At that early stage we only had a small handful of growing beds on the go. The entire parcel of land was (and still partly is) covered in nylon carpeting for supposed weed control (ha!), over which a 2 inch layer of soil had long since settled, into which thick grasses had marched, determinedly laying down their mats of roots. Because Nature is badass, and thinks the whole idea of weed control is fucking hilarious.

Anyway, those sod-bearing carpet chunks, cut out with a utility knife, each weighs about 40 kilos. And then what do you do with it, after you’ve pulled it up? Lay it down in a pile and it takes off again, becoming a lush green mini-mountain of carpet-grass; throw it in the big plastic rubbish bin and the weight splits the plastic. All of which is why so few areas were prepared for cultivation at that point.

We had one smallish square bed available, and Steve hurriedly planted the four apple trees there, one in each corner, while thunderclouds spat intermittent raindrops, likely to become a full-on storm any minute.

‘Um…that seems a little close together for so many fruit trees,’ I observed helpfully. Because that’s what I’m like. But really, there was nowhere else for them to go.

‘We’ll just keep them pruned,’ said Steve. ‘It’ll be fine.’

The two pear trees were then planted nearby, at either end of a peculiar-shaped little bed (back when we were still trying to be creative and interesting in our garden design) which had become known, for shape-related reasons, as the eyeball bed.

At the time we knew nothing about fruit trees, much less the fruit trees we were now in proud possession of. Dwarfing root stock, or not? Pollination pairs? Uh…what?

Despite all of that, 5 out of 6 trees survived. The two pears had seemed a bit less happy and hardy than the others from the very start. One of them couldn’t take the drowny wet winters, and gave up trying after 18 months or so. The remaining pear tree never fruited, but we were just pleased to see it hanging in there.

The apples, meanwhile, grew absurdly, non-dwarfingly tall due to the very necessary annual sideways pruning they received—my futile attempt to keep them from weaving their branches into each others’ hair like gigantic ready-made nests for some kind of mythological bird. Despite my clumsy efforts, they started fruiting in their second year, gifting us with bigger harvests every subsequent season, of really wonderful apples.

Last year was a so-called ‘mast year,’ a season in which every fruit and nut tree in the region collectively decided to shower the world in ridiculous abundance. Our apple trees produced at least a dozen crates of beautiful fruit (with many more windfalls left on the ground for critters to enjoy). I made a couple of batches of apple butter, but the fresh fruit kept so well there was no further need to preserve it. We each ate an apple a day for at least four months, and loved every minute of it.

To our astonished delight, that year even the little pear tree that had never fruited, decided to produce around 18 beautiful pears. Which all disappeared without a trace before I could harvest any—literally overnight. Who would’ve done such a thing?

Animals aren’t great with the table manners; there are always bits of half-eaten fruit left behind on the ground, or on the tree itself. Muntjack deer. Birds. Wasps. They all eat in recognizably messy ways. There’s always telltale evidence left behind of who’s been doing what. But that tree had been systematically stripped from top to bottom. The sort of thing humans would do—but we really don’t have any likely humans around who would’ve pilfered in such a way.

(Although, speaking of the human element…at the start of last season we noticed 6 plastic watering cans had mysteriously gone walkabout over the winter, leaving us only 2 to use. Far more expensive tools than that were all left untouched. We never did get to the bottom of that one.)

Anyway, this year the little pear tree outdid itself, producing a couple of dozen pears. I hurriedly harvested around 18 of them, leaving only the ones I couldn’t reach at the very top of the tree, just in case we had a repeat thief. Which we did. A few days later the remaining beauties had disappeared into thin air just like the ones from last year.

Mystery solved

I mentioned last time about the wheat seed trials I’m growing for the Gaia Foundation’s seed sovereignty project. Two modern population wheats (‘population’ meaning highly diverse parentage; the complete antithesis, in other words, of the genetically identical clones favored by the current commodity wheat system). One of them I’ve grown before with great success: a wheat named YQ which stands for Yield + Quality. Another has been bred by a local farmer friend, that one’s been given the sexy name of HS23.3; and then lastly as a comparison, an old fashioned heritage wheat from France called Touzelle.

I’m having to be more fiddly and exacting about the whole process than I would usually be, because they rather understandably are concerned with actual measurable science and stuff, in these trials. So they need the wheat sown in very particular ways, by each of us in the program. Which is how Steve and I (well, just Steve, actually) found ourselves using a seed drill borrowed from our farmer friend Andrew, to get accurate quantities of this seed into the ground at (what we hope will be) the correct spacing.

The seed drill has a shallow little plough on its front end. As the wheels turn, seed is deposited into the furrow it creates, before being covered over and lightly compressed (in theory) by the wheel at the back. Ordinarily we’d never use a plough at all—too much needless soil disturbance—but in this instance it was the right thing to do.

While ploughing along, Steve encountered a strange obstacle buried in the soil. A strange pear shaped obstacle, actually, sporting a set of teeth marks where the little bushy-tailed pickle had grabbed it up in his mouth, plucked it off the tree, then absconded with it. From there he chose the likeliest spot at the time (my freshly cultivated but not yet sown grain beds) to bury it for later. Who knows where the others are buried.

I’m all for sharing my abundance with other beings of Nature. I confess it makes me laugh—or at least smirk a little—to think of that squirrel slowly working his way through his luxurious pear cache last winter, while the rest of us went without. Not sure how cute I’ll think it is next year, though. Might be time to invest in some fruit tree netting.

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But mainly the Half Wild Garden is home to a different species of wasp altogether. These are littler fellows who live in holes in the ground—part of a group known as Digger Wasps—and although they could no doubt sting you if they wanted to…yeah, they really don’t want to.

Mild mannered and supremely affable, they’ll busily gorge themselves on ripe berries right alongside you as you’re harvesting your own dark sweet fruit from the same bush. (Try that with wasp type #1.)

These guys are tiny drunkards, actually. Like any wasp, they love sugar in all its forms. But in late summer, when fruit gets a bit overripe and starts to ferment…make way for a whole bunch of happy little wasps on a bender.

A few years ago a (human) neighbour used to regularly bring her kitchen waste to our garden for composting. We kept a big bucket in the barn for just this purpose; when it was full I’d then take it out to the processing area and tip it into the compost bin. One day she added the rinds from a supersweet melon along with her usual veg peelings. When I later unsuspectingly dumped my own kitchen veg bits into the bucket on top of hers, a cloud of freaked out wasps rose up to circle me. Shit.

Luckily for me, these were the drunken revellers, not the pugnaciously in-your-face kind. They buzzed me for just a brief second, as startled as I was. Then: Oh it’s you. Well, all right then.

And with that slightly slurred decision made, they returned to their feast in the bottom of the bucket. Whew.

This year I’m gladder than ever of the wasps’ good-natured disposition. Every summer one or another of our ageing willow trees is visited for a few weeks with an infestation of a particular kind of black aphid. Cleverly, the aphids escape the notice of the multitude of hungry bird predators out there who would enjoy a tasty snack, by clumping together in long black streaks: Overcrowded aphid high-rises, essentially. Birds don’t interpret those bumpy black streaks as tasty bugs, so they fly right on by.

The sticky honeydew the aphids produce falls like drizzly rain beneath the tree, speckle-coating everything and everybody. The tree vibrates with an otherworldly hum, audible from 10 feet away, as a garden’s worth of wasps turn up for the irresistible treat.

There’s never a super-convenient spot for this phenomenon to take place, to be honest. But this year’s aphid infestation wins the inconvenience prize, as they’ve chosen a tree directly overhanging the garden gate. Because it turns out aphids are not terribly interested in our boundary infrastructure issues.

So the gate, the latch and the ground all around it are covered in a heavy coating of what amounts to sugar syrup. And covered also in slightly drunken wasps, of course.

Lift the latch slooowly, swing the gate open. The wasps on the latch don’t even look up from their feast. Walk gingerly into the garden itself, eyes glued to the ground, to avoid meeting any inebriated little fellows crawling around. (I don’t kick off my sandals until I’m well past that tree—just in case.)

It’s been an interesting education, learning how to mix and mingle with our unruly interspecies neighbours; even the charming ones don’t necessarily take our needs into account—or historically, we theirs, I guess—when choosing territorial preferences. I could give dozens of examples.

The robins who nested inside Jabba (the hut) where we keep our garden tools. Awkward, but the birds eventually learned to put up with our frequent visits. Their acceptance was due in no small part, I’m sure, to the food and water Steve left in there each day for mum and dad robin.

The chicks all successfully fledged despite the intense interest paid them by several vigilant neighbourhood cats—except for one, who thought it was such a great gig receiving food and water on demand inside the hut, that he hung on for another month or so in there, like a teenager living in his parents’ basement. Until mama eventually returned to boot him out into the real world, giving us free access to our toolshed once more.

Or the wren who made a beautiful little nest stuffed into the loops of a sturdy length of rope hanging in the barn. Right next to where I normally stand at the potting table. The barn, where all the wheelbarrows and other garden equipment (and the aforementioned compost bucket) are also stored.

Unlike the robins, she never truly got used to the frequent interruptions. Although she couldn’t have been too traumatised by our persistent invasions, because she chose it as her nesting spot the following year as well. Lucky us.

Speaking of the compost bucket, it recently became the object of desire for a very tiny young mouse who bravely evaded the cat patrol, teaching himself to climb all the way up onto the potting table, from where he could high-dive down into that bucket for a veg scrap feast.

Unfortunately, once in, he had no idea how to get back out. Just what we need, a mouse with poor planning skills. Steve rescued him at least 3 times, before asking me to stop putting kitchen scraps in the kitchen scrap bucket. (Sigh. Okay.)

Or there’s the pheasants, who have more than once turned my raised beds into dustbath day spas, leaving multiple pheasant-shaped divots right where I’d optimistically intended to plant my seedlings. Upon discovery of the craters, I would rake the bed flat again in preparation for planting, only to find the day spa open for business once again the following day. (Sigh. Okay.)

And we haven’t even talked about the plantlife that chooses where it wants to turn up without so much as a by-your-leave. Oak trees in my flower bed. Wild strawberries in my chard bed, which, in the blink of an eye, becomes a wild strawberry bed instead. (Sorry, chard.)

Here’s a shot of a wild dog rose, caught in the act of conquering the universe:

Admittedly we’ve been a bit naive in letting Nature have its way in the garden.

Oh Nature, we want to take our cues from you. Show us what you’d like this garden to be, and we’ll do our best to work with you on that.

Nature’s response: HOLD MY BEER.

I think I’ll have to change the name of the garden soon. Because it’s RIDICULOUSLY wild now, and almost all of its inhabitants couldn’t be more pleased about that.

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Only the storybook thatch-roofed cottages—and of course those iconic red phone boxes (now phoneless, but filled with…wait for it…defibrillator equipment. For your entirely untrained neighbour to jumpstart your heart) which are dotted here and there around the countryside, might be a giveaway that you’re still in Britain.

Yes, England: The verdant and supremely soggy land that once inspired the Beatles lyric:

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun

If the sun don’t come you get a tan from standing in the English rain.

Well the tan is no problem now. And we haven’t seen any of that English rain in, I don’t know. Three and a half months, maybe?

Meanwhile, there are fires on the Isle of Wight, and in the New Forest, which is one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed common pasture land in Southern England. A place where donkeys and ponies roam freely through scrub forests and villages alike, causing delight and traffic jams in equal measure wherever they go. It would be a dreadful shame (for humans and animals both) to lose it.

Anyway this country has endured severe drought off and on over the last 6 years or so, but none as intense or unrelenting as this one. Fortunately Britons (who prior to 2020 obviously hadn’t had all that much ongoing experience of this) seem to now be learning appropriate behaviours, when desert conditions are upon us.

Because of course that wasn’t always the case. Which is fair enough. Because when it typically rains 180-odd days a year, vegetation (and other stuff) simply doesn’t burn. Until it does.

Example: Several years back, during one of the first prolonged tinder-dry periods of hot desert winds, my neighbour felt it was the perfect time to set fire to a huge pile of ragwort in the carpark right next to his thatch roofed house. The massive billows of thick brown smoke emanating from his place set my Southern California Spidey-senses on high alert, visions of uncontrollable wildfires racing through my mind. I dashed up the road to see what was happening.

As I ran I could see sparks dancing crazily in the wind, as they rode those fierce, hot currents high into the air. Right next to his thatch roof. Imagining the worst, I was gobsmacked to find his whole family serenely gathered round a wildly shifting bonfire set directly beneath tall, overhanging trees. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me, with a smile. ‘It’s all under control.’

By which he must’ve meant that they were standing around looking at it, not indoors watching TV or something.

I wanted to slap him hard. Instead I read him the riot act, flinging a few choice swearwords at him as a parting gift, then I left.

Funnily enough, I’m never invited to their Christmas parties. On the other hand, he’s never endangered his roof (or the rest of us in a 10 mile radius) with another desert bonfire. So that’s something.

The other evening I engaged in neighbourly relations of another kind altogether. Our organic farmer friend Andrew asked a handful of locals, including Steve and me, to come after hours to help them water their lower fields, which they still do by hand in emergency situations.

The tractor pulls up with a trailer holding a couple of IBCs full of water (that’s 2000 litres) and around 20 large plastic watering cans. Like a barmaid pulling pints in a very busy pub, I was happy to man the taps for an intense couple of hours, keeping a constant flow of watering cans filled and refilled for the lovely volunteer army of field hands. Leeks, beetroot, kale by the hundreds, each got a welcome sip of life’s elixir. Enough to keep them going for another few days.

Later on, the tractor brings a third IBC down to the other end of the very long rows of veg—because walking all the way back to the beginning for refills takes way too long at that point—and the crops at the far end get a good little drink as well.

When it was over, Andrew took me aside to see a small unused field I might possibly use to grow some grain.

A little background on that:

I’ve recently become part of a year-long seed sovereignty program run by the Gaia Foundation. I’ll be responsible for growing 30 square metres—that’s roughly 323 square feet—of 3 kinds of wheat, some ancient and some modern.

This is a formal course, where they’ll teach me actual proper grain growing and harvesting techniques, and I’ll keep notes on each variety: Which ones survive the annual winter drowning. Which ones continue on, to thrive in blistering conditions like we’re seeing right now. The final harvest of plucky survivors will go back to the good folks at Gaia Foundation for further testing next season.

If you’ve been with me for awhile, you know I’m a pretty devoted grainiac. I’ve been inspired (obsessed?) for the last few years, with keeping heritage varieties of grain alive. All by myself, at first.

Why do it? I do it because humanity’s history and future are intimately intertwined with grain, and I’m not inclined to let anybody get away with destroying that relationship. Even if it means I have to grow my own, to ensure those heritage varieties endure.

Back in 2022 when I first started, I was growing grain all on my own in my garden, and pretty much making it up as I went along. After some fairly excellent harvests—turns out that’s the easy part—I found I was unable to persuade anybody to take my precious grain seeds, to help me keep these varieties alive by growing them on in their own gardens. So it was basically a seed sovereignty program of one.

After a few seasons I gave up on it.

So doing this thing under the tutelage of the Gaia Foundation—who are extremely interested in growing on the grain seeds I produce—well that’s a fantastic development, all the way around.

I’ll probably grow half of them in my own garden again, and half of them on the farm’s small unused plot that Andrew has offered to me. (I don’t relish having to go all the way down to the lower fields to water them by hand, where no IBCs or happy barmaids will be waiting there to refill my watering cans for me…but I’m grateful for the offer nonetheless.)

Yet I do worry a bit about trying to sow seeds under these parched conditions. Whether here in my garden or down at the farm, will anything actually grow, that’s been sown direct in the baked clay earth, after a brutal summer like this one?

I guess I’ll find out.

Back when I grew them in my garden, I started the seeds in highly luxurious conditions, coddled in module trays of nutritious compost inside the protective comfort of the polyhouse. I then planted them out in late October as small, sturdy seedling plants. But it’s not practical to do that for triple the square footage. I haven’t got that many module trays, for one thing.

Besides, growing grains as garden plants is not the point. They want to know which varieties will be suitable to trial next on farms for actual real-life food production. Farmers aren’t gonna nestle their seeds in trays of rich compost, protected from wind and weather while they germinate, and then lovingly pop the young plants in the ground, one by one by hand.

As far as I know. Call it an educated guess.

Anyway, other than that upcoming grain project, the half-baked, half wild garden is hanging in there. The deep shade I was lamenting in my last post has turned out to be both a relief and a (mixed) blessing, reducing temperatures in portions of the garden by life-giving degrees. In colder, cloudier weather it’ll be the pits, of course. But these days? Heaven.

Breaking News Update!

It rained just now!! For about 90 seconds, or maybe as much as 2 minutes. You could almost hear the land sobbing with relief. Or maybe that was just me.

Funny how we take the most incredible miracles for granted…until they disappear. Water is life. And every drop, a blessing. I’m not likely to forget it again.

Anyway, that’s all the local news for now. Thanks for hanging out.

Stay cool, stay hydrated, and stay clear of any well-meaning neighbours brandishing defibrillation paddles. I know I will.

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And writing to you, of course.

It’s been an extraordinary year so far, in the garden. Having finally admitted bitter defeat in our many attempts to tame this piece of land—Nature 10,000, human caretakers 0—we made a radical decision at the beginning of the season. We would only tend the areas needed for growing the handful of crops we most love to eat. Or flowers we really want to grow. This decision translated to keeping the greenhouses and polyhouses active for indoor growing, plus about one half as many outdoor raised beds as before.

All other beds, brassica cages and partly wild spaces have been enthusiastically reclaimed by Nature, which never needs a second invitation to landscape the garden as it sees fit.

This year we also gave up on the hopelessly Quixotic quest of cutting back willows to let in more light. (We still have half a mountain of unprocessed logs from 2 years ago. And nowhere to stack them once sawn.)

All of this surrender makes the garden an interesting mix of ecosystems: Deeply shaded woodland—I’m sitting in one of those right now—cheek by jowl with vast areas of blazing summer sun, supporting the kinds of plants that are happy in that harsher grassland environment.

A series of carefully groomed growing beds, surrounded by a hugely varied abundance of unbridled Nature, doing exactly as it pleases, where and how it pleases.

The gift of releasing our hopelessly unrealistic desire for control, is twofold. One: The entire garden, most of it designed by Nature, is surprisingly quite beautiful in its own right—once you get over any latent OCD tendencies you may have.

Take this bionic rose for instance. We did not plant it, nor encourage it to wind its way through at least 4 different trees; Nature did all that.

Two: Given a sliver of a chance, Nature regenerates like nobody’s business. Watching it happen right before my eyes, is a gift that inspires incredible awe. Not to mention profound respect for Nature’s extreme badass capabilities—along with some real hope for the future.

Let others cite the horrifying statistics about catastrophic species loss and ecosystem collapse here in the UK. It’s all undoubtedly true and cause for grave concern.

But I will tell you something.

This year, due to our abject failure at garden wrangling, this tiny acre of land supports an astonishing bird population. The dawn chorus here is deafening, a joyous throwback to a much earlier time.

Even more stunning is the proliferation of insects—which, (besides having their own right to live and thrive), are of course essential food for the multitude of birds and bats.

In the golden light of early evening, the air is so full of butterflies, moths, pollinators, damsel flies, gnats and every other type of tiny flying critter, that it takes me back to my 1970s childhood. As if the intervening 50-odd years of indiscriminate pesticide use had never happened. Back to a time when that phrase (from ‘Convoy’) ‘Them Smokies was thick as bugs on a bumper’ referred to an actual, commonly recognizable (if somewhat icky) phenomenon.

Because incredibly enough: This year, if you were to drive a car at speed through the Half Wild Garden (not recommended, by the way), the insect carnage would indeed be smeared all over your windscreen and bumpers, just like the old days. Back when there were flying insects, and cars still had bumpers.

God, I’m old.

Anyway. The amazing thing—amazing to us, anyway—is that the very specific ways in which we were finally forced to admit defeat, have been the very actions (or rather inactions) that have allowed for this joyous population boom.

It’s been soul nourishing. Heart uplifting. For us humans, I mean. And an incredible boost for all the other beings who call this place home.

Here’s the accidental recipe for what happened: Last year’s richly composted growing beds, abandoned to Nature’s preferred way of gardening, have produced islands of lushly flowering 7 ft tall weeds, and grasses of every description.

Huge areas of erstwhile raspberry and blackcurrant production have been given up on, which mean that although currently impassable to humans, they’re home to all sorts of enthusiastic others.

And as if to compensate us for that berry loss, a nearby bramble mountain that rarely flowers or produces fruit (concentrating instead, as it does, on world domination), has exploded into blossom and soon-to-be blackberries. And those? We can reach.

There’s seemingly something for everybody here. Wilderness and woodland for those creatures who prefer it. Tidy garden areas for those who like to rummage through my newly planted beds—blackbirds, I’m lookin’ at you—in search of slugs or other tasty treats.

I’m told that yesterday as I moved around the garden, I apparently carried a passenger for some little while: A butterfly hitched a ride on my head.

Nice.

I could never have predicted the quiet sort of ongoing joy that all of this Nature-based intimacy would bring to me.

It’s not all sweetness ‘n light, of course. It ain’t all hitchhiking butterflies. There are plenty of itchy (or stingy) midsummer insect bites to be had here as well…and in truth, Nature is often anything but pretty.

But even so. Even on the very worst days, this garden is still an incredible gift.

Except in February. Then it sucks.

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That’s when Steve and I took on the toxic waste site at the other end of the farm that, 8 years on, has eventually turned itself into the Half Wild Garden. A place of incomparable beauty, a haven for wildlife, a reasonably abundant source of organic food, and a year-round timesuck of neverending bloody hard work.

Oh, and the all-electric flat? We put in a seriously splendid woodfired cookstove that heats water, dries towels and warms a room like nobody’s business. And does a brilliant job of cooking too, of course. On cold days the cats worship it.

Prepping means very different things to different people, of course. A dear friend, inspired by all the distressing events playing out on the other side of the world, recently ordered a 25 kilogram bag of dried chickpeas (that’s more than 55 lbs.) from a local food co-op. A bag, incidentally, that’s been nestled in the trunk of her car for the last 2 weeks ever since she took delivery…because she can’t lift it. But never mind, eh. She’s set for curries until at least 2035.

Meanwhile, I belong to a food grower’s group, a delightfully feisty bunch of knowledgeable gardeners, most of whom are into slightly more serious prepping of one kind or another.

There’s a camo-clad fellow, for instance, his long white braid trailing down his back, who will happily teach you to shoot your own 4-legged food with a crossbow, if you so desire. Based on looks alone you might think twice about meeting him in a dark alley, but he’s actually a lovely guy.

Steve and I attended one of his archery lessons (for recreational purposes, not hunting) at a friend’s farm last year. A beautiful sunny afternoon of homemade treats and happy, quiet chatter in between meditative longbow sessions aimed at the series of straw bale targets.

All very civilized…except for that one rather intense couple fixated on mastering the crossbow, whose murmured conversations suggested the apparent aim of taking down 2-legged game. The kind often seen wearing shiny badges on their uniforms.

Uh…okay. (They’re not in the grower’s group. Must be friends of camo guy.)

So like I said: There’s prepping and there’s prepping.

Mainly we—the growers group, that is—meet once a month to talk gardening, eat great snacks and swap seeds and excess garden produce. Which can arrive in incredibly overwhelming amounts, in a good season. Which last year definitely was.

Last summer I ate probably 150 beautiful ripe figs (and would’ve easily been given 150 more if I’d allowed it) due to the ridiculous overabundance every fruit and nut tree in this region offered to all takers.

I said no to most of the plums, pears and apricots, and to all of the apples—our own very young trees showered us with about a dozen crates of incredibly beautiful apples, which we ate every day for several months—but I’m a sucker for a ripe fig. We have 2 sad little potted fig trees, and bless their hearts, they squeeze out about 3 little figs each, per season. So it was fig heaven for me.

It’s good to belong to a group where mature fruit trees rule the day.

But now that we’ve looked at various styles of prepping, let’s turn our attention to the fancy restaurant alt-universe opposite…

…for an unrelated mini-rant.

As in: What is it about pea shoots? People rave. I don’t get it. They say they taste just like peas; to me they just taste vaguely green. They say they’re a wonderfully tender addition to an early spring salad. And then you let the plant grow on after that brief early harvest, to become mature pea plants full of peas.

Okay, sure. Sounds like a nice idea, getting that double harvest. But they’re not actually all that tender, are they. I took an experimental pea shoot harvest from my own young plants only once, a few years back, and that was enough.

Recently our farmer friend Andrew gave us a bag of ‘different’ pea shoots he’s been growing for some London restaurateurs, to see what we thought. We thought they were vaguely green tasting, with muscular, ultra-curly tips that reminded me of chewing on telephone cord, back when phones were attached in that way.

(What. Yes, I’m old. Why do you ask?)

I can understand why chefs like them (pea shoots, not vintage phones)—they add interesting texture to a salad of baby greens. Or maybe they just use them as a garnish; an upscale version of that ubiquitous parsley sprig on so many diner dishes of yore. Breaking up the beige with a bit of contrasting green; never really meant to be eaten.

But what if it shows up in your salad? Definitely not something you’d order on a first date—not if you want a second date, anyway—the tendrils wrapping themselves around your teeth, peeking out fetchingly from the corner of your mouth as you chew.

Well. I suppose if you’re living off the land, true prepper style, then you’d be foraging nutrient-rich edible weeds and such to help fill your salad bowl, during that early spring period before your own spring crops are mature enough for harvest. Dandelion greens, maybe some chickweed or whatnot. In which case pea shoots might be a welcome addition to your lunch.

Okay, maybe not a welcome addition…

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Years ago a friend of ours jokingly christened Wednesday as Chip Night Eve, and damn if it didn’t stick. It matters not whether you ever buy your Thursday night meal from that aforementioned takeout provider. (Which we ourselves rarely ever do.)

Ever since it was so named, your week now goes Monday, Tuesday, Chip Night Eve, Chip Night, Friday. And then Saturday, Sunday of course.

You might be led to think, from the outsized importance the chip van’s Thursday evening presence seems to enjoy, that nothing much of any note goes on in the countryside. But dear reader, you’d be wrong.

Last year, for example, a local farmer quietly began raising moderately illegal herbage instead of chickens, in his vast complex of agricultural barns. Well actually, not that quietly. Somebody mentioned something to someone in the local pub, and the next thing you knew, said farmer’s incarceration made front page news. Exciting stuff.

Mind you, front page headlines around here usually say something more like: Enterprising Tot Bikes Around the Block 87 Times; Raises £87 for Charity. So you can imagine the stir this story created. It was dinner table conversation for at least a month of Chip Nights.

Recently however, that scandal has been pushed from the minds of local citizens by an even more shocking event. A gang of 200 vandals broke through the barrier fencing at our friend Andrew’s organic farm one frosty night in late November, laying waste to an entire field of winter veg. By the time their lawless spree ended, not a single cabbage, kale or sprout remained.

The unrepentant perps were quickly rounded up by the appropriate authorities. As the ring leader, a white female of average build, was being taken into custody, Andrew asked her the anguished question on everyone’s mind: ‘Why’d you do it?’

She shot him a square-eyed glance. ‘Beh-eh-eh-eh-eh,’ she muttered, as she was led away.

Oh yes. It all goes on in the countryside. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

And now, if you’ll pardon me, it’s Chip Night. Time to go figure out what we’re having for dinner.

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I knew damn well what it would mean: Steve, adding yet another giant ongoing responsibility to his overwhelming to-do list.

Case in point: Notified of the impending gift, he spent weeks building them a palatial run—a handsome dream home much admired by birds and humans alike. Which was then followed up by the endless timesuck of daily chicken pampering, after the birds were settled in their splendid new abode. More on that in a minute.

In mid-build of the run, the question came: Would you like a cockerel too? Apparently the 4 young hens and cockerel were a family unit. The farmer was hoping to offload them all together. NO, WE DO NOT WANT A COCKEREL!, we assured our benefactor. But then I thought about it overnight—realizing I couldn’t live with it, knowing what the rejected bird’s fate would likely be. So 4 hens and a cockerel it was.

We were pleasantly surprised and rather relieved by how very nearly almost sweet that cockerel’s temperament turned out to be. But of course, he was only a youngster at the time. Prepubescent.

The 5 little bantams grew big (relatively speaking) and strong under Steve’s loving care. He spoiled them all as I knew he would, teaching them to expect freshly harvested lunchtime nibbles of chard or spinach—handheld upright, of course, for ease of pecking—and bedtime snacks prior to being tucked up in their coop for the night.

I randomly brought them tasty morsels, as and when, from the garden. But Steve was their number one caretaker. Caring for chickens was indeed a lot of work (and even more work than that, if you’re Steve), but we both agreed they were fun to have around.

Kellogg grows up. And becomes an asshole.

They’ve been with us for nearly a year now. In their adulthood, all 4 hens have taken turns going broody—but no. Sorry. Absolutely not. We refuse to breed more chickens.

So they sit on empty nests inside the coop, zoning out in that peculiar chicken way. They forget to eat, drink or bathe for weeks at a time. Or rather they would, except that Steve gently picks them up and sends them outside a couple of times a day for a quick nosh before they troop back up the ramp, into the coop for another round of zombified nest sitting.

Other than that brief transport from nestbox to the comparatively great outdoors, none of the chickens have ever received much in the way of human touch. They’re friendly but not cuddly, so we haven’t pushed it.

A few months ago one of the hens, a feisty little thing named Pickle, surprised us all by inventing a new game. Whenever Steve crouched down to offer everyone the usual handheld bouquet of fresh-picked garden greens, she would jump up instead onto Steve’s shoulder, where she could peck at an individual chard leaf held up just for her, at this daring new height.

Steve and Pickle were equally delighted by the new lunchtime ritual. Know who wasn’t delighted? Kellogg.

I was out in the garden one day shortly after the lunchtime game began, when I heard Kellogg produce a strange new sort of furiously throaty roar: Oy-yoy-yoy! Ow-wow-wow!

I remarked on it at the time. That bird never shuts up even for a moment, and he’s got an astonishing vocabulary to draw upon. But I’d never heard anything like this.

The next time Steve entered the run, Kellogg charged at him, spurs out, without warning or provocation. (Spurs are nasty weapons. Think cockfighting.) At first Steve ignored it, hoping the behavior was some sort of fluke. It wasn’t.

Steve goes in and out of their compound numerous times every single day; cleaning the coop, refreshing the food, water and treats. Hand feeding. Communing.

A small but viciously enraged attack rooster was not something he was about to allow. The third time Kellogg charged at him, Steve scooped him up on the tip of his boot and sent him sailing harmlessly backward toward the other end of the run. Just to remind him who was in charge.

Oh the ruckus! Oh the drama!

Steve is a horrible deadly dangerous monster!, screamed Kellogg. We should all be very, very afraid for our lives! The hens looked up from their scratching and pecking, shrugged and resumed what they were doing.

NO, REALLY! WE SHOULD ALL BE TERRIFIED!, roared Kellogg, who by now was cowering in the corner behind the coop. STEVE IS A MURDEROUS CHICKEN KICKER!

If a hen is capable of an eye roll, they surely all did it at that point. Steve is Bringer of Treats, murmured the hens to one another.

Kellogg’s demeanor turned surly and dark from that day forward. Some of the others have yet to forgive him for ruining their relationship with Steve. (Pickle, in fact, was recently witnessed giving Kellogg’s foot a sharp peck for no particular reason, as she passed him on her way into the coop.)

This rooster has no actual job, mind you. Seemingly aware of this, he spends his noisy days crowing, clucking, chortling and yelling, as he tries (and mostly fails) to convince the other 4 how useful and important he is. 2 of them sort of listen. The other 2 think he’s a complete ass.

Although Steve still takes excellent care of them all and offers treats as he always has, he no longer hangs out for quality time inside the run; Kellogg has made that impossible. Some of the hens are not happy about that. They’d far rather keep company with Bringer of Treats, than the feathered jerk they’re stuck with.

It’s safe to say there’s no harmony in Chickenland.

An existential crisis of a different sort

Bantam hens are particularly prone to broodiness. As I’ve said, each of them has gone broody at least once and maybe twice, since they’ve been with us. But unusually, all 4 of them have recently entered that state at the same time: 4 hens crowding into the 2 nest boxes, to zone out together inside the coop.

Leaving a very quiet and forlorn Kellogg all by himself outside.

No one to impress. No one to bully. No one to nail when they least expect it. (His pickup lines were never great to begin with. But these days he’s dispensed with the small talk, and goes straight for the hit and run.)

Without an audience, he has absolutely no idea what to do with himself. He just sits, limp and alone, uttering not a sound.

What is a rooster, after all, without hens to boss around? Without other males to fight? When there are no listeners…what is the point of er-er-er-er-ooooo?

Kellogg is a first class idiot. No 2 ways about it. But I have to confess, I feel for the guy.

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The horses spent most of their spring season sequestered away in their stables, bored out of their skulls and making do with dried hay for dinner, (their outdoor paddock under several inches of water)…instead of munching fresh green grass in open fields.

For Steve and me, that turn of events meant horse poo mixed with far too much woodchip, for our composting preferences. Big chunky stable chippings take years to break down, you see; we need finished compost long before that. We therefore prefer the unadulterated poo straight from the great outdoors, whenever possible.

Poo connoisseurs, we are.

Added to the dearth of useful poo, the weather itself was unrelentingly cold and wet. Exactly what you don’t want for hot, rapid compost production. The result? Bigtime compost shortage for the spring/summer growing season.

In desperation we turned to Andrew, our organic farmer friend. ‘Yes, I have a bit of compost for sale,’ he said, ‘but it’s not very good. It was left uncovered for a few months, so it’ll have some weed seeds in it.’

Some weed seeds, I thought. Not ideal, but hey…how bad can it be? And with that, the sale was made.

Q: How bad can it be?

A: Bad. Really, really bad.

With that compost purchase, we imported a ton of new weed types we’d never seen before onto our land, and in truly frightening numbers, to boot. It’s a lasting legacy; our garden (already no stranger to fairly daunting weed growth) will never be the same.

‘Well I did say,’ commented Andrew with a grimace, when he heard the news.

Yes. He did say. Sort of.

But no matter. There’s a powdery silver lining to the story…because one of those incredibly vigorous new weeds was fat hen.

Chenopodium Album, AKA goosefoot, AKA lamb’s quarter. In the US, it’s romantically known as pigweed.

Whatever you want to call it, fat hen is a truly delicious wild veg, raw or cooked. The leaves, young shoots, flowers and seeds are all edible, tasty, and nutritious as all get-out. Fat hen is rich in vitamins A and C, and minerals like calcium, iron, phosphorus and potassium, plus it’s got antioxidant properties. The seeds are high in protein, as well—but we’ll come back to those in a minute.

Like so many wild-foraged ‘weeds,’ fat hen has been widely used medicinally. It’s a mild diuretic with anti-inflammatory properties. Its powdery silver-green leaves have been used, among other things, to treat digestive disorders.

It’s an all round good egg, basically. Except in your garden, of course, where it’s a fricken nightmare…but hey. Nobody’s perfect, right?

Back to the seeds: These nutritious little babies can be cooked as a grain—similar, in fact, to quinoa, which is a close cousin in the same Chenopodium family—or they can be ground into flour.

But I know alittle something about the frustrating timesuck of trying to separate teeny tiny grain seeds from mountains of chaff. Seriously, you don’t want to go there.

Why not do this lovely thing instead: Harvest the green, unripe flowering seedheads early in the season, and eat the whole thing. They say it tastes just like cauliflower. I plan to find out, this season.

Anyway, the point here, beyond its many virtues as a wild veg and medicinal plant, is that you don’t have to do anything at all to grow it. In fact, I dare you to try and get rid of it. Cut it down a thousand times, pull it out by the roots. It’ll be back next week, more vigorous than ever.

Last year we harvested and ate tons of it, finding it far tastier than spinach. It proved virtually indestructible as a ‘cut and come again’ crop, happily surviving everything we, and the crappy weather, could throw at it.

With all of the above in mind, this year we decided to dedicate one of our outdoor beds exclusively to growing fat hen as a proper crop.

Fat hen as an annual veg crop

Did we carefully save seed from last year’s plants, you ask? Start them off as seedlings in module trays? Enrich and protect the overwintered soil of the bed with a fresh layer of compost?

Nope, nope and nope. All we did was not weed that bed. After the autumn harvest and clearance of whatever was in it, we purposely left that bed to its own devices.

Aaaand…here’s that same bed now. Something like 10 fat hen plants per square inch, plus one self-seeded chard volunteer. (I probably should’ve thinned them all out a bit when they were younger, to give the strongest plants a better chance. But let’s be real. The empty spaces would’ve quickly been filled up by…you guessed it. Yet more fat hen seedlings.)

Funnily enough, we grew a close relative of fat hen last year—like, on purpose, from purchased seed—called Huauzontle, or Aztec broccoli. Latin name Chenopodium Nuttalliae.

It was ok. Not nearly as vigorous or easy to grow as fat hen itself, and frankly nowhere near as tasty. So…honestly, why bother, when you can have brilliant veg that grows itself? That’s what I say.

Anyway, the last of my overwintered spinach has all been harvested this week. By next week, (if last year is any indication) we can look forward to bountiful, nonstop fat hen harvests for the rest of the spring/summer season.

Plus it’s the only bed there’ll be no need to weed!

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And now for fat hen of a very different sort…

I’ll leave you with a video clip of all 5 fluffballs enjoying a combination communal dustbath/all-you-can-eat cafeteria, in one of my raised beds. Ah, the simple pleasures.

See you soon.

So…Announcing The Liberated Grain. A Substack newsletter devoted entirely to this beautiful bread I keep talking about; to the gorgeous local grain it’s made from; and to the micro bakery project I’m in the process of putting together (which will bake exactly this ultralong fermentation bread, using this incredible local grain).

The courses, recipes, videos and scientific papers about nutrition and digestibility, will (for technical reasons mainly) be on the Liberated Grain website. Which is not live yet. Still working on it.

Meanwhile…the Liberated Grain Substack will be where I will regularly post all my articles, and updates about progress on the Liberated Grain website, and on the bakery project.

I’ll also be posting regularly on Notes, which is Substack’s kinder, gentler version of social media. (You need the Substack app to use Notes, I believe. The articles themselves will show up in your email inbox like always. No app needed for that.)

Here’s my first Liberated Grain post:

Carrie Triffet Wood

The real bread project

Hey! Welcome. I’m Carrie, a longtime author and Substacker. (Love this platform…

Read more

2 years ago · Carrie Triffet Wood

Anyway, please do subscribe to the new Liberated Grain Substack, if it interests you. (Just click on ‘read more’ and it’ll take you there.)

And please share this post, if you know anyone who is gluten intolerant…and/or is a human who eats food.

Thanks and love,

Carrie

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The year before last, one of her seasonal gifts was a beautiful amaryllis in a tall hurricane vase. The plant was nestled in a bed of fluffy green moss, studded with artfully placed pinecones and cinnamon sticks and whatnot. Very festive.

After several days of admiring its blooms, we started thinking the plant might be thirsty and could use a little water. We assumed that underneath that layer of decorative moss we’d find some cleverly hidden floral foam. The kind that could be re-soaked in water as needed. But no.

Whoever assembled that arrangement did not intend that the amaryllis plant would ever be watered. They’d scraped all its roots off and plopped it into the dry moss, where it was apparently supposed to live just long enough to blossom for a week or two and then die.

We were both stunned. To us it seemed like such a senseless murder.

Looking back, I really don’t know why we were so shocked. This is the same holiday, after all, where it’s customary to chop down a living tree, hang dingleballs off its branches and sing songs while it slowly dies, right there in the livingroom next to the TV.

What’s a little assisted suicide for an amaryllis, compared to that?

We’ve since realized that cutting off amaryllis roots is actually a thing. Not an absolutely necessary thing, but a practice sometimes engaged in anyway, by traditional gardeners.

(But not cutting off ALL the roots, and never while it’s flowering!)

Anyway, after the amaryllis flower faded, we put the naked bulb in water and told it: We hope you’ll survive and grow new roots. If you do, you can live out your natural life with us, and we’ll never ask anything of you. You’ll never have to bloom again if you don’t want to.

The bulb thought about it for a very long time.

It got all shriveled as it used up the last of its resources…but still we kept it bobbing in its water bath, on the off chance it would decide to make a go of it.

I’m not sure how much time passed. 6 weeks? 2 months? when we noticed a tiny protuberance on the side of the bulb. Could that actually be a root forming?

Yep, it was. Over the next month or 2, that bulb produced a full complement of healthy new roots. Into a roomy new pot of soil it went, and after another respectable length of time, leaves started to sprout. Big leaves. Happy leaves.

And that’s how the amaryllis plant remained for the next year and a half: A repotted miracle bulb, sporting a very large spray of healthy green leaves.

It spent half its year in the polyhouse, soaking up the garden vibes from its sheltered position, and the other half on the kitchen windowsill, jostling for space with half a dozen overwintering chili plants. It didn’t seem to mind the company.

The amaryllis had become a familiar member of the household by this point; just a big old, twice repotted spray of giant green leaves, greeting the world, and us, each day.

But then all of a sudden, a few weeks ago…this!

My teacup is in the photo to give you some sense of scale.

The cabinet behind it is 7 feet tall—just to give you an idea of how enormous this magnificent thing (now a third time repotted) has become. And that hazel stick is in there because the blooms are so top-heavy, they threatened to tip the whole pot over.

Here’s a closeup taken in the polyhouse. Each flower is almost bigger than my head.

Spectacular, no?

I could make a joke here, about how this amaryllis plant rose from the dead and appeared to many.

But that would be in dreadfully poor taste, wouldn’t it? Given that Easter is right around the corner and all?

So instead I’ll simply shake my head in wonderment and say:

Ain’t Nature completely amazing.

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Our growing beds are all ready for spring plantings; seed sowing begins in earnest later this week. I wouldn’t say we have it all under control by any means, but I’m cautiously optimistic about our chances. For the first time in a long time.

The polyhouses, currently full of merrily bolting winter veg, will soon receive their final harvests—time for a few delicious spinach/mizuna/mibuna/lambs lettuce/chard pies, I think, to celebrate the turning of the season.

And alittle later on, there’ll be yet more beautiful greens pies, when I wild forage—AKA go weed picking—fat hen and nettles. Fat hen is the most incredible plant. It deserves its own story all by itself…and maybe it’ll get one a little bit later in the season. And I’ve already talked about nettles loads of times in these pages, I’m sure. Together those two plants are an unbeatable combo, so I’m very much looking forward to those early summer harvests and the pies (or pizzas) they produce.

As for the grief bit…a couple of tragic and/or deeply upsetting things have happened around here over the past few months. Each of them could be a full length story on its own, but hey…the sun is shining, and I don’t wanna.

So here instead is the news in brief:

Last season a magnificent young swan, while joyously trying out its wings, flew straight into those bare power lines I’m always telling you about. Incredibly, it lived.

One doesn’t realize just how massive a swan is, until putting it into a tiny car, to drive it to the wild animal vet 10 miles away. (Doesn’t sound like much, a 10 mile trip. But a 10 mile journey around here is at least half an hour on narrow winding roads.)

The swan took up both back seats, and all of the hatchback. My job was to keep its wings pinned tight inside a blanket, because an 8 foot wingspan flapping in panic in a tiny car would not be a good thing for anybody.

The swan let me stroke its lovely neck to keep it calm on the long journey. Occasionally it would turn to give me a long searching look, and then would rest its beautiful head on my arm. What a gift, to be allowed to comfort such a majestic wild creature in that way.

We left the swan with the vet, and after we drove off they killed it.

Upsetting event #2 happened only a few weeks ago. The short form of the story:

Decades ago, something like 85% of British voters voted to outlaw fox hunting. It still goes on. It’s thoroughly illegal but big power and old money keep it in business.

I won’t give you the details of what goes on. How the dogs are trained, or how they’re treated. How the foxes are raised. What actually happens before and during a hunt. What kind of damage is done to farmers’ fields, livestock and unlucky family pets. If you are at all sensitive to animal welfare (and even if you’re not) you might not sleep for a week.

So the local hunt got a wee bit out of control a few weeks ago, and the distraught fox came tearing through this farm and industrial estate. With a pack of crazed hounds just behind it. On a weekday afternoon, with dozens of witnesses about. (These hunt people are nothing if not arrogant.)

The dogs ran through a cheese-making facility before the owner could kick them back outside and slam the door. As it happens, his security camera caught both the fox and the hounds in action. He filmed the rest of it on his phone. Because (and DON’T excuse my French) these fuckers are extremely hard to prosecute. But filmed footage definitely helps.

Ok, back to nicer news. I have one more short story, about some unexpected additions to our half wild garden family: Chickens! A gift we definitely did not ask for; nevertheless, here they are. 4 adorable bantam hens named Pickle, Lily, Coco and Nibs…and a surprisingly sweet rooster named Kellogg.

Tears and laughter both lately (thanks to our standup comic chickens), with a sunny focus on new life moving forward.

On that cheerful note, I’ll leave you for now.

Thanks for reading.

PS It turns out swans are a protected species. When lobbying the power company to do something about those wires, I believe the word ‘swans’ was mentioned. We recently heard back:

They’ll be sending out a team to assess the situation. Fingers crossed.

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But today I’m here to say there are forces at work in the world—beautiful forces, growing in momentum, that you’re never gonna hear about on the evening news—and in the particular case I’m talking about today, those forces are all about growing grain. So grain is the uplifting topic of the day.

Because who can’t use a little bit of uplift right about now? Seriously.

Anyway, before we get to all of that good stuff…let’s go for a brief recap, on how I came to embrace this grainy form of geekitude. Because it’s relevant.

It started 3 or 4 years ago, as a sort of an ‘Oh HELL no’ response to a statement from Bill Gates, about his plan to erase from the planet all genetic variability coming from all of those thousands of strains of natural wheat…leaving only his genetically modified super-wheat. With which he’s gonna ‘feed the world.’

Bless.

So I thought: Ok. In my small, backyard gardener way, I’m gonna make it as awkward as I possibly can, for Gates and Co. to execute that plan. And I set about learning how to grow grain. Not just any grain, but organic heritage grain. As many different varieties as I possibly could.

As it turned out, acquiring said grain seeds was no mean feat, here in the UK; there are laws about that. But I was determined to get my hands on some by whatever methods, and soon found myself growing 11 types of heritage grain, including 7 varieties of wheat.

And it was easy! Funny how most gardeners (including me) never even think about growing grains. Like maybe it’s really hard to do, or takes lots of specialist know-how. But really, grains are just grasses. They mostly take care of themselves. And if you’re not intending to eat them (i.e. if you’re using them purely as ornamental plants at the back of your flower border, for instance) they couldn’t be simpler to grow.

It’s only come harvest time, that the insurmountable reality of work and effort kicks in: Threshing. Winnowing. Cleaning. Modern mega-farms have huge automated equipment for that. Small farms (and backyard growers like me) struggle.

After a couple of years of hand threshing my grains—most of which haven’t yet been winnowed or cleaned properly enough to actually eat…and are therefore stored in glass jars in my larder, waiting for that imaginary day when I have time to do it—I confess that last year’s rye grain didn’t get threshed at all. The ears of grain were harvested and tossed into a basket…and that’s as far as I got.

Eventually in a decluttering phase, I threw them out. I know. Tragic.

So thus ends, for now, at least, my (mis)adventures as a backyard grain grower. But it’s ok, because something way better than that is going on in the world, grain-wise.

A thrilling discovery

Thrilling if you’re a grain geek, I mean. Recently I stumbled across something wonderful, while ordering stoneground flour from my local organic flour mill. (How fortunate am I, that I can even say that phrase: My local organic flour mill. I’ve spoken of it before in these pages; a mill that’s existed since the days of William the Conqueror.)

Anyway, they’re now carrying something called True South West flours. It’s a combo of heritage and modern population wheat varieties, including YQ population wheat. I’ve grown YQ wheat in my garden. It’s absolutely gorgeous, vibrant and bursting with vitality and goodness.

Of all the types of grain I was growing side by side, it was the harvesting of the YQ wheat that most upset the blackbirds. They perched on nearby branches and yelled at the tops of their little lungs in outrage, as I took away their absolute favorite snack. (I did leave them some. But not nearly as much as they wanted.)

Anyway, these True South West flours are grown and milled locally by small farmers and millers, all of whom are part of something called the South West Grain Network. The Network’s stated ethos lit up my soul:

“We are an alternative, human-scale, non-commodity grain economy grounded in friendship and collaboration,” they wrote. “A food system must be more [about] values other than price and quantity.

Collaboration, friendships & trust – these are the currency of a human-scale food system. [And] food sovereignty isn’t just about empowering farmers to make their own choices; it also means widening access to healthy, nutritious food networks.”

I promptly joined that network.

Know your farmer

A couple of weeks ago, Steve and I attended a South West Grain meetup at a farm around 1.5 hours from here. Fred (photo, left) of Gothelney Farm is one of the main instigators behind this beautiful network. I believe that’s Mum and Dad standing with him.

It pissed with rain that day, nevertheless 70 farmers, millers, bakers and grain geeks like me showed up to sit on hay bales in an open barn for 6 hours in the butt-freezing February cold. (At midday there was a phenomenally good lunch, plus coffee breaks with gorgeous baked goods supplied by an on-site bakery…so it wasn’t exactly a hardship to be there.)

The love and respect, the desire to support each other in collaborative problem solving for the good of everyone in the group? It felt radical.

This is a group—one of several, I’m told, springing up all around the UK—determined to simply turn its back on the soullessly anonymous, cut-throat playing field of the bigger-is-better commodity grain market.

It’s a group intent on reconnecting ordinary people with the small scale local farmers who produce their food. Real food, not hyper-processed commodity food. A group that really cares about offering quality organic products, at a fair price for farmers as well as consumers.

A group engaged in regenerative farming practices, who care about longterm soil health and beautifully diverse ecosystems.

The Anti-Bill Gates, in other words.

There’s a whole lot more to this story. But for right now I’ll just say that stumbling upon this network of like-minded hearts has been a dream come true: An all-ages community of people soundly rejecting business as usual…and instead actively engaging together to create the beautiful new world they wish to see.

Count me in.

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BIG difference.

Forest gardens (AKA food forests), if you don’t know, are gardens carefully designed to mimic natural forest spaces, but are composed of well-chosen trees, shrubs and plants that, among other things, maximize year-round harvests.

Our garden does not mimic Nature. It IS Nature. Nature on a roll; Nature on a bender; Nature galloping wherever the hell it wants to go, while we stand and watch in horrified admiration.

So yes. This update, as promised, will indeed be full of humble thanksgiving. But before I tell you about all of that, here’s a realistic, and not terribly thankful assessment of where it’s been.

This garden has been (and still is) such an over-the-top, dauntingly deer-in-the-headlights undertaking, that all through the fall and winter we’ve been half an inch from just...walking away. From all the hard work and investment. Walking away from all the successes and plentiful failures.

Much as we adore this crazy-wonderful plot of land, we’ve teetered on the razor-edge brink of finally admitting defeat: Nature wins. Human caretakers lose. Pack up those secateurs and g’wan home.

Some of that relentless sense of impossibility is due to the ‘new normal’ weather patterns: Near constant driving rain, coupled with gale force winds. Most days, the land is afloat. To tramp around with wheelbarrows, trying to get any serious work done out there, would only cause pointless damage to the waterlogged soil. Plus of course, that’s just a cold, wet, all-round shitty way to spend a day. And really, who wants that.

The other sisyphean task (well beyond our feeble ability to perform it), is the holding back of Nature’s unbridled growth. That’s an issue everywhere in the garden, but at this particular moment, most pressingly, it’s all about the willows.

I’ve written at length about the willow trees before. How they’re actually pioneer weeds. How each tree grows up to 10 feet in a single season. How their roots can easily travel 15 feet or more underground, to rob nearby raised beds of their moisture and nutrients. And how, unless coppiced or pollarded in regular rotation, a willow only lives for a few years before decaying and dying from the inside out.

(And yes, I’ve also written about the many useful gifts willows bring: Basketmaking materials. Natural rooting hormone. Natural pain killer. Natural windbreaks. Natural flood mitigation. Winter pollen for the bees. And of course, plentiful firewood and woodchip. Like everything else in the Half Wild garden, they’re a genuine blessing...but a very mixed one.)

We did not know any of this, in our first few seasons here in the garden. By the time we figured out what they were like, those cute 6 ft. (recently coppiced) trees had become towering 26 ft. trees, which made alarming creaking noises in the wind. Did I mention the gale force gusts we’re getting nowadays?

So what we’ve got here, 5 years on, are many dozen elderly willow trees, much too tall for us to cut easily or safely. And many of them have lost big heavy branches in this year’s storms. Deadwood that’s splintered and toppled sideways--but has fallen high up into the next tree, in such a way that it’s impossible for us to remove.

This past summer (a summer almost entirely without sunshine), it dawned on us that this garden is turning itself back into a wooded forest. Plants that enjoy growing in sun—like, uh, all the fruits and veg that we’re trying to produce out there, along with all the wild, sun-loving plants of Nature—were starting to die out. Replaced by shade-loving wild plants.

On those rare, blue-ish sky sunny days, the surrounding fields would all be bathed in full sun...but thanks to those plentiful willows, the entire garden dwelt in perpetual shade. And was several degrees cooler than everywhere else nearby.

So that’s the basic state we found ourselves in. Endlessly behind the curve, hopelessly trying to hold back the encroaching forest, while dodging raindrops to attempt to do some, like, actual gardening now and then.

The astonishing gift of Lloyd

I wrote about Lloyd the first time he came to help us out in the garden. The pluses and minuses of his eternally cheerful and frighteningly unstoppable work ethic.

A handful of other volunteers have come and gone, and bless ‘em all for trying to put a microscopic dent in the chaos. But Lloyd has taken on the rescue of this garden (and its 2 hapless gardeners) as a personal mission. And over time we’ve slowly learned how to better deploy him, in ways that work for us, as well as for the land.

He comes once a week, rain and shine, refusing any kind of reciprocation beyond the occasional sharing of an abundant harvest. I’ve taken to baking the nicest treats I can think of for our tea breaks, as that’s a ritual he enjoys and allows.

With Lloyd’s help I’ve cleared all the raised beds, and as of this date I’ve mulched approximately 2/3 of them with a protective layer of our own homemade compost. Nearly all set, in other words, for Spring planting. It almost feels like a miracle. Like a glimmer of light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Speaking of that glimmer of light: For the first time in ages, actual sunlight is starting to filter into the garden again.

There’s Lloyd with a hard hat. Lloyd with a chainsaw. Lloyd humming tunes as he works alongside Steve, to cut out most of the deadwood from the first two lines of willows. (There are 6 or 7 long stands of windbreak willows on this property. But only 4 of these stands actively shade the garden.)

All hands on deck, and waaaay too much wood for me to process into logs or woodchip. Besides which, most of it is entirely dead and fairly rotten—not much good for burning. Therefore after much discussion, we’ve decided to start a few dead-hedges around the borders.

Not the designer kind of dead-hedges that you might see featured in eco-responsible garden magazines. Nope, nothing that artful. These are just rustic, somewhat carefully tangled branches, forming long natural walls. In very short order they’ll be covered with ivy, bramble, nettle, honeysuckle and cotoneaster, turning them into living green hedges—because that’s what Nature does around here. But with that protective interior log structure, these dead-hedges will offer ideal year-round homes for hedgehogs and loads of other kinds of critters. Win-win.

And maybe it’s just me? But I think they’re rather beautiful just the way they are. Even without their soon-to-be cloak of greenery.

And yesterday Steve surprised me with my own baby-sized chainsaw. (The real ones are way too big and heavy for me.) Aww, ya shouldn’t have.

But it means I’m now able to get in there on the days when Lloyd’s not here and Steve is otherwise occupied with, uh, actual paying work. And I can start to reduce those massive piles of logs into firewood. All by myself.

It’s yet another activity I can add to the long list of stuff I never dreamed I’d be doing in life.

So all in all I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about being able to garden in the garden, for the first time in a long time. And so immensely thankful for the unearned gift of Lloyd.

How does one say thank you for a blessing so needed, so life-changing, so unimagined and impossible-seeming that it would’ve never even occurred to us to pray for it? An astonishing gift that is offered so cheerfully and without pricetag?

We’re so blessed. And yes, so full of thanksgiving. I was kidding about the pumpkin pie...although…

...It could definitely happen.

Maybe for the next tea break.

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Take the tale of our newest friend, Homer the homing pigeon. He undoubtedly lives in a town or city someplace; his handler regularly releases him, likely for racing purposes.

But recently in his travels, Homer discovered our magical little oasis and decided he rather likes it here, stopping off for weeks at a time, enjoying the amenities before eventually heading for home.

A bit unclear, perhaps, on the concept of racing.

Curiously he’s shy about entering the garden itself (which is why I assume he’s a city bird) but hangs out in the gravel yard just outside the gate. Steve being Steve, he’s created a special little feeding station in the yard just for Homer—and anybody else who doesn’t mind the cars and gravel. And cats.

And then there’s the family of house martens who built their lovely little mud nest just above the rather low, double workshop door of a taciturn guy named Chip, who restores kayaks here at the farm estate.

Chip will do just about anything to avoid your eye, and generally finds it painful to even say hello. (But ask him about his passion for kayaks and he lights up like a golden sunbeam, instantly becoming friendly and downright talkative. And then the next time you see him, he’s back to avoiding your eye.)

Steve warned him about the nest, in case he hadn’t seen it. Chip lit up as if Steve had asked him about kayaks. Yes, he knew all about it, he said, and last season after the martens had gone, he’d even built a tiny supporting shelf underneath the nest to protect it.

The nest being where it is, means Chip is unable to get all but one of his kayaks in or out the door without disturbing the babies. So he simply doesn’t.

He feels blessed, he says, to have the martens here. And so he happily rearranges his life’s passion (and his paying work), for the brief months of their stay.

Aren’t people amazing. You never know where you’ll stumble upon golden sunbeams in the unlikeliest of places.

And now the farewell bit

I have such fun writing this Substack, but here’s the thing. Despite all the helping hands we’ve had recently, the half wild garden is still in an overwhelmingly ridiculous state right now.

Recently I’ve had little choice but to conclude that talking about what it takes to care for the land, is sadly not the same thing as actually doing it. (I know. Bummer.)

So I’m taking a hiatus from writing about our life in the garden, to spend more actual time working in the garden. Because each one of these posts takes me at least a day (and sometimes two) to write. And at this moment I’m needed more, out on the land.

If you’re subscribed to both of my Substacks, never fear, the main newsletter will continue as it always has. And if you’ve generously gifted me back for this Substack by taking a paid subscription (thank you!), your subscription has been paused until such time as I start writing again.

And I do intend to start writing again. After it gets just, y’know, a little less crazy out there. Whenever that is.

In the meantime, take good care of yourself, and thanks for reading.

Love, Carrie

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The garden has grown massively more productive, and also massively more out of control, since then. Yet our daydreams of receiving help to care for the space, remained just that. Wishful imaginings.

Everybody loves that garden—who wouldn’t? Step through the gate and your soul is instantly refreshed. It’s that kind of place.

But friends who had the time to help, weren’t all that interested in gardening. (Perhaps that’s why they had so much free time to begin with.) And those who loved to garden were always busy tending to their own.

This summer, as I’ve said recently in these pages, we’d just about reached the burn. That moment of throwing in the secateurs and calling it quits. Because over the last couple of years, Nature has grabbed the reins from our hands, sending the garden on a breakneck gallop toward reknowing itself as woodland.

But recently something shifted in the ethers. All of a sudden we’ve received 16 potential offers of help. Two of those offers came from professional gardeners. 15 of them came from deeply spiritual folk who are in tune with (and therefore respectful of) the brilliant intelligence of Nature. One of those offers came from our friend Lloyd.

Interesting story about Lloyd. He was a professional landscape gardener until a couple of years ago when this happened: He was up high on one of those very stable tripod ladders, manicuring a client’s tall hedge, when without warning he blanked out. The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. No memory of dizziness, no memory of falling.

Right around the same time there was an odd little spate of similar ladder accidents in the news. People blanking out without warning, and coming to on the ground.

Anyway, Lloyd. Extremely lucky to not be paralyzed. Several months of dreadfully painful physio exercises later, (and a couple of inches shorter than before) he’s more or less back to his hale and heartily unstoppable self.

In that time-honored cliche of prematurely enforced retirement, Lloyd has been driving his wife completely mad as he dangles around the house looking for useful and productive things to do. Recently in desperation she texted us:

“Could Lloyd come over and help you with your garden?”

(If you listen closely, you’ll hear the angels singing, there.)

Lloyd came yesterday. We were completely unprepared for his energy level and enthusiasm for the work. We’d decided beforehand to give him a large mess of a winter veg bed that had yet to be cleared: A tangle of 6 ft. chard plants gone to seed, many of which had fallen over onto the potato and red cabbage plants underneath—all of which were, by now, festooned with long strands of bindweed, sticky willy, and the odd nettle here and there.

We figured that would be his main job for the day, interrupted by multiple cups of tea and chats about life. By the time I arrived in the garden around 9:45, that bed was completely empty, but for 2 surprisingly good looking red cabbage survivors. He even dug the little potatoes from the ground while he was at it.

Over the next few hours he kept at it, with the energy of at least 4 people. We used JimBob (the hand-powered antique chaff cutter) to frantically process his first dozen barrow loads of greenery, before switching in desperation to The Red Thing.

The Red Thing comes out of retirement once or twice a season. Steve uses it when clearing large areas of deceased nettles, thistles etc. He wheels it out to whichever area he’s working on; it instantly shreds great volumes of pre-cut garden waste, spitting it back out directly onto the land from which it was taken.

(We would dearly love to be able to tend this garden without the use of motorized equipment. There is a famous and very inspiring permaculture farm in France called Bec-Hellouin, where they use only human and animal-powered equipment in their highly productive crop farming. They also use no plastic: Tubs and baskets are all woven from reed or willow. Pots are presumably all ceramic. I love that Bec-Hellouin exists. I don’t know how the fuck they do what they do.)

Anyway. Lloyd. He started clearing an area behind brassica cage #1 that used to be a productive growing space, but had slowly turned itself into shaded woodland a few years ago. That’s another dozen barrow loads of greenery at least.

The thing about barrows of greenery: They don’t get better with age.

They go limp and horrible, and processing them becomes much more difficult. Likewise, the human-height mound of chopped, processed greenery we were producing, there in the barn. It’ll start fermenting instantly, if left there overnight. Some of it needed to go into the compost bins asap…but that meant we needed plenty of woodchip to add to the mix.

Oh Lloyd…? Could you please thin out the line of willows that’s grown so tall and leafy this season, that they’ve completely shaded out brassica cage #2?

Why yes. Yes he could. And in what felt like mere minutes, I received a very large pile of willow branches, perfect for creating ramial woodchip. Which Forrest (our splendid wood chipper) and I dispatched with great electrically-powered efficiency, while Steve wrangled the giant mound of chopped greens.

But no time to catch one’s breath. No ma’am.

Pruning task accomplished, I spied Lloyd automatically turning back to his wilderness clearing efforts, energy undimmed in the least (unlike my own!). So I did the only sensible thing. I called a tea break.

Because, this is Britain. And, y’know, everything stops for tea.

So the 3 of us sat out in the garden like sweaty but civilized folk, and had our tea break. It was lovely out there, birds calling noisily all around us. Cats dropping by to see if, by chance, our picnic included cake. (It didn’t. Biscuits are too dry and rhubarb crumble is a bit too tart for their taste.)

And then we human picnickers all went back to work, while the cats more sensibly went to sleep on our vacated chairs.

Another friend is coming tomorrow afternoon to do some gentle and methodical detail weeding/pruning, in the more cultivated areas of the garden. And I’ll be tremendously grateful for her participation too. Indeed, I’ll be grateful for all who come to help, each in their own way, offering their own talents and sensibilities.

The beautiful flowing energy is palpable, when people gather together to work and help each other in common purpose. Don’t you think? And isn’t Nature, and the universe itself, quite amazing for bringing all of this richness to us.

Some days I’m overwhelmed by the gift of it all.

But I have to say, it’s Lloyd’s superhuman contribution—and he says he’ll come back again!—that gives me real hope. Soon this may become a half wild (as opposed to full wild) garden once more.

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Andrew, our organic farmer friend (whose compost it is currently growing in) doesn’t even know what a cannabis plant looks like, much less ever having grown, or even smoked it, for that matter. So the chances of a wayward seed falling into his compost, lying there for a year or two, hitching a tractor ride from there to our garden, and then sprouting in our potato bed, seem fairly remote.

Until, that is, you enter the miraculous world of the soil food web and start poking around.

Last Sunday we attended a Rhizophyllia workshop with Eddie Bailey, the delightful soil scientist I recently babbled about with such great enthusiasm. In his joy at sharing what he knows, he manages to shrink us all down to the microscopic level, where we experience the staggering intelligence of Nature’s incredibly elegant systems at work.

He takes us on a journey through the vast communication network between a seed and the multitudes of natural bacteria that are coating it—and the even grander communication superhighway between those bacteria and the world they encounter beyond themselves.

Sunlight. Temperature. Water. Air. Nutrient availability. All are registered by the seed’s bacterial coating, and if there seems a decent chance of survival, they advise the seed (through chemical signals) to go for it. If not, the seed can stay dormant indefinitely until conditions change.

Somewhere, sometime, not necessarily on that organic farm, a cannabis plant (or a careless human) dropped a seed…and it patiently waited for the bacterial ‘go’ signal, to try its luck in my potato patch.

Making compost for the soil food web

Everything Eddie teaches is based upon the scientifically demonstrable recognition that Nature’s systems are already perfect; and that soil contains a ridiculous overabundance of every possible nutrient a plant could ever want.

All of that natural goodness just needs to be transformed into a form the plant can make use of. And that transformation is accomplished by a healthy population of microscopic critters—the aforementioned soil food web.

Our Rhizophyllia workshop was all about compost…specifically compost teeming with healthy microbes. How to make it; when to use it; and why there’s never any point in buying bags of commercial compost.

(Hint: High heat sterilization kills weed seeds, yes, but also every healthy microbe. On top of which, plastic bags of lifeless soil matter encourage anaerobic bacteria to proliferate. Which is not really what you’re after.)

He demonstrated the 3 compost making methods he uses in his own extremely lovely gardens.

1. The Johnson Su method, a large volume heap which gets nicely warm but never hot, as it turns itself into compost over a several month period.

2. A correctly—one might say obsessively—managed thermophilic heap, which gets stonkingly hot…yet not SO hot that any of the soil life is killed off. This one takes only a few short weeks from start to finished compost.

3. And finally the kind of heap most of us think of when we picture a compost heap, albeit a carefully monitored, and frequently torn apart and turned over/reassembled version. This one contains garden waste, kitchen scraps and chopped up ‘brown’ (carbon rich) stuff, in a general ratio of 4-5 parts brown to 1 part (nitrogen rich) green. Way less nitrogen than we’ve been adding to ours, by the way. Which explains a lot.

The Johnson Su and thermophilic heaps are both composed of around 40% ramial wood chip, and the remainder is hay cut from his own lovely wildflower meadow, dried and rehydrated just before use. (Or in lieu of meadow hay, he sometimes buys in dried alfalfa, the kind that’s used as horse feed.)

He feeds his soil monthly, all year round, with one or the other of these composts. In between, he makes extremely simple extracts: A handful of compost into a bucket of water, which is then agitated for a couple of minutes to release the microscopic critters off the soil bits and into the water. And then the plants are watered immediately with it.

This is not a plant feed; it’s a root drench to boost the microbial activity in the soil directly around the plant. He never feeds or fertilizes a plant, and he never weeds or disturbs the soil. If a weed is getting too big, he just cuts it down. All other weeds stay in place, doing their bit to protect and nourish the microbes in the soil.

Pretty simple, eh?

We’ve seen his composts under the microscope, and they’re teeming with healthy life. Bacteria, amoebas, flagellates, nematodes, fungal hyphae and more. (We’ve also seen our own composts under the microscope. Not so much.)

When all those busy little fellows live and die, eat and get eaten, these are the processes that turn all of the abundantly preexisting soil nutrients into bioavailable nourishment for plants. The plants, in turn, send out chemical signals on their root hairs, to invite and attract more of the tiny critters to themselves, to ensure plenty of good eats for all concerned.

The science behind it all—offering a window, as it does, into Nature’s elegant systems—is awe inspiring. But the real proof is in Eddie’s garden. Everywhere you look are strong, sturdy plants brimming with vitality.

We strolled around, admiring his pond and meadow, his orchard and flower and veg gardens. I remarked on how few of his plants had been nibbled by slugs—I’ve lost dozens of plants to slugs this year, in this nearly-constant rainy season.

‘Oh, I don’t have slug problems,’ he answered.

(I gasped.)

‘Soil nematodes eat slug eggs,’ he explained with a smile. ‘I have a few slugs here and there, but they never get out of balance.’

Damn. I’ll tell you what, I was already plenty excited about the possibility of bringing our soil back into peak natural health, with his methods.

But this news? It definitely seals the deal.

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There wasn’t much to look at, in there. A washer/dryer, some woodworking equipment. A car.

From my current vantage point, I’m amazed at how rarely I bothered to drive a whole 10 minutes, to take that same brisk walk along a beautiful California beach.

Usually deserted, but for the odd dog walker or sand runner. Free parking and easy access. Cappuccinos across the street in the marina, even, if one was in need of a designer coffee afterward.

Not exactly a hardship commute, in other words.

Although I’m not terribly far from the (cold, gray pebbly) Atlantic coast nowadays, warm sandy beaches are something one would have to travel distances by plane, to experience. Oh, for a 10 minute car ride instead.

Anyway.

Skiing would’ve been alittle more difficult to arrange in that sunny beach town, but a short hike in the nearby hills would’ve offered a similar exercise effect. With the added interest of possible bobcat encounters and stuff.

But no. None of that was as convenient as my own garage—a half hour of me-time, squeezed in between work and making dinner.

Many (most?) self-employed people are understandably more motivated than I was, to get out of the house, in pursuit of that exercise. Biking, swimming. Yoga classes. Places with fresh air, or at least other people. Me, I preferred efficiency.

But I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about, here. Whether you do or don’t exercise regularly, whether you like exercising alone or in groups, whether you do it indoors or out…we all know how physical movement (and a change of scene, even one with a washer/dryer in it) clears away the cobwebs, after a day spent staring at a computer screen. Not to mention the health and fitness thing. And then of course there’s the whole business of weight management and body sculpting.

I was interested in all of the above, but especially that last bit.

Toward that end, I favored a gently aerobic, mostly lower-body workout. If the arms and shoulders received alittle benefit along the way, that was ok too. But making sure the jeans continued to fit, was my main concern.

Fast forward to now. The jeans still fit…but the shape of my world (and body) is different.

These days, as I work outdoors in the garden—the operative word here being work—I feel kind of like a visitor from another planet, when I think back to my former preference for indoor exercise equipment, and exercise for its own sake.

No judgment on any of it, not in the slightest. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s more of a melancholy that overtakes me, when I realize how removed I was, from the joys and sorrows of hard, satisfying work on the land. Work with purpose. Work that makes life rich with meaning.

Work that sculpts the body however the hell it wants to.

Present-day-me knows the priceless nature of living and working intimately with the land. But back then I very definitely preferred the convenience (and weight management practices) of my modern suburban lifestyle. A Trader Joes within walking distance—not that I ever walked there, but it was nice knowing I could—to pick up groceries for dinner. As opposed to picking groceries for dinner.

Had anyone tried to convince me back then of the noble beauty of hard labor on the land, it would’ve fallen on very deaf ears. When the growing of crops and conscious land stewardship is not at all what you’re into, the prospect of it sounds like endless drudgery with no upside.

So I get that it’s not for everybody. It certainly wasn’t for me. Not back then.

Anyway, back to the weight loss/body sculpting thing:

Most of what I do these days, exercise-wise, from shoveling horse poo to shredding nettle stalks, involves upper body musculature. Funnily enough, none of it involves lower body sculpting.

The closest thing I have to exercise equipment is JimBob, our antique human-powered chaff cutter. He provides something along the lines of a full body workout, but as you can see in the video below, it’s the arms and shoulders pushing down, and then pulling up on the rotating blades, that do nearly all of the actual work. And actual work, it definitely is.

You will be unsurprised when I say it’s the joy of working outdoors on the land itself, that makes all of this sometimes overwhelming physical labor worthwhile.

The breathtaking privilege of it. Feet on the earth. Hands in the soil. Heart and mind bathed in birdsong.

Blackbirds dig up my beds and help themselves to plump ears of still-maturing grain… but who wouldn’t melt at their exquisite song? Robins sound their chattering alarm, to scold the prowling cats; woodpeckers tap-tap-tapping, doves cooing, rooks cawing, and a dozen other species all weaving the texture of their nonstop polyphonic overture.

Meanwhile daredevil house martens swoop and dive high overhead, on the hunt for midair insects. And new this year, a cuckoo heard in the distance—quite a rare bird nowadays. (They sound just like the clocks!)

This week the willow trees have been sending out their magical drifts of summer ‘snow.’ Thousands and millions of tiny white seed puffs, glowing soft as they travel on the sunlit afternoon breeze.

Iridescent dragonflies pause to alight on pea plants in full blossom. I, in turn, pause my labors to admire their fragile beauty. And as always, underneath (and often over top of) it all, the ongoing riotous explosion of vibrant green jungle-liciousness: Unapologetic Nature in its full-throated summertime roar.

Maybe there should ideally be a balance struck, between hard, satisfying (yet relentless) work on the land, and the world of modern ease and convenience. I suppose I haven’t quite found that balance yet.

Because there are times, I confess, when hard-work-as-exercise gets alittle bit old. Or maybe it’s just me, who’s getting alittle bit old.

Nevertheless.

The outrageous gift and privilege of living and learning in Nature’s classroom never, ever, gets old.

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On a completely different note, I’ll end with this delightful (and oh-so-English) garden posy, picked for us the other day by my equally delightful (and yes, very English) sister-in-law.

Enjoy.

Sounds seat-squirmingly dull, right? Hard chairs, in a fluorescently lit village hall, and an enthusiastic scientist showing slide after slide of bacteria and protozoa at work.

Actually it was enthralling. Life-changing, in fact.

I’ll be honest. When it comes to Nature (and especially the growing of food), I don’t give much credence to the scientific community these days, bought and paid for, as they are, by big agriculture. No fault of their own, mind you; the universities that issue their degrees are funded by those selfsame industries. They learn what they’re told to learn.

This guy, even with his impeccable mainstream scientific credentials, was completely different.

As he spoke about the incredible elegance, the deep intelligence, the symbiotic (and ever-evolving) partnerships between seeds and bacteria; between roots and fungal spores; and dozens of other examples of cooperation and competition within the soil food web, he positively glowed with joy in his appreciation of Nature.

Consequently, his life’s mission has become to spread this knowledge and appreciation as widely as possible, to farmers and growers of all kinds.

His message: Nature is already perfect. All the nutrients any plant needs are already abundant in the soil—there just needs to be a way for the plants to be able to access them.

He then takes you through the science bit, explaining exactly what those nutrient molecules are, how they’re formed, and how they’re broken up by other living and dying beings in the soil, unlocking their goodness and causing it to become bio-available to the plant. (And in the process, he opens a window onto the astonishingly responsive intelligence underlying all of that.)

Science meets Spirit

If you’ve been with me for a while, you know I’ve been struggling to make sense of Japanese natural agriculture. Every DNA strand of my being knows that their overall way of approaching the growing of food in harmony with Nature, is the way forward.

Problem is, both founders of its two independent branches, arrived at their insights due to sudden spontaneous spiritual awakenings about the true essence of what Nature really is:

They saw that Nature is already perfect. They recognized that all the nutrients any plant ever needs, are already abundant in the soil. (Sound familiar?)

They saw that, for best results in growing food crops, our level of human intervention ought to fall someplace between minimal and nonexistent—yet all the while offering careful stewardship and facilitation of Nature’s processes already present and functioning.

All of this came to each of them in a flash of divine insight.

Right. It’s pretty hard for anyone to adequately describe to others, the contents of a divine insight—largely because, by its very nature, divine insight falls entirely beyond where language can go.

It’s a much higher thing; like a broadcast from way further up on the radio dial.

Divine insight is where eternal, timeless truth suddenly becomes plainly self-evident—simultaneously revealing that everything of this world which we’ve ever believed to be true, is clearly recognized as the limited, partial and/or temporary collective opinion that it really is.

Good luck describing all of that sacredness, all of that brilliant clarity, and all of that joyous perfection, to anybody whose radio is still playing the other program lower down on the dial.

So there’s that.

Add to that hurdle, the moderately insurmountable task of translating exquisitely subtle Eastern cultural contexts to an attention-deficit audience on the other side of the world…and you’ll get why I couldn’t seem to grok Japanese natural agriculture. No matter how keen I was to crack its beautiful, ephemeral secrets.

But this guy, coming at it from an entirely different science-based perspective, effortlessly opens up that door. Amazing.

I asked him afterward if he knew anything about Japanese natural agriculture, and he said no. But actually, he doesn’t need to. In his own methodical Western way of working, he’s arrived at the same core essence. The same living, beating heart of Nature itself.

Eddie’s website is called RhizoPhilia, if you’d like to check him out for yourself. Here are his own words, about that chosen name:

• RHIZO, or more fully the rhizosphere, is the microbial megalopolis of bio-geochemical alchemy surrounding and within the roots of our plants. It also refers to the myco-rhizosphere, the even more spell-binding network of fungal hyphae and partners reaching out into the soil universe, acquiring nutrients for plants…as well as knowledge!

• PHYLLIA comes from ‘phyllos,’ the Greek for leaf... I use ‘lia’ as Aristotle did, to mean friendship, because the symbiosis between plants and microbes is an essential and irreversible relationship that stretches back over a billion years – that is some marriage!

It does no more than hint at his endless enthusiasm for his subject (lots of exclamation points, there!) but it gives you a bit of an idea.

Meanwhile, I’m aware that I haven’t even begun to adequately explain the insights revealed, or to successfully communicate the joy derived from hearing him speak last evening. Or even to tell you what’s so incredibly different, on a practical level, about how one might approach the living plants in one’s care, armed with this kind of understanding.

I guess that’s how it is, when gaining sudden access to the nature of Nature—it leaves one tongue tied.

I’ll just say the puzzle pieces of natural agriculture suddenly dropped into a much more coherent picture for me, and the resulting explosion of beauty is in the process of slowly unfolding.

Possibly not the exact radio station the founders of Japanese natural agriculture had in mind, but it’s surely there somewhere in the same general bandwidth.

In a nutshell, last night is changing everything about how we garden.

Steve and I intend to follow up by studying with Eddie in person, at one of his local courses. We’re fortunate that he’s within driving distance-ish. If you’re further away (but, like me, are deeply delighted that he exists), there’s always his YouTube channel. Which is a poor substitute, but at least it gives a taste of what he’s all about.

Anyway, I’ll do my best to share what I learn, in my future posts on the subject.

In the meantime: Stay tuned, and don’t touch that dial.

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Two thirds of polyhouse #1 have been cleared and replanted with tomatoes and beets. The other third currently holds overwintered broad beans (AKA fava beans), which are finally entering their full, bountiful bean display. Several weeks and many harvests from now, those bean plants, too, will come out, to be replaced by yet more tomatoes, chilis and basil.

But until then: We’ll be feasting happily on broad bean hummus, broad bean hash, broad bean soup, broad bean salad…not to mention nibbling the young ones fresh and raw as a snack—a rare delicacy you’d never find in any grocery store.

Grateful I am, for such seasonal gifts as these.

Polyhouse #2 is half planted with tomatoes, and waiting for cucumbers to join them. And a few more outdoor beds have been planted up too. So yes, things are moving along.

Still remaining on the to-do list? Heh. It’s best not to ask.

Let’s just talk about what’s up next, or currently in the works. Brassica cage #1 is still chock full of (now gigantic) purple sprouting broccoli. All of that needs to be cleared to make room for the next crop, which will be Aztec broccoli.

And the small greenhouse…well…welcome to slug hotel #2.

Here’s the thing about clearing beds. It’s not just clearing the beds. If only it were that simple. It’s the breaking down of all that cleared plant material—in this case, carefully removing all the slugs first and depositing them elsewhere—and then chopping a commensurate amount of dry straw using Jim Bob, our trusty antique chaff cutter, to offset the amount of cut-up wet green matter. Then mixing all of that together, before adding it to the compost bins.

And then there’s the harvest, of course. Which is, after all, kinda the point of all this.

In the case of the small greenhouse, which I cleared this morning during a thunderstorm (while wearing my regular shoes—you know how much I hate wellies) it yielded three big crates of spinach plus a handful of low hanging chard leaves. And a pair of very wet shoes.

I’ll get the rest of the chard and finish clearing those greenhouse beds tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back to the harvest. Our fridge is already stuffed with beautiful chard and late-season spinach, so that means this bountiful harvest needs to be washed, cooked and frozen ASAP.

Super grateful for all of it, of course…but the above is no brief task, either. (That’ll be this evening’s project.)

All of which is why the simple job of getting a few dozen tomato and squash plants into the ground, feels as dauntingly Sisyphus-like as it does. Especially when it pees rain three or four or five times a day.

But never mind, eh. It’s good for the slugs.

Anyway, back to the spinach harvest. At this late stage, the spinach plants have been putting all their energy into flower and seed. So the leaves, although deliciously edible still, are probably not bursting with nutrient any longer. The solution? Easy.

Right outside that greenhouse door, a huge stand of nettle invaders is completely out of control. They’ve already been cut back twice this season, although you’d never know it. Thanks to all this rain (and the nutrient they’re undoubtedly stealing from underneath the greenhouse beds) their leaves are lush, vibrant and bursting with goodness.

Uninvited guests or not, who couldn’t be grateful for such an endlessly abundant gift of nature?

So I donned a pair of leather gauntlets and picked a big tray of nettle leaves, which I’ll cook together with the spinach, before freezing those beautiful nutritious bundles of greens for very welcome later use.

There’s so much to be thankful for, I was thinking as I brought the nettle tray indoors, mere moments before the next thunderstorm hit.

Furious rain hammering on metal roof, while I, warm and dry, set down my harvest and entered the kitchen where Bessie’s fire was roaring (thank you, Steve!) and the copper kettle was steaming away, prepped and ready for piping hot mugs of tea. Bliss.

There is so much to be thankful for.

I’m often taken aback, at just how blessed I am.

May you, too, have reason to stumble upon soft joy in the unlikeliest of places. Wherever you are, whatever your weather, I hope your life is showered with simple everyday gifts.

(Or rain, if you need it.)

Love, Carrie

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It’s true, we’re always playing catch up; year round, it never stops. So, being hopelessly behind the curve, as we are right now, is certainly nothing new.

Even so.

This year’s rain-hail-frost-repeat cycles have slowed everything down to such an unheard-of degree, that now with the sun suddenly shining and absolutely everything exploding with life, and several hundred seedlings all clamoring to be planted out NOW! NOW! NOW!—except oops, there are all of those winter veg beds waiting to be cleared first, before the new crops can go in…and don’t forget to move those fallen logs, and good god, the nettles have grown 2 feet overnight…and, well, sometimes the only thing to do is sit down in the (crazy overgrown) grass and laugh. Or cry. Depending on the day.

Which is why I’ve often thought, I should grow more perennial vegetables.

Because: A permanent veg plant means there’s never any bed clearance. No annual trays of new baby seedlings to keep warm through the winter chill. Plant it once in a chosen bed, and there it stays. Maybe add a little extra compost once a year; a bit of weeding, and that’s it. Bountiful veg that more or less takes care of itself, and then it’s harvest time. What’s not to like, right?

It’s a fantastic idea. In practice? Somehow it’s never been quite like that. Not for me, anyway. At least, not yet.

These days I have multiple beds (whether I want them or not) of amazingly low-maintenance perennial onion greens, which do fit the above carefree description. Except here’s the thing. A perennial onion green is basically a giant chive. In my book, that’s a garnish. A condiment. It doesn’t really qualify as food.

I want to grow perennial veg that A.) Can be harvested year round, or at least for a few solid months in a row, and B.) Is the basis of a hearty meal, not just a salad green or a spinach substitute. And C.) Is a strong, robust plant that’s low-maintenance and trouble-free. Oh, and D.) Is something I actually want to eat.

Does such a unicorn-like perennial veg plant exist? Maybe it’s out there. I’m still searching.

Daubenton kale

I thought year-round kale sounded like a splendid idea, so a few years ago I planted 3 Daubenton perennial kales. I actually wanted to plant Taunton Deane kale, also perennial—but those are highly sought after upright ‘tree’ kales, and I couldn’t find any.

The very opposite of an upright tree, Daubenton kale straggles along the ground. Which is not really what you want in a permanent brassica plant. Trust me on this.

But that tendency to flop everywhere in its journey across your other garden beds, is just one of the strikes against it.

All winter long (when fresh kale greens would be very welcome) the plants die back, only bursting into abundant leaf in late spring—when the fridge (and our bellies) are already stuffed with mountains of chard, spinach, purple sprouting broccoli and mizuna. So over the last 3 years, I’ve probably harvested a total of no more than 10 or 15 of those kale leaves.

Plus, that permanent kale bed is an epic, multi-generational slug hotel.

I haven’t had the heart to take these otherwise healthy plants out before this, but that slug situation is way out of control. So I’m thinking this will be the final season for the Daubentons. And I’ll start looking again for some slightly more unicorn-esque Taunton Deanes to replace them.

Jerusalem artichoke update

I wrote about these babies before, and at the time they seemed to tick all my perennial veg boxes.

But actually, no.

Last year we discovered that we don’t really eat nearly as many of their chunky tubers as we thought we might. A whole storage crate of them went moldy and had to be tossed. (And the many crates we sold to our friends at the organic farm shop haven’t exactly flown off the shelves either. 6 months later, they’re still trying to sell them.)

But not to worry: As it turns out, the plants themselves are not quite as insanely robust as they seemed. This year, slugs have repeatedly eaten almost every tender shoot emerging from the ground. Which means, after several fruitless tries, some of them haven’t even bothered to come up.

(The last 8 months of almost continuous rain, is what’s caused this wildly out-of-balance slug-o-rama. Combined with the protective frost netting, of course, which keeps the hungry birds and hedgehogs out of the beds, where they would otherwise do a grand job of managing the slug populations.)

Therefore, half of that ‘permanent’ Jerusalem artichoke bed has now been replanted with (annual) beets. Which we do eat.

Wild garlic

Speaking of 8 months of rain, I have a new perennial veg experiment on the go.

This has been an astonishingly good year for wild garlic around here. Hundreds and thousands of them have popped up along the hedgerows, roadsides and woodland areas. Massive clumps of them, a vast sea of beautiful bright white flowerheads cheering up an otherwise cold, damp vista.

SO abundant. No harm in taking a few, right?

A couple of weeks ago, armed with a trusty trowel, we set about vandalizing a nearby wooded area, bringing home 3 or 4 beautiful specimens to re-home in our half wild environs.

They’re hanging in there so far, slowly acclimating to their new home away from their clan.

Like most wild plants, wild garlics are notoriously finicky and opinionated about where they want to grow. But if they like their spot, they’ll become invasive, crowding out all the other weeds. Fingers crossed.

Technically these wild garlics fall into a similar category as the onion greens: Condiment. Not food. What’s more—unlike the onion greens—they give the very opposite of a year-round harvest.

On the other hand…wild garlic pesto, during its all-too-brief springtime season? Yes please. (And do I need to explain further the allure of the ‘crowding out all the other weeds’ bit? I think not.)

Anyway. Apart from all of these above-mentioned perennials, I’ve also tried growing asparagus with little success—too many aggressive weeds taking over their permanent beds—so the search for brilliant perennial veg plants continues.

If you know of any others I haven’t mentioned, that you find particularly unicorn-like? Please do say. I’m deeply interested. And in the meantime, I’ll keep looking.

Who knows, maybe someday I’ll preside over an amazingly low-maintenance and wildly abundant perennial food forest. Imagine the oodles of spare time, that would’ve otherwise been spent gardening. All the while reaping copious harvests.

I can dream, can’t I.

In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me…

…several hundred seedlings are calling.

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