worth mentioning what each of these plants should give us in case anyone's interested.

Amelanchier lamarkii, aka juneberry or apple serviceberry (a catchy title, I don't think). As well as a pretty show of reddish foliage in spring and autumn, juneberry has fair-sized white flowers in spring which are followed by black berries in June and July. The berries are delicious and apple-y, are good raw or cooked, and can be eaten in large quantities with no ill effects. They can also be dried for winter use. I look forward to this one!

Cornus mas, aka cornelian cherry. Bunches of small yellow flowers on the bare branches in February are followed by bright red cherry-like berries ripening in September. The berries are horrible until they ripen, but when ready are juicy and tart. They can be eaten raw, dried, or made into jams (although not alone, since they're low in pectin). Should we feel the urge, the seeds can be pressed for oil or roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.* A tea made with the dried fruit is supposed to be good for fever or diarrhoea.

Rosa rugosa, aka ramanas rose, flowers from June to September. I chose a mixture of red and white flowers, although it also comes in pink. It bears large orange hips ripening from August to October. Left on the plant these will attract birds right through the winter, but can also be eaten (carefully) raw, cooked, made into a vitamin C-rich tea or wine, or used for rose hip syrup (a traditional tonic for children and the reason my teeth were so bad as a child) (I have only myself to blame for the state of my adult ones, sadly). Surprisingly enough the flowers are edible too and handy for jellies and preserves once the bitter white petal bases have been pulled off, and have a fresh, clove-like aroma.

Berberis darwinii aka Darwin's barberry is a plant I encountered when I was learning about herbal medicine, since the berries contain an antibacterial that concentrates in the urinary tract and is therefore good for cystitis - far better, in fact, than cranberries. This is the one plant I broke my hemisphere rule for, for this very reason - but it has a certain reputation for attracting wildlife (my chickens used to have a mahonia, a related species, that they were very fond of). It has masses of deep orange flowers from May to June followed by edible blue barberries, which are acid until they are very ripe but are very good eating, if a bit pippy, and can be used for preserves or mixed into museli or porridge.

Elaeagnus x ebbingei or "silverberry" is a hugely underrated plant which has barely noticeable flowers in the autumn. Barely noticeable to us, that is; late-foraging bees are drawn to them because of their wonderful heady aroma. The big deep red fruit is ready intermittently from mid-April until May making it a welcome "hungry gap" fruit, long before anything else is ready. It can be eaten raw (improving on storage for a few days) or cooked. The large seeds can be cooked and eaten too, I read, tasting a bit like peanuts. Hmm.

Finally Hippophae rhamnoides, also known as sea buckthorn, is the only one of my plants that doesn't attract pollinating insects as it's wind-pollinated. It does, however, bear masses or orange-yellow berries in the autumn that, like rosehips, are best used before the frosts but will stay on all winter if the birds don't get them first. The berries are too sharp for most adults to eat raw, although kids seem to love them; they can be juiced and mixed with other fruits. Picked in late September, they're apparently delicious when cooked and make a terrific marmalade.

So there it is. The edible hedge is partly there to encourage wildlife and I don't intend to try to obsessively harvest all the fruit it bears, but it will provide us with a welcome variation in diet with some input from mid-April to November or so. Insect-wise, there'll be flowers for the supping from February until October so the hedge ought to make a definite difference to the biodiversity of the garden, making it less susceptible to pest population surges. At least, that's the theory!

Purely as a note to myself, the trimming times for the different plants vary, which is a bit of a pain. The juneberries, cherries and silverberries get trimmed once the juneberries finish flowering in the spring; the barberries are pruned after they flower in late June; the sea buckthorns are trimmed back in August; and the roses are massacred in winter. I suspect that in practice once the hedge has filled out everything will be hacked back every other summer, but we shall see.

* I'm always cautious about claims like this. I'd sooner they were roasted and ground because they tasted nice, rather than because you can pretend they are something else.

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The Edible Hedge, part 3

Since it's my hope to plant the hedge tomorrow if it doesn't blow a gale, I thought I'd get a word in about a small problem I had in choosing plants. When I was still at the planning stage I set out to select native plants, on the received wisdom that they would harbour more wildlife than exotics. When I started trying to make choices, though, I hit on a problem; suppliers varied a great deal in what they thought was native. So what exactly does native mean?

Well, apparently a native plant is one that reaches our shores without the aid of man. If a piece of thistledown crosses the channel in a gale and takes root, it's a native; if it sticks to your shoe as you board a ferry, it's an invader. Not entirely useful, really. So what do I mean? I mean that I want to make choices that our native wildlife will be able to eat, and that our native fungi will be able to break down. But... I scrabble through long-neglected engrams for memories of geography lessons... Britain has only been an island since the last Ice Age. How different can the flora here be? I reach for a book on wildlife gardening.



Enter "No Nettles Required", an entertaining little book that WP gave me for Yule. This book came off the back of some academic research and a fair-sized field study called entitled BUGS (Biodiversity of Urban Gardens in Sheffield) so Ken Thompson, it can be assumed, knows what he's talking about. It seems that so far as wildlife is concerned what matters is the chemistry of the plants, rather than what they look like; and chemistry runs in plant families. Not only does Britain not vary much from Europe in this respect, but Europe does not vary very much from the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is something of a surprise, but when you think about it there are quercus (oak) and pinus (pine) species native to both England and Japan.

Okay, so perhaps there's a list of "wildlife-friendly" plants somewhere that I can choose from? Actually, there are a few of these. The bad news is that the BUGS study showed they made no difference, since they're based on lists of native plants (sadly disproven) and things that attract flying insects only (which isn't hard to do). What I'm left with is a clear instruction to avoid southern-hemisphere plants and the knowledge that the single most important thing I can do is to put more shrubs and trees into the garden. Which is, like, exactly what I'm doing. There's more to wildlife gardening of course, but I'll post more on that another time. Now - where's me spade?

Moles can keep it!

Have I mentioned that I hate digging? Actually, strike that; it isn't strong enough. I arsing well hate sodding digging. I might have mentioned that before, once or twice. This weekend I managed (with some help from Number Two Son) to finish digging and backfilling the planting trench for the edible hedge, ready for planting out on Wednesday. Frankly, I've had enough of digging now. Particularly digging that you just fill in with improved soil afterwards. Except of course my next major job is to finish improving the soil where the new veg rows are going - more trenches to dig, then! Small wonder that when I heard of the idea of "no-dig" gardening I shouted "sold!" before anyone had even had time to explain it to me.

The baffle shown along the line of the hedge;
from the top of the garden the hedge should look continuous.

But I'm still setting up, so dig I must; the only consolation is that I won't have to do this again - at least, not very often. There's enough clay in the soil where the new beds are going to form a hard pan eventually, so when I manure next year's peasenbeans beds at the end of each year I'll lift an experimental chunk two spits deep to check that everything's still looking as light and crumbly as Jamie Oliver's underpants.

Also this weekend saw the termination of my experimental overwintering broadies; the plants themselves were fine, but I'd underestimated just how much things grow in a tunnel in winter and so they grew fast and had finished flowering before the arrival of the first pollinating insects (a load of fairly hungover bees, yesterday). No bees, no beans! We pinched out and ate the tips before lifting the plants of course, but as expected these were fairly tasteless compared with their summer cousins. From what I hear the beans themselves are similar, but coming in as they do in very early summer I'll bet they'll still be very welcome!

Onions, shallots and garlic are all in now, planted zig-zag fashion for better use of raised bed space. I found out too late that the shallots and garlic do much better planted in late autumn, but it's been so warm and wet this winter that I reckon a lot of them would have rotted in the ground anyway. As compensation for this, though, I was able to get hold of some "banana shallots" from a local farm shop. Wow. I've seen smaller onions! I've no idea where these things came from (France, I expect) but I've had to allow 12" planting distance for them and it still may not be enough. They're that big. If they grow it'll solve my major grumble with shallots, which is how fiddly they are to prepare. They may be sweet and they may be early, but if they're the size of ballerina's nipples then old sausage-fingers here may have a little trouble unwrapping them. The shallots, that is.

Bombing in Chickerell

Okay, here's the joke. It's been modified a bit now, but this is how I found it on Duelling Analogs;

Me: Knock-knock.
You: Who's there?
Me: Interrupting cow.
You: Interrupting -
Me: MOOOOO.

Simple enough, you might think - it worked fine with the first person I tried it with, but the second... ever seen Vicar of Dibley? The end bit where Geraldine tries to tell Alice a joke? Well in real life Alice is called Janet. She's over 50 and really has no excuse for this. Quoten verbotum.

Hedgewizard: Knock-knock.
Janet (confused): Yes?
HW: No, Anne, it's a joke. I'm going to tell you a joke.
J: Oh, right. Sorry.
HW: No problem. Knock-knock.
J: (smiles and nods encouragingly)
HW: It's a knock-knock joke. You're supposed to say...
J: Oh right. Who's there?
HW: (sighs) Let's start again. Knock-knock.
J: Who's there?
HW: Interrupting cow.
J: (frowns) But I didn't...
HW: No, Anne, that's the joke.
J: But it isn't funny.
HW: It isn't finished. You're supposed to say "interrupting cow who".
J: But I didn't interrupt... oh, I see. Interrupting cow who?
HW: (Becoming aware that other staff members are gathering around and one or two are hanging onto bits of furniture to stay upright) Let's start again.
J: What?
HW: Knock-knock.
J: (sounding irritated now) ...Who's there?
HW: Interrupting cow.
J: (looks panicked. Long pause) ...Interrupting -
HW: MOOOOO.
J: - cow who? (looks expectant)

I also tried the joke at home on Number Two Son (aged three) to get the Zen take on it. I wasn't disappointed.

Hedgewizard: Knock-knock.
Number Two Son: Who's there?
HW: Interrupting cow.
NTS: MOOOOOO. (cackles)

The Edible Hedge, part 2

As you might have guessed by my silence, all was not well with Witchypoo after our return, and so I was forced to be Supermum for a day and a bit that I'd really earmarked for the hedge. I did get out in the end, though, and press-ganged Number One Son (who actually says he likes digging!) to help. Gritting our teeth, we made a start.

The wiggly line on the plan was only ever intended to show the fact that the hedge would curve, but not how. To work out that minor detail, we drafted in a length of old and crappy hose, and laid it on the ground to represent the shape of the planting trench.

Witchypoo was fetched to act in her role of creative director, and there followed an unexpected interlude for an argument about where the whirly line was going to go, how spiky the hedge was going to be, and how far out we could expect sheets to blow on a windy day. Who'd have thought these things could be so complicated? In the end WP wasn't entirely convinced that the whirligig would go there at all, so we softened the curve of the hedge a bit so that it wouldn't look odd. Just in case.

We also had to make a final decision about how to get through the hedge to the tunnel, and opted to stick with our original idea of a baffle. This means having to turn a corner on the way to the tunnel, admittedly, but it will hide the tunnel from the top of the garden better and more importantly Number Two Son and his little friends will no longer be able to hammer down the slope and topple down the steps to the tunnel. Now they'll have to stop for the baffle of highly spiky hedge. Heh.

Once the hose was in position, Number One Son and myself cut and stacked the turf and started to dig the planting trench out; 45cm wide, 30cm deep, and 23 sodding meters long. No wonder we only managed half of it! As breaks from the digging I finished the apple pruning and we planted all the raspberries; five each of Glen Moy (fruiting mid June to mid July), Glen Ample (early July to early August), and Autumn Bliss (mid August to mid October). That's more than three months of raspberries - I wonder if we'll get sick of them?

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Hedgewizard returns!

Sorry no updates for a while, folks - have just got back from Centerparcs. I'm too wiped out to do a proper post tonight, but as Douglas Adams said "Normal service will be resumed as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway."

Oh, and I forgot another drawback of going away from home for a holiday - E.coli infections (commonly known as "the change in water", or traveller's tummy). Poor Witchypoo has fallen foul of one such so I'm frankly not sure what sort of day we're going to have tomorrow. All being well, I should be finishing off the pruning; planting onions, garlic and shallots; and making a start on the edible hedge, blackberry and raspberries. All being well, that is!

Home holidays - the real eco break

Going away for a holiday once or twice a year is something that most people take as a given, although really they're a concept that's less than a hundred years old (for the common man, anyway), with holidaying abroad a still more recent development. Going abroad has a high environmental cost, which is increasingly well publicized, and yet the popularity of foreign holidays continues to rise. I'm no angel on this count, having visited the Far East twice in my life, but this year we have decided to take a break in Centerparcs (ooh, my aching wallet) and hopefully another short trip down to camp in Kitchenwitch's garden when she's making her cob bidet or whatever it is.

But that's not the point I set out to make. It's just that when your garden has more going on in it than Paris Hilton's knickers, how on earth can you take a break during the summer months? After all, you know instinctively that somewhere in your securely-netted brassica patch there's a little patch of eggs (presumably teleported in by an unusually sophisticated butterfly), ticking away like 0.8mm timebombs. By the time you come back the caterpillars will be four feet long, and having run out of purple sprouting they'll be making a start on the planks that hold the raised beds up, like something off Jon Pertwee-era Dr Who.

In short, can you leave it? You can count on friends or neighbours to feed the cat and maybe even open and close the chicken house, but will their generosity extend to picking peas every other day to stop them running to seed? Making sure the courgettes don't get above themselves? Watering the polytunnel or greenhouse every morning? Transplanting these three cauliflowers here, but not those ones, and definitely not those ones which may look like cauliflowers but aren't, as soon as the fifth leaf is properly opened? Particularly if they’re non-gardening shrink-wraps* who wouldn’t know a radish if it paraded around in front of them wearing only a pair of skimpy underpants with “I am a radish” printed on them? Perhaps not.

Personally, my ideal holiday would be at home when the kids are off anyway, using the money I would have spent on flights and hotels on all manner of wondrous things to really make a holiday out of it; even a local caterer bringing food in daily and a housecleaning service every morning would be substantially cheaper than going abroad. Okay, I know this isn't going to be for everyone but it's something Witchypoo and I have been thinking about lately, and we may give it a try. What sold it to her was the notion of daily maidservice, in our own home. There are obvious microeconomic benefits too as it would fuel local jobs, albeit seasonal ones.

What other options are there then? Well, house sitting is an obvious option provided you can find someone you trust to do it for you. There are agencies for this kind of thing even for smallholders, so it has to be worth looking into for future years. House swaps are another option and have a certain attraction, although I don't think there are any schemes around for the self-sufficientish. Then there's winter breaks, but if you're not willing to fly then your options become vanishingly small. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one, dear readers.

*I’ve come to adopt the term shrink-wraps to describe some of my friends and colleagues who have somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware of all matters environmental – sometimes by sticking their fingers in their ears and going la-la-la-la-la. It’s a faintly derogatory term I know, but there’s a whole spectrum of shrink-wrappedness to be covered. At one end there’s the “Oh, I’d love to grow some vegetables but we love having a lawn” and at the other there’s “Global warming? We don’t have anything to do with that sort of nonsense.” That last one is verbatum by the way, from one of my posh neighbours. Oh yes.

The behaviour of shrink-wraps is sometimes quite baffling to people who have actually thought about these things and begun to totter out of denial. Feeding your family consistently on junk food, or on a diet of intensively-reared chicken; refusing to eat or even handle home-grown vegetables because they have a bit of soil on them; driving thirty miles to eat a picnic in the car on a pier and then drive home again (my own parents)… there seems to be no end to it. And not so very long ago we all thought like that. Anyhow, I’ve posted shrink-wraps as a word in the Pseudodictionary . If you like it, please use it as I’d be immensely flattered if it caught on.

Incidentally, it joins my other entries of microbe, scrob-driveller and snivellope, although my personal favourite is someone else’s snorkel foot. By the way, I was going to mention George W Bush in the shrink-wrap entry but it'd probably go the same way as my mention of him in the scrob-driveller post. Enjoy.

Spring can bugger off. I'm busy.

It's ridiculous.



Stonehead has swallows in his barn. Kitchen Witch and Mel are planting all sort of seeds all over the place. I'm seeing finches starting their mating displays in the hedgerows. To round it all off I was forced to enter the Evil Empire Tescopoly yesterday and it's official; they've put their range of summer clothes out*. Now, I'm used to seeing a few signs of false spring, but they're usually limited to a few early daffodils. This is something else; this winter we have had a strong ENSO effect (El Niño Southern Oscillation) on top of whatever contribution Global Warming may be making.

There are consequences, of course. While my shrink-wrapped co-workers talk about how nice it is to be out in their shirt-sleeves at this time of the year, I have a quiet worry about what will happen to the balance of predator insects and their prey this spring - particularly if the forecasted hot summer materializes. A genuinely early spring will result in higher than normal hatch rates for predatory species such as wasps and ladybirds, which will quickly overwhelm the available prey. The prey species' population will then crash, followed by that of the predators - but guess which will recover first? You've got it. Bad news for organic gardeners.

There's a silver lining though (although not everyone will agree with me with the spring bank holiday coming up), since the ENSO effect has been dropping off steadily over the last week, which should prompt a return to seasonal norms by this time next week - a few hard frosts will sort out the wasps and Stoney might even get a bit of the white stuff he needs to secure his water supply (that's SNOW, townies - and if one more of you tells me you can buy reusable snow now I'll go crazy).

Happily, the increased day length has given us a gift, as the chickens proudly presented us with the first egg of 2007 on Saturday. Okay the shell wasn't up to much and someone had crapped on it out of surprise, but it was still a welcome sight and was followed up with another one in much better shape this morning. I'd completely forgotten the pleasure of finding a warm egg on a frosty morning; even an XL egg like ours is only a small thing really, yet somehow it gives you a glow that keeps your hands warm all the way back to the house. We've been buying from a free-range farm not far from here, but for some reason the eggs are much paler and blander than ours - and although they collect daily the wateriness of the whites tells me they're a few days old already. You can't poach 'em in open water, or you get egg soup. So let me just put cackleberries back into the now eating panel...

This year we've had no eggs for the first time since the boids arrived - not a single one from November 19 to February 3rd, a 76 day gap. In itself that's hardly serious, but from a self-sufficiency point of view we've been eating fewer eggs and making special trips to get them (GAH! I nearly said source them. What's happening to me?), while the birds have consumed more or less the same resources as usual. The birds are three years old and their yield is now less predictable than it was, and that means only one thing**; it's time for some replacements, and we're going to have to get into the habit of doing it every other year at least. Bird flu notwithstanding, it's time to speak to the Egg Man at Kingston Maurward.


*I've long been puzzled about why clothes shops are always selling goods suitable for what the weather will be in a few months time, rather than stuff people might want to buy now. Try going out to buy a woolly sweater right now, at (allegedly) the coldest time of the year; go on, try it. Skimpy tops, on the other hand, are a-gogo. Can anyone shed any light on this? After all, restaurants don't stop serving lunch at noon do they? Or train stations stop selling tickets half an hour before the service is due? I can only assume it's the same phenomenon which has stopped me from buying my remaining apple tree from the Agroforestry Research Trust - deliberately understocking slightly to avoid being left with redundant stock at the end of the season. Fair enough, I know my place. I'll plant a geranium instead, and go out walking in bermuda shorts, flip-flops and a t-shirt bearing the legend "Surf's Up", all of which were on display in Tescopoly yesterday. Actually, perhaps I should - after all, they'll be gone by the summer.

**Okay, two things. The first one is soup.