Urban Guerrilla

It started with conkers. Ever since the invention of string, it seems, people like Lunchista fils have collected conkers every autumn, threaded them on string, striven to make them as indestructible as posible (by means fair or foul) and smashed them into each other.

Academics have recently pieced together the story of the invention of string, or at least, why it caught on so rapidly. As the ice-age tightened its grip on our ancestral landscape, the cave-family who were able to use a sharp bone and some string to piece together their furs to a more figure-hugging shape, including new-fangled luxuries such as shoes, obviously had a life-enhancing piece of technology worth sharing. It's interesting to speculate that the existance of patents in those early days would probably have done for the human race.

Meanwhile, as the more serious-minded family members stitched together their winter survival kit, some bored five-year-old was probably experimenting with the head-bashing potential of one of granny's pieces of this new-fangled string stuff with a nut threaded on the end...on his little sister's head. The family's continued survival thus rested on the invention of the game of conkers as a substitute activity. But I digress.

What usually happened at Chateau Lunchista was that the conkers would be collected all right, but then just thrown round the garden and forgotten about...until nature took its course and small horse-chestnut trees started appearing everywhere. Lunchista dug them up and put them into pots. They were later joined by some stray Hazels, grown from nuts that had gone past their "use-by".

Then a suitable road-verge appeared: people kept veering off it in their trucks and demolishing, over and over again, the same piece of wall. We thought a hedge might be a better bet, keeping the HGVs off the wall, while also providing a softer landing. So the trees got planted out in front of the wall. That gave Lunchista a taste for that kind of thing.

Hazels and rose-hips (the big fat irregularly-shaped type) spilled out onto the path from the station to my previous workplace. They all came home, got planted, and are now growing in our garden. The lawn under an oak tree at Castle Howard was covered in acorns when we visited one day last autumn. Erm, then it wasn't: some of them are in the loo-rolls in the picture, and some took off last year. Planting them out is the difficult bit. It hasn't stopped me from collecting more seeds of various sorts, though.

It took ages before I could find a place that isn't mowed, dug over or napalmed with weed-killer on a regular basis. I had to content myself with lobbing apple-cores and plum-stones (dozens and dozens of them, from fruit from the orchard) out of the car window if our trips took us along country lanes.

Until the day, just over a month ago, when I spotted a perfectly good gap in a hedge. It was just the right time of year too.

So I loaded a potted oak sapling into a JJB bag (and covered it with another bag), stuck in a trowel and set off, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody's at work. Getting from the path to the chosen place was a pain: it was full of nettles! I also noticed how loud a carrier-bag can be, and how long it can (seem to) take to get a plant out of a pot. I'd picked a place that looked as though it had a nice view: that way, if people happened to come by I could pretend to be looking at something. This came in handy when 2 joggers hove into sight.

I quickly dug a hole, stuffed the contents of the plant-pot in, pushed a load of dead weed stems over the patch of bare soil, trod it down a bit, picked up my stuff and scarpered. It poured with rain that night, so hopefully the tree got a good start. It's also bang up against a wire fence, so no strimmers or accidental boots.

A month on and not only has the neighbouring path been completely mown (missing my tree) but floods have come, and washed a load of old twigs over it. It looks as if I'd picked a good place: the tree's neither been strimmed down nor washed away.

Nearby is a huge old apple tree that probably escaped from somebody's orchard. It dropped hundreds, possibly thousands, of little apples. Not much good for eating, but brilliant as "seed bombs". They are now scattered in the brambles all along the path, among the nettles along the edge of a nearby field, and in the long grass the strimmers have missed under a fence along the main road South out of the city. Of course apple seeds don't usually "grow true" but even so, they'll still produce fruit of some kind, or at the very least grow into trees and improve the landscape.

On my way back, I also got rid of two stuffed pockets full of beech nuts. They are lining a verge between the road and a field, currently under water, where 700 houses are to be built. It turns out that Lunchista is in good company: Admiral Collingwood (Nelson's second-in-command at Trafalgar, no less), thinking about the need for timber in the future, used to plant acorns wherever he could.

Barking? Possibly. But who would you rather put in charge of your future: Admiral Collingwood, or someone who'd arrange to build 700 houses on a flood plain?

Interlude

Here's a little something I've put together for people who are too busy to sit and watch their sunflowers come out. I hope it brightens up somebody's Monday!

The Bees' Knees

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.

Time to move the Strawberry plants

Been putting the strawberry runners into their own pots. I wonder what they get up to when nobody's looking...

Investment Strategies

I used to have savings. They used to live in a building society in which, quietly and without drama, they did their stuff. Then the building society got eaten by a larger building society. Then the resulting combo turned into a bank (and handed Lunchista a few shares, which were promptly flogged off). Then that bank merged with another bank, and just this year, in a move that made headlines, the resulting bank-combo was bought out by a bank whose services Lunchista had been studiously avoiding using for years.

It all looked a bit like that video game in which you're a fish and you get bigger by eating smaller fish, while trying not to get eaten by a bigger fish in your turn. Good job I'd long since taken the money and run.

And now for something completely different. A few months ago the Yorkshire Post was offering free organic seeds. Talk about an Offer I Can't Refuse! The new front bed at Chateau Lunchista is now full of Purple Broccolli, Sunflowers and Beetroots. For once I must be doing something right, because they're all enormous. And, might I add, tax-free. The beetroots are called "Detroit". In an effort at Cold War reconciliation, we dug them up and made Borsch.

It's dead easy. Get four beetroots, chop off the roots and the leaves (leave a couple of inches of the stems), wash them, put in a big pan (about 2 litres or 3 pints) of water and bring to the boil. Now either simmer it for an hour, or get a box full of crumpled newspaper, carefully put the pan in, put more newspapers around it and close the flaps, leave it and go to work for the day (or sleep for the night). Return to find nicely-stewed soft beetroots in purple liquid. Lift the beetroots out, grate them back into the purple liquid, add salt and heat up again. Serve poured over diced cucumbers (and diced boiled eggs for a more substantial dish), with a spoonful of Smetana (or plain yogurt) on the top. You can eat it hot in the winter (and make it even more substantial by putting in any scraps of cooked meat you happen to have) or chilled in the summer.

Hell's Kitchen (and how to avoid it)

I don't know if this happens to anyone else but hot weather kills my appetite stone dead. Then after eating next-to-nothing all day I wonder where all my energy has gone (well Duh!, as a passing American would say). If it's difficult to eat, it's even harder to cook, so what's been happening in the Lunchista kitchen of late, and more to the point where have all the lunch ideas gone? Some of us are getting quite hungry out here!

This is what we do in hot weather. In fact, in 2003 when it was ludicrously hot for a ridiculous length of time, we carried on like this for weeks. A family from the Continent were staying so there were eight of us altogether, which made for a great atmosphere.

We have an ancient wooden dining table (the sort that folds down so it hardly takes up any room when not in use) that we bought from somebody's garage for a tenner. We sanded it down and varnished it with "does exactly what it says on the tin", making it almost completely resistant to food stains, burns, and the English summer weather. If sanding isn't your bag, the alternative is a couple of yards of wipe-clean plastic to use as a tablecloth. Thus protected, the table stayed outside all summer, making every meal a delightful garden experience. Anything that fell off it onto the lawn neither broke nor needed sweeping up. Heaven.

We made salads. Not limp lettuce and quartered tomatoes with a bit of salad cream type salad: this is hard-core. First, for the meal's energy, salad spuds with parsley and chives from the garden, plus dill pickles and yoghurt. Then a dish for protein, bean salad (a cupful of blackeye beans tipped into the water in which you've just boiled your breakfast egg, and left there to soak, will only need cooking for 20 minutes or so before lunch), then add, well, anything: peppers, tomatoes, sweetcorn, nuts...

And one for colour: grated beetroot and feta cheese (half-and-half) with some walnuts.

We found lettuce tastes a lot less limp if it just has lemon juice on it. And Lunchista has discovered that strawberries go really well with Wensleydale.

Finally, glasses of wine, and a huge jug of lemonade (thank you, The Homely Year, because I didn't have the presence of mind to get a photo of ours...), or just water with lemon slices in it: Lunchista can't drink just wine in that heat. Some people keep boxes of sliced lemon in the freezer for emergencies.

It is a curious fact of life that people will have better apetites if presented with lots of different dishes and just left to get on with it while chatting, than if there's just one heavy course. Some of our lunches, with the addition of tea and cakes, lasted through until the early evening. By which time the weather had cooled down enough to get the barbeque out...

Compost Mentis

All this talk of the humble loo-roll being elevated to the position of moral barometer of the nation (at this point my Editor is warning me of the dangers of being too verbose) reminds me of a recent, and very entertaining, lunchtime. But how I got there is a bit of a tale. Bear with me...

About this time of year two years ago, I was on a train North of here, which took me through grain farming country: to be more specific, bare fields in the spring (pedantic note: technically it is still spring until the longest day). There had been driving rain all night, but the wind had finally blown it all away and the sun was shining on the newly-ploughed fields. The rain may have gone but the wind had unfinished business. In field after field, I could see a sort of earthy spindrift blowing from the crests of each ploughed ridge, forming faint brown clouds which billowed away, presumably into the North Sea. No photographic equipment was available, so I'm afraid readers of this blog will just have to slum it with a picture of part of Chateau Lunchista's loo-roll-tube hoard (we use them for planting beans in).

Now I am no farmer, but I have a vicarious interest in other people's farms because their produce, by a long and tortuous route, eventually becomes my lunch. And so I began to wonder, is it possible to run out of soil? Which is how I ended up on the mailing list of The Rotters, who do what they can to promote things like composting.

An email came through asking if anyone could donate loo-roll tubes, so I took our hoard round to Rotter HQ. It transpired that they had arranged for a stall at a schools' science festival, and parts of the rota needed extra hands, so I took lunchtime on the opening day. Groups of 20 or so children came and sat at our tables, on which we had deployed all the kit: compost caddies (full), scissors, sellotape, newspaper, and loo-rolls.

We had exactly 20 minutes to explain what compost is, then on to how to cut, fold and tape up the loo-rolls into miniature plant-pots, help everybody do this (without mistakes), watch them fill the little pots up with compost, put a sunflower seed in each, show how they could be wrapped with newspaper so that they could be taken home without spilling compost everywhere (again without mistakes), before finally handing out information sheets about compost and the care of sunflowers, waving cheerio to everybody, tidying up and setting out the next lot of kit. You couldn't hang about.

I might as well mention the backdrop for all this worthy activity: we were in the cavernous main hall of the city's Railway Museum. Great for a bit of trainspotting, not so hot for being able to hear yourself think. Since Teacher was therefore out of earshot (but not out of sight) we could have a bit of a laugh. Swapping the scissors for the left-handers: "All the best people are left-handed: President Obama, Prince William, Napoleon..." Describing how to wrap up the little tubes became "Imagine you're wrapping up a bottle of gin for your granny for Christmas" (well it could have been worse: it could have been a Molotov), and of course someone, inevitably, asked about slugs. "Oooh yes, you get great big fat ones, you have to keep them off your sunflower" "How d'you do that, Miss?" "You go out at night after it's been raining, you find them and you squash them with a brick!" Lots of people asked if you got bugs of various sorts in compost: it could get quite graphic. Ever noticed you can get a lot of kudos from a ten-year-old for that kind of thing?

Apart from trying to out-gross me (and not succeeding!), the kids were actually quite well-behaved. They seemed to enjoy making their little sunflower Molotovs and were perhaps even relishing the prospect of nagging their parents about composting when they got home. There was no swearing or lobbing great fistfuls of compost into the delicate inner workings of the Flying Scotsman. Lunchista would make a terrible teacher though: I'm just incorrigible!

The Eco-Slob School of Design

The afternoon sun is glinting on freshly-fallen rain, Lunchista had a particularly successful slug-blitz a few nights ago (and none have been spotted since), and it's the last sliver before new moon. Perfect. So what better time to share with you Lunchista's delight on discovering that an awful lot of this seed-planting lark, together with the ensuing angst about whether they'll come up (and why they don't), is completely and utterly unnecessary?

Welcome to the wonderful world of Permaculture ("Permanent Agriculture"), a way of designing landscapes of all sizes (and by extension, anything else) in such a way that Nature does most of the work so you don't have to! I stumbled across the term quite some time ago, but it has to be said that since then the parts of Chateau Lunchista's garden given over to it are doing rather well.

Now Permaculture does assume that you have quite a lot of time on your hands, at least initially, because you are asked to walk around (or sit and watch) your landscape and notice what's going on. Where do some areas naturally start and finish (e.g. dry parts, shady parts, parts frequented by any local wildlife...), and within each of these, what kind of plant (or weed, if you haven't planted anything yet) does well, and what struggles, gives up the ghost or is completely absent?

It almost sounds like cheating, but really it's best to plant the kind of thing you know is going to do well, and forego the kind of plant that's going to struggle. We started off with herbs, planting them near the door so there are the nice scents as you come out, oh and so you don't have to pick your way across a soggy lawn in the rain just to get some thyme for the spag bol. Those nice scents scare off various pests, so you can borrow herb plants and put them next to things that would otherwise suffer: all the little roses in our garden have chives as companions, to keep off the greenfly. There are a lot of "things that grow like weeds" which are actually useful: mint, strawbs, hazel, lemon-balm...

There are tactics such as thinking "upwards" if there's not much room in your landscape, or mimicking the seven height layers of a forest (Canopy, trees, shrubs, herbacious, ground-cover, roots, and climbers as shown in the illustration nicked from Spiralseeds: thanks guys!) if there is. So the Lunchista garden now has trees and shrubs. For the dosh-conscious, I might add that the phrase "mature garden" looks good on estate-agents' blurb.

The real hard-core like to take things which would otherwise be rubbish and turn them into something useful: they earth-up spuds in neat towers of abandoned tyres, make paths out of old bricks and assemble cold-frames out of disused windows. The softer option is to just make sure all the waste that a garden makes goes back in as something useful: we have a compost dalek, out of which something vaguely approximating soil comes every spring and autumn. The ash from the woodburner can also be spread about as fertiliser, but apparently coal-ash is a no-no because of heavy metal which can harm your plants. Something called "Jack-by-the-hedge" has seeded itself in our garden, and I'm just letting it carry on because it's edible and, as the name implies, will grow next to hedges: a place where everything else struggles.

Getting back to the seed question, why bother digging up expired annuals and replanting every year, when you could find something perennial which would give you almost as much yield? Recently that very question turned up in a rather thought-provoking BBC programme about the future of farming. One of the interesting factoids that transpired was that you could get almost as good a yield (calories and protein per acre, for example) from nut trees with assorted things growing around them as you can with grain. And none of that messing about with ploughing, spray-on weed-killer, fertiliser and the like. Alternatively you can be like Bruce the "lazy Aussie Farmer" and make more cash, even with less yield, by simply not bothering with a lot of the "input costs".

But Permaculture fans don't want to limit their design principles to gardens and farming: there's also housing, transport, healthcare, learning... And there isn't necessarily a size limit to the area involved, as long as you adapt optimally to each different part, letting nature do as much of the work as possible. So you could, in theory, have a village, with all its surrounding farmland, designed "permaculturally". Or a county, even a whole country.

The "Sporting Chance" school of gardening

In this shot is something which Lunchista hopes really will turn out pear-shaped: the more botanically-inclined viewer may be able to identify pear-blossom which has just set. But it very nearly didn't happen.

Sometimes the things you buy for the garden with the best of intentions, just drop all their leaves and sit there looking to all intents and purposes as dead as the proverbial Parrot. Or, having justfiiably looked dead all winter, they fail to come out in the spring. This has happened quite a lot in the Lunchista garden, usually to things that were expensive to buy, such as:

A lemon tree
A climbing peach
A grapevine
Some miniature roses
Countless seeds, berries and nuts that go into pots just for the heck of it.

One of the first victims was the pear-tree. We'd planted seven fruit-trees during our first winter here, and in the March they all showed buds. Then blossom in April, and leaves in May. All, that is, except the pear-tree, in spite of the fact that it had received the same TLC as all the others. Lunchista couldn't bear to dig up a tree, so we left it there, its bare branches giving us two fingers every time we looked in the garden. Until June, when it suddenly decided that having no leaves was a bit of a career limiting move, and as they say in the USA, "got with the program".

The lemon was a bit more dramatic: it suddenly decided to drop a full set of perfectly good leaves in the middle of summer, and remained leaf-less for the rest of the year. Then when we fed it some lemon-food the following spring, it put out new leaves. In the autumn. By then it had cobwebs on, giving its dead-ness that extra Gothic touch.

Apparently plants can go into shock. They "play dead" because they're too dry. Or too wet. Or lack some mineral or (more probably) sunshine. The same thing happened to the other plants in our Rogues' Gallery above (all except the peach, which after six months we decided was genuinely dead: its branches were completely dry. You can't win them all.).

And so evolved the Sporting Chance School of Gardening. I'd always thought it was a bit barking and wondered why I did it, but now I've discovered something of a justification, from the world of high finance of all places.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was one of the very few traders to emerge from the 1987 crash with a positive result. A large part of what enabled him to do this came from his understanding of the patterns of highly improbable events, in particular the difference in the statistics behind ordinary physical things, such as for example the heights of pear-trees (which typically have a Gaussian distribution), and human-made ones, such as gains from inventions taking off, or losses from markets crashing or wars breaking out. These typically follow something more way-out, like the wealth-distribution curve found by Wilfredo Pareto, in which it is possible for one individual's contribution to tip up the entire table.

After describing all this in eloquent detail in The Black Swan, Taleb then poses the question, on behalf of the reader, "So what do I do now?" Part of the answer is to go to parties: you never know who might be there and end up putting you onto a "positive Black Swan", that might really take off. Another part of the answer deals with the more pedestrian parts of life.

The Strategy is to split your resources (time, wealth, space in your garden...) 85:15, in fact very much like Mr Pareto's 80:20. Put the 85 into something (apparently) rock-solid, or at least boringly conservative. Then take the remaining 15 and put it into something which, though it's very probably going to just sit there doing nothing, might just take off and land you a good result. Something, in fact, like an apparently-dead pear tree.

The real art is to line up the two sets of assets in such a way that any improbable event causing the loss of the 85% will also result in that remaining 15% coming good in spectacular fashion: for example an entire row of pear-trees. Lunchista assumes this is why this type of investment is known as a Hedge Fund.

Pascal's Wager, meet Moon...

Well, there was an Earthshine last night and this morning It's raining!! It's gorgeous, it even smells gorgeous. I thought about going out and dancing about in it, but then Lunchista is British, and really that would be a bit OTT. Perhaps I'll just have a nice cup of tea instead.

Anyway, it means Lunchista can finally put in all those seeds that have been hanging about waiting for the right time. Which is where the moon (again), and Pascal's Wager, come in.

Now Lunchista has not, historically, been very lucky with seeds. I put them in, I water them, and then I really don't know what happens to most of them, and very probably neither do they. Chances are it is some permutation of: thirst, drowning, birds, mice, cats, slugs, wrong kind of soil, weedkiller courtesy of the Council (it has happened!) wrong phase of the moon, abduction by aliens.

This year, however, we are taking no chances. This year, we have a Strategy.

First, the seeds are going in in the rain. This waters the soil much better than Lunchista ever can. Then, nets will be stretched over them to keep off the birds (and hopefully the mice and cats, and if I'm really lucky one of the aliens will get its foot caught and I shall be famous). Slugs will be hunted down ruthlessly at night-time with a torch and a brick. The soil has been enhanced with compost (lovingly made of old garden detritus and kitchen stuff of the non-meat variety: we have even been known to collect old seaweed). The council are now too skint to stretch to weedkiller. And finally the whole kerfuffle will take place at the correct time: afternoon, as near as possible to new moon. You are doubtless now entertaining the possibility that Lunchista has finally lost it. However...

There exists a school of thought known as Biodynamics. It has a noble, and very interesting, pedigree, including all sorts of characters ranging from Mr Steiner (of Steiner School fame) to the Soil Association. Lunchista is a fan of the Soil Association and in fact everything in the garden here that has already started to grow, seems to do very well by it. So let's put the moon-phase bit to the test, Pascal's-Wager-style, because we have nothing to lose.

Pascal's Wager applies to those kind of risks for which you have no idea of the odds, but you'd like a favourable outcome. Picture, if you will, a slice of Battenburg cake:


Thank you, ForTheLoveOfBritishFood (who also have the recipe), don't mind if I do.

Imagine the four squares represent a set of the four possible outcomes. Taking these in order row-by-row:
1. You take precautions, it turns out you were right to do so. Yellow smiley square.
2. You didn't take precautions, but you should have done. Pink girlie disaster!
3. You took precautions but you didn't need to. Pink embarrassment or perhaps wasted time or cash.
4. You didn't take precautions, it turns out you didn't need to. Yellow smiley square again.

Now what most people do is compare the two pink squares, then make their choice about precautions. It turns out this is an easy decision in the Biodynamics case because if Mr Steiner turned out to have been right, and Lunchista ignored him, we get pink disaster (no seeds come up). However if we follow his idea and it turns out that the moon phase is an irrelevance we end up with square no. 3, but no time or cash has been wasted and really, do you think Lunchista cares all that much about embarrassment? So, pink square no. 3 it is, please.

Pascal's Wager has been used as an argument in favour of religious practice: you may not know whether or not God exists but you may as well sing along with the choir because spending a bit of time on Sundays (pink square no. 3) is better than spending eternity on the cosmic bonfire (pink square no. 2).

But there's a twist in the tale. Going back to Mr Steiner, supposing that he got it wrong, not in the sense that it turned out that the moon phase didn't matter, but in the sense that the phase mattered but was the opposite of what he said??

Multi-dimensional Battenburg slice, anyone?