Summer Harvest, and Beyond.

Pineapple sage exists.

For surviving a winter that felt like it might never end, it feels like nature is rewarding is with a summer we don't want to.  It's been gloriously sunny now across the country for over two weeks - a fact to which I might have sacrificed some exotic varieties of sage (pineapple and tangerine) I acquired last weekend at the magnificent RHS Flower Show at Marlow Carr over in North Yorkshire and then leaving them in their pots on my allotment un-watered for nearly four days as I went about the tiresome business of earning a living, commuting, and sleeping.

In and amongst, I've been reading David Graeber's excellent new book, Bullshit Jobs, which feels very much like I could have written it, had I been as intelligent and brilliant as Graeber unarguably is.  Taking his cue from a 2015 YouGov survey in which it was revealed that 37% of British workers consider their own jobs to "make no meaningful contribution to the world" (a statistic which, as it turned out, was mirrored, more or less, in many other prosperous capitalist countries were comparable surveys were conducted) Graeber goes on to investigate the meaning of this remarkable phenomenon.  I've not finished reading the book yet, but it's a corker.  Cast your eye-brain system over these choice quotes:

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient Socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens...

We need to ask ourselves, not just how did such a large proportion of our workforce find themselves laboring at tasks that they themselves consider pointless, but also why do so many people believe this state of affairs to be normal, inevitable—even desirable? More oddly still, why, despite the fact that they hold these opinions in the abstract, and even believe that it is entirely appropriate that those who labor at pointless jobs should be paid more and receive more honor and recognition than those who do something they consider to be useful, do they nonetheless find themselves depressed and miserable if they themselves end up in positions where they are being paid to do nothing, or nothing that they feel benefits others in any way?

If 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labor falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term. If you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much.

And, the real clincher:

[T]hroughout human history, most people seem to have agreed both that paying back one’s debts was the essence of morality and that moneylenders were evil. While the rise of bullshit jobs is a comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar moral embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract. (“We can’t just give poor people handouts! Then they won’t have any incentive to look for work!”) On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends to contradict these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and react to situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would predict. The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials, these theories about human nature are wrong. 

Shove that up your Milton Friedman.  Or, in the words of Boris Johnson, "fuck business".  (Or fuck 37% of business, anyway).  So what if Brexit (whatever that is) completely collapses the economy?  It's hard to see why that would really be such a negative, in the long run.

Anyway, enough politics, let's talk plants.  Plants are more important.  Having celebrated my first self-sufficiency milestone just about a week ago, today I reached another.  You see, it's late June and early July, which means that it's potato time.  The stalks on the plants sown at the end of March are yellowing and dropping, which means:

So it is that today I'm tucking into my first full, cooked, homegrown meal.  Not mere sandwiches this time, but meat (by which I mean veg) and...three veg.  Roast potatoes, with boiled broad beans and peas, and sautéd (or added to the potatoes for the last five minutes of their roasting, whatever you call that) outer kale leaves (which may or may not have bolted).  Sprinkled generously with home-dried sage.  A vegan feast!  Evidence:

Delicious, and nutritious.  The broad beans were a highlight.  I've been saving most of them to dry, but I'm starting to think this may have been a mistake.  Still, I recently learned that June is actually a great time to plant more beans, so as I've been stripping the broad ones away, I've been sowing some beans of the borlotti variety in their place.  They germinated almost immediately.

Garlic sown in autumn is finally ready.  Some came out purple, some came out white, and who can fathom why?  Even the blackcurrants are ripening.

As I pick and gather, my thoughts turn to next year, and how much more potential my allotment still holds.  I'm still using less than half of the potential growing space, but I'm curious to try more intensive methods of generating free food - for instance, a potato tower, which is exactly what it says it is.  Onwards and upwards!

Related posts

Home Grown Sandwiches
The Decline and Fall of Clarence Park's Sensory Garden
Go to Bed
Mundane Freedoms

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