potato fright

Oh no! I think my potatoes have blight. I was over-eager and ordered all my seeds, onion sets and seed potatoes in January. The box containing all these I put in my studio and forgot about for a fortnight. The seed potatoes, seduced by central heating and the dark containment of the box, began to sprout far too early. When I remembered I remedied this and thought I’d saved them but now I may be paying for my neglect…

…Just spoke to my allotment neighbour who tells me there was a frost two days ago - so it’s not blight after all and hopefully only minimal frost damage – hooray! I earthed up most of my potatoes last time I was here, perhaps I’m becoming more intuitive than I’d realised.

what to do on a rainy day

Sowing seed this afternoon has seemed very playful, particularly some of the extraordinary pumkin seed that fell into my hand as I shook them out of their packet. I took to my shed during a shower of rain and caught up with my sowing and re-potting. French beans haven’t germinated outside so I’m trying again inside.

ordinary aesthetics

Arrived straight from a tent at 7.30am – Council lorry day. Jobs done, I’m gasping for a coffee. A pair of swans just flew over… and now back again… I always wonder at the sound of their powerful wings in flight.

This may be a habit worth developing – first coffee of the day at the allotment. I’m sitting by my pea and cabbage seedlings that I watered 2 days ago – they’ve shot up – should come on leaps and bounds after this weekends predicted downpour.

I was chatting with a neighbour earlier who was saying he always takes a breath of honeysuckle on his way to and from work. This is a huge and straggling bush situated in my wild area that overhangs the wall and hence the adjacent path. I’m guessing it is home to a whole host of wildlife as well as being redemptive to a sensibility that looks for the aesthetic in the ordinary. (bell hooks, Art on My Mind: visual politics, 1995).

death of a hedgehog

I feel so sad and responsible for the death of this beautiful hedgehog. I hope the stones that I have now provided as a ladder will prevent any more accidents of this kind.

Potato progress for Dave

Orla - first early, Desiree - first maincrop, Verity - late maincrop.

After speaking with my friend Jane about a quandary I find myself in she suggested, in the style of my research, that I ‘dig on it’ to discover what emerges from the process of doing instead of thinking, so here I am.

I stopped to take a rest from digging and stood back 2 paces from my fork. A robin flew and perched on it, dropped down to pick up a worm then flew off to my wild corner. A strange little grating squeak alerted me to turn and focus on a small, fat, brown bird with wide-open beak… the recipient of the afore-mentioned worm.

I let my kettle boil too long and my shed now smells like a sauna.

It’s a new moon I can see it even though it’s only 3pm, it’s beckoning to me to do some planting.

Scilly mnemonic

I heard a familiar sound whilst digging today and looked up to see a helicopter circling overhead and reappearing at regular intervals, sightseeing flights I think. I was reminded of living in Newlyn, Cornwall and seeing the Scilly helicopter flying over to the islands and back, like a bee to its hive, day in day out. During our penultimate year there this sight triggered a repetitive emotion. Our then 18-year-old was working on Tresco, which though only about 20 miles away involved a prohibitively expensive flight or sea voyage. Having taken the job and departed all within a brief period of 7 days our first offspring quite literally flew the nest.

At this time I had negotiated with a neighbour the use of some land behind our house and was digging up the most insidious rhizome I’ve ever encountered - bamboo. This was when I ‘discovered’ digging in all its glories. The patch I was working had obviously been used as a rubbish tip. I dug up some strange metal objects that may have originated from the harbour below, also some tiles from an Edwardian fireplace and my most intriguing find a discarded empty tube of oil paint. The land I was working was just in front of a house occupied in the last century by one of the more famous artists of the Newlyn School. I want to believe that the contents of this object are now seen and admired by many, perhaps in the painting ‘Blue Door’ that Harvey must have painted from about the spot at which I discovered the redundant tube.

Here, today, on my allotment poppies are popping.

after the rain

Early afternoon, warm and dry but still overcast. Once it finally started raining last week it did it steadily for several days, almost filling the water butts and waking up the dozing seeds. All of a sudden germination is happening – carrots, lettuce, endive, chicory, peas and cabbage both red and green – everything reaching for the sky. I’ve discovered that what I thought was comfrey and transplanted in the corners of my bean and potato bed are foxglove. Fruits are swelling, some gooseberries almost fully grown – I’m guessing the goldfinch gang will be first to know when they’re ripe.
I dreamed last night that one of my neighbours had rotovated the bottom part of my allotment behind their bungalow and was using the space for hanging out their washing. I think this must be separation anxiety on my part as I’ve been at home writing the last few days.
There are a whole gathering of poppies bowed and swelling in amidst my raspberry canes.
I’ve plans to rig up a poly-lean-to behind my shed to acclimatise my young tomatos and to collect the rain.
I must now be a qualified gardener, a robin just perched on my fork.

digging for deep thoughts

Rain has softened the ground making digging an even more pleasurable activity. As I dug up a dock, levering it up with my fork, it made the oddest hollow cracking sound as though it were somehow connected to an underground tunnel. I also found a bone and, as always, wondered if it belonged to many more in the same bit of ground.

I’m digging thick yellow nettle roots that creep along just under the surface. These were, I remember, under a piece of old carpet that I presume was covering a compost heap. The nettles obviously found there way there and made themselves at home. Last year as I was cutting back the brambles (that entirely consumed my allotment when I took it on) I piled the fronds on top of this carpet on top of the nettles on top of the compost on top of earth. The pile of brambles remained there rotting with new brambles and nettles growing up through them, that is until March this year when for my birthday present (my request) we hired a chipper and made this pile and others into sacks of chippings on one of the wettest weekends of the year. So, this area I am digging has not seen the light of day for many a year until now, which adds to my curiosity at what may be lurking in it.

The light is growing warmer and subdued as the sun sinks, birds are singing out the day, swallows and blackbirds in pairs, honeysuckle giving off its scent in response to the evening.

Like animals, birds and insects I love the wildness there still is here – however much I want to use the space to grow more food I wonder if I’ll like it when or if (being more realistic) it eventually becomes organised and tidy here.

The sky is now pink and violet, light is falling fast, I’ll have to pack up and leave soon.

rain at last

I meant to write at home today but a situation I’m worried about combined with PMS meant this would most likely be unproductive and involve more sitting and frowning than words written so I came here to dig.
3 hours later and still obsessing on the issue in hand a robin came to see me and a little later I glimpsed a heron in flight, both of which served as momentary distractions. Then, my middle daughter rang and asked if she could come home tonight for me to look over a proposal she’s writing, finally I have a different focus.
Plus, it’s raining – hurrah!

digging again

I’m sitting by my onion bed under the birch tree and amongst bluebells, nettles, brambles and willow-herb, all about a foot high.
After the council lorry left I sowed a red and a green cabbage in the centre of my maincrop-potato and pea bed and three French beans in three wigwams, blue, green and red-striped (the beans not the wigwams). I bought these varieties thinking they would be interesting on my Farmers’ Market stall. I mulched the beans and strawberries that I’ve now un-cloched, then turned and activated the compost and now I’m back to my favourite occupation… digging.
After only a short spell I feel calm and contemplative. If I were to compare gardening and painting then digging would be comparable to stretching and priming canvas and planting would be more like the act of painting. As a painter I found painting a stressful and angst-ridden activity, no wonder I subsequently enjoyed my job as a technician.
Nearly 3pm and I’m still here, thank goodness for instant soup. Dug and planted the last corner of my onion bed, the soil is much lighter this end of the allotment. So much for imminent rain, it’s sunny and hot again.
A bee, I think, keeps hovering beside me at head height then zipping off and re-appearing in front of me, I wonder if it’s checking me out?

mischievous finches

Despite the forecast of a sunny afternoon it’s been grey all day and much cooler, rain is on its way, in anticipation I’ve sowed two rows of peas using the blackcurrant prunings I saved for pea-sticks.
Sandy’s just been on my salad bed again, he even dug a hole earlier when I wasn’t watching.
I spotted some baby gooseberries and within half an hour of seeing them three goldfinches arrived as if by telepathy, (yes, I know, they’re beautiful) they were grubbing about in my onion bed, I’m sure it was just a cover for a takeover. I’m now wondering whether my gooseberries weren’t barren last year after all. I had a robin here today too, a much more welcome visitor than the finch gang.
The rubbish lorry is coming again in the morning, unusually two weeks in a row. This means an early start as he is here and gone between 7.45 and 8.15 am.
I just surprised one of my neighbours who popped her head up over the fence and didn’t expect to see me sitting here… we talked about the weather, of course.

voting bluebells

Two more new foals and a whole kindergarten of lambs now on School Lane.
Daughter number two just called my mobile to ask me what to vote which reminded me that I haven’t yet… I’d be more enthusiastic if I didn’t live in a Tory stronghold.
I’ve been weeding after earthing-up potatoes and sowing the next succession of beetroot and parsnip, the latter marked by radish. Weeding has the same effect on me as ironing. I hate the thought of it and can easily turn-a-blind-eye but once started I enjoy the rhythm, perhaps my rebellion is against the routine not the activity.
It’s nearly 8pm and Sandy is silently willing me to call it a day – he’s probably right and it means we’ve time for a bluebell wood walk before dark as well as catching the polling station before it closes.

planting herb and salad bed

Seminar and Forum were cancelled today so I have a bonus day for planting. It took me some time to prepare myself for this serious task, or so it seemed to me. Maybe it’s conditioning but I’ve gone for a geometric kite-shaped planting for my herb and salad bed, paying attention to the sun/shade requirements of each plant… no time for reverie today.

Returned at 6.30, realised whilst walking Sandy round to the end of his rope extension that since the herb bed is now planted, and he’s been basking on it this week, I need to create a boundary. This I am doing with twigs however it’s not much of a deterrent since he seems to think I’ve put them there for him to chew. I remember now I was at about this stage last year when I stopped bringing him with me.

thinking through digging

12 noon - I’m thinking of the blues and the reds ‘obby-‘ossing their way around Padstow today in an ever increasingly drunken stupour. I hope the sun is shining on them too.
We’ve an Easterly wind today which I think accounts for why it doesn’t feel excessively hot even though the temperature in my shed at 11am this morning was 32 Centigrade.
I was thinking whilst digging that I must be losing my strength as I was tired after only a short stretch but I’m putting it down to the increasingly dry and hard ground and the sun’s rays. In a moment of shade I glanced up at the sun to see the smallest cloud passing across it. I’m not too far off the end of this bed now, the thought of fresh rocket, coriander and lettuce spurs me on.
Yesterday on my way home along the country lanes I stopped to congratulate a ewe who was licking clean what appeared to be the third of her freshly born lambs, then only a few paces on a white mare with a tiny black foal in white socks.
My neighbours must be having yesterday’s stew again for lunch.

3.30 – On completion of digging and laying out dividers for my herb and salad bed I noticed that my onions are starting to brown at the tips of their leaves. Odd how digging causes a kind of blindness to other tasks, but an openness to reverie…
…The sun is so bright today that I kept seeing fragments of straw (blown over from where they’re meant to be mulching my broad beans) and mistaking it for metal – how does my brain allow me to make this (albeit interesting) error of judgement at least three times? I wondered if magpies collect it for the same reason, rather than lambs eyes, a fact I was introduced to by a farmer-neighbour younger than I was ready for. I also found an object that seemed to resemble an animal’s tooth – this prompting together with my memory of childhood loss of innocence reminded me of when we took our eldest daughter (as a little girl) to see a dead whale, beached at Long Rock, near Penzance. What I noticed was that people had sawn off the whales teeth presumably to take away as souvenirs and that it was, like a rock, covered in crustaceans. I remember hearing it said that it was thought to have died because of its tail being badly severed by the propeller of a boat. Our daughter, on the other hand, rather than finding it a fascinating fact of life and death was traumatised by the experience to such an extent that even now aged 22 she averts her gaze when she comes across even an image of a whale.