Digging & Dreaming

Wild Northumbrian Places and Spaces

Northumbria is one of my favourite places. So wild and desolate, but also beautifully fresh and pristine. I try to get up there at least once I year to enjoy the huge Northern skies and the crisp, fresh air, aiming to go up there off season when the beaches are as quite as possible. Here are some pictures of the the beautiful places we visited during a stay up there last week.

Stormy skies looking North from Bamburgh beach

Sand dunes on Ross

Barnacles at Low Newton

Lindisfarne lichen

Gentle waves at Low Newton

Misty morning on Lindisfarne

Charles Dowding's Veg Journal

From time to time I am lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to read books that may be of interest to readers of this blog. When this happens, as much as I may be tempted to fill my house with wonderful books on gardens and growing, it is my preference for refuse the offer unless it is a book that I think will be of particular interest to the people who drop by this site to have a look at what is happening on my allotment and in my Permaculture life beyond. For this reason I was delighted whan I was offered the chance to review of copy of Charles Dowding's latest book - Veg Journal. Charles is one of my favourite writers on the theme of growing, with his books on Winter Veg and Seasonal Salad Leaves being firm favourites for me, so I leapt at the chance to give this new book a read. Charles is also one of the leading advocates of no dig gardening so I was keen to see if this book would give me further insight into this way of growing

 

This book is beautifully laid out making suggestions of what to do on your veg plot each month, whilst also giving tips on the wider context of soil care and organic growing. On this basis it is much more informative than some of the month by month gardening books which are available which simply give lists of what to do but not why to do it.

I particularly enjoyed the top tips and how to guides for popular crops that you may want to have a got at growing. There are also good sections on dealing with different perennial and annual weeds with suggestions how you may begin to get rid of them.

The book is beautifully designed and I think it would be especially useful to people who are early on in their growing careers who want a helping hand along the way to get started.

 

Month by month tips of what to do when

 

In-depth background information building your knowledge as a grower

Top tips on popular crops

To order Charles Dowding's Veg Journal at the discounted price of £12.00 including p&p* (RRP: £14.99), telephone 01903 828503 or email [email protected] and quote the offer code APG69. 

 Alternatively, send a cheque made payable to: 

Littlehampton Book Services Mail Order Department, 

Littlehampton Book Services, 

PO Box 4264, 

Worthing, West Sussex 

BN13 3RB. 

 Please quote the offer code APG69 and include your name and address details. 

 *UK ONLY - Please add £2.50 if ordering from overseas.

 

Cooked - A Natural History Of Transformation

Over recent months I have been reading Cooked by Michael Pollan - a book that I picked up because I had enjoyed The Ominovore's Dilemma by the same author so much.

As a book Cooked is beautifully formed in four distinctive sections, on the premise that the fundamentals of how we cook can be directly connected to the four natural elements of fire, water, air and earth. It  explores how the power of the elements can be used to transfrom the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink.

Pollan is a superb storyteller and in this book he weaves a rich narrative around the ways that we prepare food. From the traditions of barbecue to the magic of cheese making, his stories are powerful advocacy for the argument that the further away we drift from food and its transformation, the less rich our lives become. Alongside this he makes strong arguments why eating mass produced food is making us ill.

The book is superbly accessible, and the division into sections makes it brilliant to dip in and out of. It is an essential read for anyone who loves food and who values the quality of what they eat and how they eat it.

“Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we’re at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”

Michael Pollan - Cooked

The Heritage of Hops

I have been growing hops in my garden for a couple of years now. It is a beautiful, vigorous plant that grows well and easily. It is also a plant with a fascinating heritage and history. The modern hop has been developed from a wild plant as ancient as history itself. As far back as the first Century A.D. they were described as a salad plant and are believed to originate from Egypt. It is also a plant surrounded in fascinating facts and legend - here are a few interesting things that we have learned about the plant:

1. Hops are often referred to as the ‘spice of beer’.
2. Hops have been in regular use as a beer-making ingredient for approximately 1,000 years. It gives beer its distinctive flavour and aroma, acts as a natural preservative, and is a key component in foam quality.
3. A climbing vine, Hops, like cannabis (marijuana), comes from the hemp family Cannabaceae but do not offer the same psychoactive effects as cannabis. Interestingly enough, the hop plant has both male and female forms: the cones on the female plant are used in the brewing process, while male hops are used for breeding the plant.
4. Hop cones contain resins including alpha acids, beta acids and essential oils. The acid components (primarily alpha acid) contribute to the bitterness of beer, while the oils contribute to flavour and aroma.
5. Aroma hops are generally lower in alpha acid content, and have essential oils that are associated with great aroma. Bittering hops have high levels of alpha acids in particular. There are also dual-purpose hops that play for both teams.
6. Hop varietals can impart widely different flavours and aromas, depending on where, and the conditions in which it is grown. Randy Mosher, in his book TASTING BEER, says German hops are generally considered to be herbal, English hops spicy, earthy and fruity, and American hops – while widely variable – are generally more citrus, piney and resiny.
7. The so-called noble hops, traditional varieties from Europe, are: Saaz, Hallertauer Mittlefrüh, Tettnanger and Spalt. These can often be found in traditional lager beers.
8. Breweries use hops in a variety of forms, depending on their needs. This can include pelletized, liquid, dried, or wet hops.
9. Hops are added into the brewing process during the boil where the alpha acids are isomerized. Bitterness is enhanced with a longer boil, while aroma is reduced. This governs the timing of the additions of various hops throughout the boil. Other hopping techniques require the addition of hops at later points in the brewing process (i.e. dry hopping).
10. Hops generally impart bitterness ranging from 5-7 International Bittering Units (IBUs or parts per million iso-acids) for  Light Lagers, and up to 100 IBUs for an Imperial IPA. However these days, some experimental brewers are exploring extreme hopping, creating beers with 1,000s of IBUs. This is a largely theoretical exercise, because the human palate can only perceive a maximum bitterness somewhere in the range of 120 IBUs. This maximum is also related to the solubility of iso-alpha acids in beer.

Day 5 - Sunday 13th November - Havana

As Sunday was my first full day off with nothing horticultural planned at all I took a trip into Havana with Marisol and her son Roberto. We left INIFAT about half nine and picked up one of the many taxis that runs between Santiago and Havana – a journey of about 20km. These taxis are totally different to what we’re used to here in the UK. Firstly, most of them are glorious classic cars that inventive and ingenious Cubans have kept on the road. Secondly they operate almost like mini buses with strangers sharing the journey and jumping in and out along the route when the get close to where they need to go. The cost of the journey to Havana was 20NP per person working out about 50p. If you made the same journey on the very crowed, hot, slow bus it would only cost you 1NP (2.5p!) showing why this kind of taxi journey is still a luxury for the average Cuban who earns around 1360NP per month. It is certainly the busy busy buses that most Santiago commuters are using to get to work.

The Capitolio

The drive into Havana took about half an hour and when we arrived we were dropped right in the centre outside the Capitolio Nacional that is at the heart of the city. It was built as a result of money earned from sugar by Cuba’s US-backed dictator Gerardo Machado between 1926 and 1930 and still remains one of the grandest buildings in the city. It cost around US$17 million to build and was made in similar style to the American Capitol Building in Washington DC. Originally the home of the Cuban Congress, it became the home of the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Library of Science and Technology in 1959, and still reamins their home today. From there we walked down into Havana Vieja which is the beautifully, if a little clinically, restored historical heart of the city.

This part of the city is one the best-preserved Spanish colonial centres in the Caribbean and Americas and is jam packed with over 900 buildings of historical importance in an astonishing variety of different architectural styles. Full of cobbled streets, shaded alleyways, 16^th Century buildings and leafy courtyards, the whole area was left virtually untouched from the 1960s to the 1990s. This meant that although it fell into serious disrepair and decay it also retained its historical integrity intact. We began our exploration of the area by heading down Calle Obispo that is one of the main ways of getting through the neighbourhood, and that was already packed with lots and lots of tourists by the time we got there. From there we headed to the Camera Obscura on the corner of Plaza Vieja that is one of the oldest and most beautiful squares in Havana. This was Marisol’s idea and it was a very good one because the camera and its tower gave amazing views and an excellent introduction to the geography of this part of the city.

View of the city from the Camera Obscura

After this we carried on walking, passing through the gorgeous Plaza de Armas where we sat a bit to admire the architecture, before carrying on through Havana Vieja to Centro Havana. This is a part of the city that many visitors ignore but it certainly gives a more realistic, less sterile view of what life is like for Cubans who live in Havana. It’s a much more residential neighbourhood than Havana Vieja and much less beautiful in many ways, but it’s got amazing energy and is the place you’re more likely to see children playing in the streets and people out on their doorstep chatting to their neighbours. Here we found a basic NP cafeteria to eat lunch. And where Roberto discovered much to his amusement that in me he had met his first vegetarian – a great rarity in Cuba so it seems! It was whilst we were eating this meal that the enquiries and questions started- something I was learning quickly was that as soon as Cubans feel relaxed with you and comfortable they also feel happy to start asking questions. Today it was Roberto’s turn…

“What is the average salary in the UK?... How do taxes work?... How much tax do you pay?... How much does a house cost?”

The questions are never rude or pushy, normally just genuinely curious. And sometimes with a melancholy undertone that life would have so many more possibilities if they lived somewhere else. As Roberto interrogated me I was happy to answer his questions because I have nothing to hide and no embarrassment about my country, but also because I felt it was important to reinforce my own belief that every country and every way of life had positive and negative aspects that have to be taken into consideration. Nothing is ever as simple as black and white. For example, of course it is true that Cubans earn a very low wage compared to people in the UK, but they do also have access to some of the best health care in the world. Cubans also have fluctuating access to basic things like electricity, and access to many consumer goods is limited and expensive, but their education system is top class with an adult literacy rate on the island of 100% - impressive by anyone’s standards. Of course, Cuba is the only place that Roberto has any experience of so it is hard for him to make an informed decision about whether the way of life there is the one that he wants to live. And this lack of information seemed to make this bright young man who wanted his own independence feel that he was being hindered making the decisions about his own life that he wanted to make.

Glimpse into Centro Havana

So that’s another part of the Cuban dilemma, a highly educated knowledgeable population who are hungry to know more but who aren’t able to due to lack of access to information. Almost the polar opposite to many situations in the UK where people have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips, a great privilege, but they decide to turn their back upon it. And the reason for doing this seems to be almost as though their capacity to act and react has been almost entirely deadened by the world that they live in.

As José had said the day before;

“Cuba – a country of contradictions.”

And here was another one for me to try and get my head around. Only a couple of days in and I could already see that my trip to Cuba was going to give me a lot of food for thought, and this was before my learning proper had even started at the Ministry. I couldn’t even imagine what that may hold when I started properly the following day.

PS For those of you who tune into this blog to learn more about organic growing and who have been bored to death learning about Cuba instead I promise that the next installment of the Cuban adventure will really start to get to the bottom of how they grow food in their cities. I promise it'll be worth the wait!

Cuban Countdown

It's only a matter of days now before I head out to Cuba on my horticultural adventure and I feel overwhelmed by absolute fear and absolute excitement in almost equal measure. Although I have done loads and loads of research it's almost as though I have no real perception of what will greet me when I arrive. Of what the country will actually be like. My experiences so far seem to suggest that Cubans are extremely hospitable and helpful people but beyond that I don't know what expectiations I should realistically have of what the island will actually be like when I finally step off the plane next Wednesday. One thing that I am secure about though is my motivation for visiting in the first place - to get a feel for how their organic agriculture system actually looks on the ground, with particular focus on urban agriculture.

The break-up of the USSR in the early 90s signalled the beginning of a time in Cuban history that is referred to as the ‘special period’.  Prior to this Cuban agriculture was highly industrialised and had relied heavily on Soviet oil for farm machinery, fertilisers and pesticides. When the Soviet Union broke up Cuba lost more than 50 percent of its oil imports, much of its food and 85 percent of its trade economy. Transportation systems ground to a halt and people went hungry.

The Cuban response to the crisis included a series of major shifts in the way food was produced. Estimates suggest 50% of Havana’s 2.2 million population is now supplied by urban agriculture, a growing industry in which 140,000 people are currently employed. Lack of access to fertilisers and pesticides has also meant 80% of Cuba’s production is now organic with use of pesticides slashed from 21,000 tonnes per year in the 1980s to the 1000 tonnes it now uses. Use of oxen has also increased in place of petrol fuelled farm vehicles and large state run farms have given way to smaller co-operatives, with 10,000 acres leased rent free by the state.

Even now Cuban food production continues to increase and since Raul Castro took over as president from his brother Fidel in 2008 the state has increased what it pays for crops; decentralised agricultural decision making and distribution; and leased 50% of vacant state lands to 100,000 individuals and private and state co-operative farms. Investment continues in agricultural alternatives to fossil fuelled farming with estimates being made that the production of bio-pesticides saves the Cuban economy $15 million annually.

Amazing stuff huh? I can't wait to see how this will all look in reality and get a feel for how this organic farming revolution that I have heard so much about actually functions on a day to day basis.

 

Moss Cider

The Moss Cider Project is a brilliant group based in the Moss Side area of Manchester. Founded in 2010, their purpose is to harvest, or scrump, unwanted fruit, from parks and gardens in Moss Side and its surrounding areas, so that it can be mashed and made into cider. Dan Hasler, who founded the project, is a local project manager for the Manchester-based charity, Action for Sustainable Living. He was inspired to get it up and running by the proposed demolition of a local bus depot. Dan was taken by the amount of land that this demolition would leave and how green space could be integrated into its future re-development.

On Saturday 25th September 2010, a group of neighbours and volunteers gathered for their first 'mash-up' of locally 'scrumped' apples. In that first year they made over 40 litres of apple juice, of which 35 litres was turned into cider. Now, in October 2011 the group are looking for apples to be included in their current harvest and I was delighted to discover that they would be happy to take a donation of apples from our plot, even though we are a little outside their normal neighbourhood.

We only have one apple tree on Plot 45 but it is a big one that yields a huge number of apples - many of which go to waste each year. The apples off the tree are cookers which are not ideal for cider making as the resulting cider will be less potent, due to the lower sugar content I suspect. However, Dan and his team are confident that our apples will be of use to them and are going to be popping over later in the week to pick them up. I'll keep you posted how this year's brewing goes for them!

I love this project because it is an amazing example of local food production, demonstrating how to make the best use of every day crops that nearly all of us have access to right on our doorsteps, but which often goes to waste. Have you got any examples of projects like this in your local community that you'd like to share? I'd love to hear about them!

 

Urban Farming in Detroit

Amazing film from The Guardian on urban agriculture. Inspirational stuff!

Happy Birthday Plot 45

It was around this time five years ago that we first got our allotment. I can't remember the exact date but I remember vividly being shown round the different plots that were available by Brenda, our Site Manager. She showed me a couple of different plots, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Typically for me I chose the most over the top and un-manageable plot out of the four that I was shown.

Plot 45 had been perfectly tended by its previous owner but it was at least twice as big as what I had imagined, included a beautiful pond (that I didn't have a clue how to look after) and, as the then chair of the Committee had put it:

"That plot is really unsuitable for a woman gardener. Much too big for them to deal with."

Of course that was like a red rag to a bull for me and made me absolutely determined to take the plot on, no matter how big and unwieldy it may prove to be...So, going into my sixth season as an allotment gardener, what do I think that I've learnt from my experiences on Plot 45?

• Despite what any book or newspaper column may try to persuade you, looking after an allotment takes alot of hardwork. Especially in the first year when you probably won't have a clue what you're supposed to be doing.
• Despite what any grumpy fellow allotment holders may try to persuade you, this hardwork is not thankless and boring. It will soon become some of the most satisfying time you will invest and, despite what they may also try to persuade you, you will be well able to deal with it.
• Listen to the old handers on your allotment site when they offer advice - they've got a whole load of knowledge that can really help you out cultivating your plot. However, don't feel that everything they say is right! Everyone grows in different ways and it's about each individual finding their own way of doing things that works for them.
• Listen to your soil and respond to what it tells you. It knows everything that it needs and the knowledge is all there for the taking if you respond to the way that your soil behaves and accept that this may not be the same as you're told it will behave in the books that you have been reading.
• And finally, enjoy yourself. Cultivating an allotment is a pleasure and a privilege that not everyone has access to. It is also one of the most satisfying ways you could hope for to spend your down time. Remember this above all else and you can't possibly go far wrong.

Fierce Tomato

 

We ate this tomato and thought it looked totally like a lion. Because we can be a little juvenile at times in our house this revelation caused at least ten minutes of uproarious laughter. And that was good fun so I decided to share it here with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

PS - It tasted great as well.