shifting produce

Jamesfield Farm Shop and Restaurant - between Abernethy and Newburgh, Fife

Anyone who has ever tried their hand at growing fruit and vegetables will have observed that although getting the stuff to grow is challenging, getting it all eaten afterwards can be near impossible.

One year I grew garlic, but in my ignorance I did not realise that what you actually planted for growing on was the little clove inside each, so instead of having a single dozen garlic plants to harvest, I ended up with several dozen. I like garlic, but no one likes garlic quite that much.

Of course even when we know what we are doing, the retailers will confound us. If you buy a packet of courgette seeds you might get thirty seeds. Unless you are running a farm this is far too many to grow. Growing courgettes this year I have six plants actually in the ground and they are cropping a couple of decent courgettes a day!! Every day!!!

When it comes ready it all comes at once. You might like what you have planted, but most crops require to be used fairly briskly. You can only really store perfect specimens, if it is a bit bashed about you really need to use immediately. A lot of crops won't store at all.

The art of effective gardening is getting round all these problems. For example, effective storage, making jams and chutneys, or finding ways to shift produce.

For our six courgette plants, I have bought my wife a courgette recipe book, and started taking in courgettes for my colleagues at work. It is better to see them eaten than left to wither. In fact it is actually quite satisfying to see folk all excited about the odd free courgette.

We do have a Damson tree, a stocky little fellow, that currently boasts a personal best crop of two damsons. However I do have great expectations, there are quite a few damsons growing round here, so it should eventually get to the stage of cropping away happily.

My wife is a keen jam maker and Damson Jams is a perennial favourite. You can pick up damsons in the shops now and again, and with a little bit of chapping on doors it would probably be possible to source some informally. However this year we got our ration of Damsons at the Newburgh Orchard Group Plum Market. This is a wonderful scheme to record and use the vast number of fruit trees in a quiet Fife village. These apparently date back to the local Benedictine Monastry which supplied the royal court at nearby Falkland Palace. Obviously not terribly recently, the Abbey is now a ruin. But as is the nature of these things, a fruit orchard is a long term thing.

So we fired up the Satnav and headed up to Newburgh, which does not seem to have changed much in the last thirty years. One of those places that progress seems to have forgotten about. It also seems to have a thriving community spirit with plenty of places to stop and chat and a host of voluntary societies. There were a few trestle tables with Damsons, plums, various apples and pears. My wife quickly stocked up on plenty of produce and compared notes with fellow jam making enthusiasts.

Also worth mentioning a fabulous garden centre come coffee shop just along the road at the Jamesfield Farm, the home of the Bellfield Organic Box Scheme.

Finding a home for your surplus crop can involve dipping into the wider community, but surely it is through sharing that we deepen and better our communities.

some thoughts on the folly of self sufficiency

I must confess to being a bit of a tree hugger.

Having said that, I think we do need to rethink our notions of what being green is effectively about. There is huge list of misconceptions that we should rethink, but I'll just focus this blog entry on the one.

My generation grew up with the notion that to be green you had to aspire to become Tom and Barbara Goode, live the Goode Life. According to the popular sitcom of the time, even if you lived in Surbiton you were to give over your garden to vegetables and livestock, opting out of the twentieth century to become entirely self sufficient. A host of similar examples could be quoted to conform to this archetype.

But being green and treading lightly on this world is nothing to do with being self sufficient. In the past, even human gatherer societies depended on links and ties beyond the family group. To be human is to be part of that larger whole that is society.

Thinking about the Swiss, Swissmiss the popular blogiste posted a photo of a Swiss farmers log pile stating how they could not help but be tidy and thorough in everything they did. While a book on the architects Herzog and de Mueron pointed out that although the Swiss aspired to their rustic farmhouses, their society was based on leading financial institutions. There is no contradiction here, you can tread lightly on your land but be entirely of a modern economy.

Whatever we do, in being green we should remain part of this world. Despite their separate notions, the Shakers were renowned in the wider world for the quality of their seeds.

We may not choose to adopt all the norms of society, but we should not disengage, instead we should engage productively with it.

We dream in absolutes, but live in compromise.

We should live like the Swiss and the Shakers, treading lightly upon the world and like gardeners imposing our own green vision upon some land, how it should/could be. But we should also make money and a contribution to the wider world where we can.

It is the outliers who affect where the norm is. Some outliers manage exert a pull over people's perception of what is fashionable/possible/desirable/normal and pull others over in their direction. A neighbour of mine grows vegetables in their front garden, treating it like an intensively farmed allotment. I think that this is tremendous, it brings the reality of food in front of us.

consume/maintain/create

It is possible to split up all your time into either

consuming

maintaining, or

creating.

recently statistics have demonstrated that we each spend some incredible amount of time each day consuming media. We also consume food, clothing, etc etc. In fact anytime that you are not actively doing something, you are probably consuming resources in some way.

The next stage up from this is maintaining. The bible for maintaining is How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. Architects might create buildings, but it is the day to day maintenance chores that keep them alive. You maintain whenever you water a plant, or mow a lawn, polish shoes, or clean your house, paint your railings or clean out your gutters.

The next stage up is creating. This is the pinacle, though it is debateable what exactly is included. Is it bringing up a child, or planting a tree, writing a book or telling a joke. But it is bringing something new into being, creating something that would not be there but for you.

This all goes some way to describe my discomfort with green consumerism. There is nothing wrong with using your retail choices to make a positive impact on the world. I like to spend my money in shops that I think are worth keeping. I like to buy thoughtful and long lasting products. But the greener option is to maintain things, rather than buying new, and even better is to grow your own, knit your own or make your own.

We become greener by doing less consuming, more maintaining and more creating.

Axis of Awesome

Axis of Awesome are an Australian comedy rock band. They are currently playing at the Edinburgh Fringe, for their third year.

My oldest daughter was adamant that we had to go see them, so as I was off anyway, we all went over to see them. The show lasted for one hour, and the small venue at the Gilded Balloon, Teviot (next to the Edinburgh University Buildings) was packed. We were probably the oldest and youngest people there, but we all loved it. Be advised there is some bad language, but it is all so good natured that it would be hard to take offence. There was of course the famous four chord song, coming up for nine million hits on youtube, but mostly new material that I had not heard before. There was a little riffing between songs, and when a back-up CD failed, they totally charmed and amused the audience.

Musically they are very accomplished, but the humour comes from their interaction. Well worth seeing, it would not surprise me if they go on to be absolutely huge.

Teeshirts, CDs, and DVDs were available on the night.

The famous four chord song is available at

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

It is a bit difficult to know what to expect with this book, the author was slated for a Nobel, but died before he could be awarded one. The reviews suggest that it relates to a walking tour of Norfolk, while the rings of Saturn are frozen debris floating in space. It consists of endless discursions on seemingly random topics.

However what should be mentioned is the charm of this work. For me, it captured the pedantic, eccentric but utterly charming tone of the Peter Greenaway shorts like Dear Phone and Water Wrackets, narrated by Greenaway and Colin Cantile respectively.

The Rings is not a shaggy dog story in the way that some books are, there is no story to get going, or promised resolution that we are seeking. It is like sitting listening, late at night, in a comfortable old chair, to someone who seems to know everything, telling their gently rambling reminiscences, and if sometimes the stories seem a little to good to be true, perhaps they are.

One of the most purely enjoyable and charming books that I have read in a long time. Like Pevsner, he describes an England that fascinates him, without ever quite understanding it.

Haimyll-daemee

After what seems like forever without taking more than just the odd day off, I am now/finally off for a whole three weeks. I am taking a staycation, or as we say in Scotland Haimyll-daemee.

The weekend was a bit more relaxed than usual. Frankly I am amazed at just how much I generally squeeze into a weekend, between walking the hound, IT geek for the house, paperwork, housework, garden work, and family time. Knowing that I was off this week, I did not attack the list of things to do with the usual gusto, so there are still a few things left over that I would normally have tried to do at the weekend.

Things did get knocked slightly astray by the dreich and undecided weather. I normally use google weather, but lately it seems to be marking up pretty much every day as having a chance of rain. I live in Scotland. It is hardly a forecast to say that there is a chance of rain. To be honest though the rain was pelting it down yesterday, but mostly it has been cloudly with just a little rain. My flymo lawnmower packed in yesterday. After years of abuse the motor now requires considerable gentle coaxing. So we headed off to get a new one, and dropped in at a fruit picking farm on the way back. This was one that I had not been been to before, and it was really excellent. Coffee and cake, and some nice organic-ey type food in the farm shop. Had a look at their free-range chickens, who were pecking about a couple of rows of blackcurrents, and a few more rows of healthy looking damson trees. I do love my fruit trees and bushes, and love to see them wherever they are.

Today I was attacking the garden with considerable gusto. There are so many shrubs and trees, that the brown bin of garden waste is filled up in no time. So I was hacking away at trimming hedges, and overgrown bits, and testing my new lawnmower. The problem with the last mower was that it was not powerful enough, the motor must have been around 1,000 watts, so I went for something much more powerful. Although the new lawnmower seems to weigh twice as much, and it a complete pig to lug around the garden, it just needs to look at the grass and it has it trimmed down to the requiste length. It does not like banks or edgey bits, but it just breezes over the main areas. I might get a more lightweight mower for the banks and edges, but the new one is most impressive.

After a day in the garden the brown bin is now virtually full. I have another day before they come to uplift it, so I should have it well filled by then.

Currently in the garden we are harvesting courgettes, a great thug of a plant, a few strawberries left, plenty of loganberries but they are a bit too bitter to use, rhubarb if anyone wants it, and the usual herbs. This will be a bumper year for the apple harvest, but not quite ready yet.

We have tried to come up with a decent mix of things to do over the next few weeks, some outings, some house stuff. Like work, I suppose the problem is not that you are bored with something, just that you have been doing it for too long, and it is time to do something else. Hence coming up with a mix of things.

I like having the chance to just sit and read a book, or a paper, and not feel that the clock is ticking away, and after all, that is what a real holiday is.