Book Review: The Community Gardening Handbook

As 2016 draws to a close, my garden looks a lot different than it did last year. For starters, it has 12 raised beds now, instead of 6. There’s a small shed for storage, and a log store. There are gardener’s paths, an improved fence with fruit-training wires and small raised beds in the extra garden strip. I would not have got this far without Ryan’s endless energy and enthusiasm, his practical skills. And his dad. Whilst I am Head Gardener, Ryan is the garden’s Chief Engineer.

From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface. 

Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life. 

I love books about weeds and wild plants – they generally contains little gems of fascinating information about useful and edible plants, tidbits you don’t find in gardening manuals. It’s been a while since I had the chance to sit down and peruse a good book, so it was great to be offered a review copy of Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley, which has the subtitle “an extensive and fully illustrated guide from seedlings to fruit.”

In a typical year, I do my garden planning before Christmas. But last year wasn’t normal, and normality (whatever that means) has yet to return. I thought I’d thought about it, but it turns out – not so much.

If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing. 

I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.

I haven’t been feeling well this week, so in lieu of eating food, I have been reading about it. A while ago, whilst I was pondering what a resilient UK garden would look like, blog reader Audrey asked me if I had read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is somewhat of a classic in the local good genre. I hadn’t, so I bought a secondhand copy and started reading.

There’s a certainly delicious irony in the fact that my copy of Flattened Fauna: A field guide to common animals of roads, streets, and highways has become resolutely three-dimensional whilst I have been reading it. I couldn’t get it to flatten down for a photoshoot, even though “…in becoming part of the road fauna celebrated in this book, an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.”

I’m not well adapted to hot weather. I’ve been soldiering on, trying to get on with things as the temperature soars, but on Friday I gave up and decided to aestivate (the summer version of hibernation) on the sofa. Mostly I watched endless episodes of Bones, but I also flipped through a new recipe book I’d been given to review, Fress, bold flavour from a Jewish kitchen. According to the front cover, Fress means “to eat copiously and without restraint.”

The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, starring Ruth Mott and Harry Dodson, was broadcast in 1993. Although you can still find copies of the book that accompanied the series, you can’t buy the episodes on DVD (or even video!), even though it is possible to buy the sister shows The Victorian Kitchen and The Victorian Kitchen Garden.

When the weather was still warm and dry, I lifted my onion crop. According to last year’s records, I planted 60 onion sets in 6 rows of 10 on 12th September 2017. I left them outside to dry, but then the weather turned wetter and I had to bring them inside to finish off. I wasn’t in a hurry to lift them, or use them, because we were still eating our way through the previous onion crop (chopped and frozen) that we hadn’t needed earlier in the year because of the plentiful leeks.