Midlife Gardener

Ranunculus

Gardening while elections are being fought put me in mind of Peter Sellars’ last film – Being There.  The tale of a simple gardener whose naive statements about  horticulture are mistaken as pithy economic advice as he potters his way to become a trusted adviser to a political insider.

Perhaps we can take some advice from our politicians to help with our gardening.   Immigration, for example.  We saw a couple of rabbits by the hotchpotch bed the other day.  After the felling of the Blue Cedar the rabbits seemed to think we had an open border policy with a free movement of labour.  We sent our border control police out and they took one of the invaders down.  We are now rebuilding our wall (well…fence really) and we are going to MAKE THE RABBITS PAY FOR IT.  I don’t know how: perhaps they are Mexican rabbits – they’ll pay won’t they?

Elsewhere the immigrants are taking liberties with our seedlings as snails chomp their way through PSB, Brussels (no, not that one – the plant), Cavolo Nero and even Sunflower plants.  Typical foreigners:  they even eat weird food.  I mean: cosmos and sunflowers?  Getting rid of these invaders (when we can find them) is easy enough:  we just send them home – over the fence –  quicker than you can print a deliberately misleading poster of refugee snails and label it “Breaking Point”.  The real solution must be to put quotas on the slippery little characters.  Or maybe a points-based system on what they can bring to the garden…

Hardest of all is stopping the moles who continue to dig up the lawn.  These guys are the real Mugwumps of the garden.  What Massachusetts Native Americans would term a war leader.  They continue to lay their own IEDs on the lawn and tunnel under the tulips.  But I think they are less like mugwumps than the kind of Old Etonian who uses such terms in his newspaper column: with their dark-suited thick-set bodies, ponderous gait and blinkered, short-sighted outlook on life having them in charge of lawn care is about as right-minded as putting Boris “350 million for the NHS” Johnson in charge of foreign policy.

But maybe, just maybe, I need moles, slugs, snails and rabbits in my garden for the sheer diversity that they bring.  We have abundant bird life and amphibians feeding on so many of these critters and the dog stays fit and lean chasing after rabbits.  My recycled mole hills are excellent topsoil for the veg patch or even in potting compost.  So maybe without the uitlanders,  my garden ecology would fall apart, like an NHS without foreign doctors.

Perhaps I might take it easy on the immigrants.  Let’s not Keep low-paid jobs for British Workers but instead grow Broccoli for slugs and snails.  Maybe, to quote Chancy Gardner, I should remember that “Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.”

So true of life, gardening and health services.

Snail damage

Sunflower stump

Rabbit police

Slug eater

Illustration of foreign policy

Green Marble F1

Christmas:  a time to celebrate but also to reflect.  And this year I was in more reflective mood than usual as I sat down to the festive fayre with the usual offerings from the garden to complement the turkey.

In terms of winter veg, I’ve had the finest crops of Brussels Sprouts and Parsnips ever.  I love Brussels and at Christmas in particular they take on an iconic status as a mainstay of the Christmas meal.  The OM would always ensure that there were enough home-grown brussels each year to feed the family – which was an increasingly tall order with four teenagers to satisfy.  I don’t remember doubting my parents’ abilities to provide for us from the garden.  I never had any great love for working the soil, let alone actually picking the veg.  It seemed an impossible task to pick Brussels without getting soaked to the skin. It might have been dry for weeks (in Somerset? in the winter?) and still the plants somehow held unreasonably large amounts of water in their crinkled leaves, ready to be released on you as soon as  you took the first sprout from the stem.  And there was apparently an art to digging parsnips that required a long demonstrative lesson from The OM.  He took personal pride in getting as much of the long tap-root out of the ground as he could, which required digging around the plant as if excavating a land mine.  And we were expected to follow suit.

So my own current efforts in harvesting these two stalwarts of the Christmas table are influenced by the memory of these childhood experiences.  But while I can happily pick Brussels in any weather (no such thing as the wrong Brussels – just the wrong clothing) I still feel a tinge of guilt when I hear the clunk of the tap-root snapping as I pull the parsnip from the ground.

Brest F1

But I have still been receiving plaudits from The OM for the standard of the produce and I, in my turn, have been boring my own family with constant references to the quality of the vegetables on their festive plates.  I wish I could say it was down to anything I had consciously done this year to make the Brussels produce solid spheres of crisp goodness and the parsnips to germinate and grow with such fecundity.   I guess I did choose two completely different types of sprout this year, for no reason other than the fact that previous crops had been so rubbish, but I practically threw the parsnip seed into the soil and hoped for the best.  I must have missed the birds, the stony ground and the thorns because my parsnips have sprung up and increased, as some one far more worthy than me once noted.  But this is no parable – these are real veg and they taste divine.

With the super sprouts and ‘snips I feel a certain closing of a circle.  It was the destruction of heavenly sprouts from a plague of heifers which first drew me into taking on the Old Man’s garden, and The OM is of the opinion that his failing health will mean he will not see another Christmas.   That remains to be seen, but if it proves to be so, I am chuffed that I have lucked out this year and produced something from the garden of which TOM would be proud.  I can’t give myself a higher accolade than that.

75 Sprouts and 4 parsnips. Would that have fed the 5,000?