A Possible World: 2021

Friday 22 October 2021

The Experiment Worked

I feel like a lot of good things are happening at the moment. Yes, I know we live in very dark times and the world is hurtling towards total ecological catastrophe in most of our lifetimes but sometimes it's worth pretending none of that matters and embracing the absurdly small pleasures of your own immediate experience. For example: the experiment worked. I left a kale plant in the soil for the second year of its natural life, and it rewarded me with an abundance of seeds. Here are some pictures of the plant's progress from spring through to summer, up to the point I was ready to harvest said abundance:

Flowers become seed pods, and seed pods fill with seeds. The plant eventually droops under its own weight, the pods turn from green to brown and begin to split open, and that's when you know they're ready for collection. It's astonishing how many seeds you get from a single plant, that grew itself from a single seed. Thousands of them. Plants really want to make sure they survive through the generations. More perhaps the humans do, which perhaps is why the have, and will outlive us. Probably.

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Thursday 18 March 2021

Kale Experiments

Many brassicas are biennials, and that includes kale, and I like kale. If you're biennial, that means you take two years to complete your life cycle: one to grow edible leaves - in the case of cabbages - and one to produce seeds. With kale being a hardy plant as well, I thought I'd let mine do their thing through the winter, to see what they might get up to in their old age. Allotmentiers don't seem to do that sort of thing very much. I don't really know why.

Here's a close-up of one of my curly kale stalks, one year old. It's sprouting all over the place. This makes me happy, and I hope it makes you happy too. What if it goes to seed and produces new edible leaves? That would be truly wonderful.

While last year's leaves have been eaten away, underneath, new life emerges. If things go according to plan, I'll never need to buy kale seeds again.

Related posts

Allotment Soup

Breakfast Smoothie Love

Back on the Allotment
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Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site. I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog. So it's really nothing to be afraid of. Cheers.

Sunday 14 March 2021

Back on the #Allotment

I declare spring.

My blackcurrant bush concurs. I'm cultivating patience this year, trying my bestest not to make the classic gardener's mistake of sowing everything all at once, far too early, at the first glimpse of spring. That being said, it now really is mid-March, so yesterday afternoon I had a good old clear out of plantable space and sowed some kale (cavolo nero) and peas.

I love how rich and healthy the soil seems to have become. I wonder sometimes if it's too heavy on compost and too light on just plain old soil, but then I remember that worms exist. Thank you, worms. My plants love you, and so do I.

It's not much to look at just yet, but I'm hoping this is the year I transform the plot into a "low work" sort of a place, upping the proportion of perennial and easy to maintain plants - herbs, comfrey, lavender, soft fruit, purple fantasy - things I can propagate and sell to cover the meager cost of the plot (£40 a year) and use whatever profit it yields to do more of the same. I achieved this last year, making a tidy £56 and change from selling cuttings on Facebook marketplace. Looking forward to more of the same this year. It's a mini-permaculture project I never seem to get round to blogging about, but briefly, the idea is for the allotment itself to be a self-sustaining "closed loop" system, materially and financially. If I can cover the cost of the rent each year and not bring in any more plants or seeds from outside unless I can acquire them for free or use profits from things sold that have been grown on the plot itself, then that's job done. It's a challenge, and a joy.

My happiest harvest over the winter was an extremely satisfying 7kg of Jerusalem artichokes, a few bags of which I gave away to colleagues, and the rest of which I pickled. If you've ever wondered what three half-gallon jars of pickled Jerusalem artichokes look like, wonder no longer because they look like this:

I've eaten maybe a third to a half of one jar since pickling just before Christmas, which by my reckoning affords me a year-round supply of crunchy snack fodder.

Plenty to look forward to.

Related posts

#permaculture: The Wonder of Cardboard

Nasturtium Pesto

Dandelion Economics

A Shed is Born

Spring on the Allotment

Comfrey and Jelly Ears

All "allotment" posts

Sunday 7 February 2021

Seasons of Sleep

I chose to believe that our ancestors had it right when it came to sleep. And that we don't. I'm talking about our distant ancestors, prehistoric. They went to bed, or whatever precursor to the modern bed as we understand it that they used, when it got dark, and stayed there until it got light again. I make no real claim to historical accuracy here: if our ancestors didn't do this, then they should have. Let's face it though, they probably did. We should do it today, and our descendants should too. It is a natural law of our apey existence.

I'm imagining ancestors living at the latitude that I do, that being Northern England, where daylight hours vary from about 8 per day in the winter to 15 per day in the summer. So what I'm proposing is quite a radical readjustment of social norms. That's fine though, let's do it.

In the winter you wake up about 8:30am, rise and carry out your morning necessities, starting your working day no sooner than 10:30. You finish around 3:30pm, and you're back in bed by 5. In summer, you're up and about by 5:00am, occupying yourself through until let's say 7:30 or 8:00pm, before retiring again for a much shorter night's sleep around half past ten. You adjust this schedule incrementally each day, all year round, in accordance with the change of the seasons and the light. Everybody does this, and it is normal.

A typical working day in prehistoric times

I accept that this is a radical proposal, and so it should be. Our society is chronically sleep-deprived. Why do we stick the same schedule of waking and sleeping all year round? Qui bono? The economy may benefit, but we do not. And what is "the economy" anyway? Why must the order of our lives be determined by this monstrous abstraction?

Everything should be adjusted to the length of the daylight hours. The working day must not be 9am - 5pm, regardless of the time of year; and neither should the school day. Night shifts may have to continue to be a thing, in hospitals and care homes, and other absolutely essential functions, but wherever possible these services should be automated and provided by robots (as, for that matter, eventually, should all unpleasant or degrading work). When it is dark, we should rest and sleep until the darkness ends, and it is as simple as that.