Creating Space

Fighting for space

It's the time of year in our garden for clearing out the summer crops and tidying up the plants that have been given free rein to sprawl during the much-too-hot-to-garden summer months here in inland Andalucía. As I slowly embrace this work, I have begun to feel a tangible sense of relief as I see a bit of crumbly brown earth appear once more amongst the vegetation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still to committed to the idea of a traditional country garden or 'potager' where flowers and vegetables rub shoulders in a riotous display of blooms and produce; I still believe that in the hot summer months, ground cover is the best way to protect the garden from evaporation; and I'm still equally committed to turning over as much of our plot to perennial plants - both flowers and veg - in order to minimize the amount of clearing and planting that needs to be done each season. Despite this, however, I know I'll always reserve some parts of the garden for annual crops because – I have to admit – that I do enjoy the process of clearing a space and planting those little jewel-like seeds full of promise into the ground. 

This clearing of space has its parallel in other parts of life. Inspired by my cyber friend Dan Goodwin's 'Shedding Project' and spurred on by my partner's insistence that I do a little less, I've been getting down to a bit of clearing out both physical and psychological over the last month.

What's amazing is how much stuff there is, both in our habits and our household, that we simply do not see because we have grown so accustomed to its presence! In the same way that it feels like the rocket patch has always occupied two thirds of one side of the garden's growing space and there's really need to change it – until we realise that there just isn't any space to plant beans this year – so ingrained habits and assorted possessions come to take over our personal and mental space leaving no room for new ideas or fresh experiences.

Room to grow and expand

So in this period of digging up huge swathes of straggly wild rocket (secure in the knowledge that it will be back again very soon despite my best efforts) I am also, in tandem, amassing no-longer-needed items to take to the recycling plant and finishing or deferring some of my always too-numerous projects in order to create space in my calendar to concentrate on just a few very important ones. 

It's been refreshing to see the humid earth appear from out under the greenery and to sprinkle in a bit of manure, gently fork it over, and add a layer of recently harvested compost from our bin and so ready it for planting this season's crops. Equally its been revitalising to designate Saturdays as to-do-free days to spend with my partner and to wake up on the other days to a do-able To Do list that fills me with enthusiasm as well as opening the way for new projects to blossom.

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No Waste in the Creative Garden

Some rights reserved by London Permaculture

"Everything can be put to use within the creative process."

Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process - An Artist's Guide to Letting Go (Shambhala, 1998)

We've just harvested a good number of large buckets of compost from our rickety makeshift compost heap. There is nothing quite like the joy of reaping such riches from a process that takes almost no effort at all - just a stroll down to the garden with the kitchen scraps and the leaf fall from the patio, an occasional desultory stir and a bit of water in the summer and, voila, free topsoil full of nutrients!

Contrast this with the constantly irritating process of collecting all the waste supermarket packaging that we seem to collect despite our efforts to the contrary followed by the reward-less trip to the nearest recycling point with bulky and unwieldy parcels (no kerb-side recycling here!) of a product that probably should never have been invented in the first place and that will be with us for millennia to come (i.e. plastic in all its myriad shapes and forms).

A major benefit of an organic garden is that it is a closed-loop system that has no waste products, everything sooner or later rotting down and returning to whence it came. Its useful to think of our creative lives in the same way.

All to often we feel we have 'wasted our time' when we make something that doesn't fulfil the criteria or expectations we had in mind for it but this is erroneous thinking because, as in the garden, everything we do in our creative lives contributes to the whole: A tiny corner of a painting we don't like sparks an idea for another work; a misplaced brushstroke sets us to wondering how it would be to paint a large canvas with broad, dripping brushstrokes; An unfinished novel that has lain in the drawer untouched for years, is recycled into a series of short stories which get published; A week spent blocked with a work in progress eventually leads to the realization that we are bored with our process and we need to experiment with new techniques...

Our minds and psyches will function very effectively as virtual compost bins for recycling creative ideas if only we will stop inhibiting the process by our negative thinking and dismissing out of hand every aspect of our creative lives that doesn't seem to fit nicely into the 'product' category. Like the making of compost in the garden, this process requires no great effort on our part; We only need a little diligence and patience and in a short time we will be rewarded with buckets of rich ideas with which to dress our creative gardens and help them grow.

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Mysterious Bugs v Fragrant Blooms

This summer the garden has been literally plagued by problems. For the second year running a mysterious bug has attacked the tomatoes and the peppers causing the fruit to rot on the stems. Another disease has also variously affected the honeysuckle, one of the rambling roses and the cherry tomatoes (not affected by the first disease) this time causing the leaves to wither.

As if this weren't disturbing enough, the normally robust snapdragons have been covered by what appears to my untrained eye to be some sort of rust and the indestructible hollyhocks have been so extensively attacked by the beetle that always eats their leaves, they they all but gave up flowering altogether!

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Water

I re-entered our potager with some trepidation after leaving it to the mercy of our newly set up drip irrigation system for our holiday fortnight. Typically we only got the irrigation set up a couple of days before leaving despite having talked about it for months so we didn't have time to thoroughly road test it so this was trial by fire or rather, water!

Despite my fears, most of the garden is in better shape than it was before we left with the exception of the snapdragons which though they have always appeared to survive very well with little water obviously need more than we allowed for. Most of the potatoes have had it as well but that's probably due to the same insect that has been affecting the tomatoes rather than lack of water. (Interestingly the tomatoes we grew from seed seem to be resisting the disease much better than those that we bought as plantlets so that's definitely the way to go although it means waiting longer for the fruit.)

Although it took a few days to set up the watering system, now that it is done we are happily reaping the benefit of the saved hours spent with the hosepipe to say nothing of the efficient water use :)

Another investment we are reaping the benefit of is our tiny reconditioned water deposit. The rainwater we collected in it over winter has all gone now but today we filled it with clean water to use for cooling off during the heat of these hot summer afternoons. We picked up a solar fountain pump going cheap a month or so ago and we are hoping that by using that to aerate the water and the addition of a tiny amount of copper sulphate we will manage to keep the nasties at bay. Ideally we would like enhance the efficiency of this by using the water to irrigate and then topping it up again and so creating a regular renewal of the water but I'm not sure about the copper sulphate going on the plants. I've used it before as a fungicide to spray tomatoes and peppers (copper sulphate is an ingredient in Bordeaux Mixture, accepted as an organic fungicide) so I guess it will be ok but I'd love to hear from you if you have any experience of this.

In the meantime, if you want me I'll be in the splash pool!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Loja

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Continuing Strange Synchronicity between Cherry and the Plum Tree

My life and that of the plum tree continue to be linked in some sort of mystical dance.


This last week it has been the turn of our 'arms'. I have experienced a severe bout of my latent RSI (repetitive strain injury) and the plum, in strange, parallel-universe-style synchronicity, lost two of its branches.


The cause of my ills are easy to diagnose – too much time spent on electronic devices – whereas the cause of the fallen branches can only be guessed at. Too much fruit for such slender branches? Too strong a wind? Or some sort of insect gnawing through from the inside?

Whatever the causes of the problems with our extremities, we have tried to turn the outcomes into something positive: I have been spending quality time in the studio (with only my ears tuned to an electronic device i.e. listening to podcasts) and my other half has turned the fallen plums into jam.


If you ask me nicely I will post the recipe ;)

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Before and After: The Story of My Emerging Potager

Since we moved into the house three years ago and surveyed our weed-filled plot (below), I've had it in mind that I want to turn the garden into an 'informal potager' – or cottage garden – where vegetables and flowers are mixed together in the same beds to create a riotous display of colours and shapes, with bees humming and butterflies fluttering in and out amongst the blooms.


This year more than ever before– to the untrained eye at least – the garden is beginning to resemble what I saw in my mind but – as is inevitable when growing anything, regardless of horticultural philosophy or style – there have been some failures alongside the successes.


Amongst the failures are the broad beans, which though they began normally enough (as you can see in the photo) – and in previous years have been a resilient staple crop – this year fell prey to some mysterious disease which caused many of the pods to wither almost as soon as they began to form, the stems to bend over and the leaves to become brown and shrivelled. We've harvested a few beans but probably only a fifth of what we normally would have.


The other major concern – and who knows, perhaps not unrelated – is the plum tree. This tree is probably around a hundred years old. We used to have two but the younger one succumbed in the first year to another mysterious disease that attacked members of the prunus family in the area where we live, causing them to leach sap and dry up. We managed to save the other one by digging a trench round it and filling it with soaked cardboard, balled up newspaper and manure and then planting garlic and peas around it. Even so, it was still clearly not a very happy plum and despite a gardener friend's warning that it was too old to prosper, last year we gave it a severe prune and a good feed and were rewarded in early spring this year with the sight of its branches dripping in blossom.


Unfortunately, although there are now lots of small plums, the leaves have curled and shrivelled and the poor dear is looking very sickly once again.

Another normally dependable staple – the hollyhocks – which were growing up very nicely and just about to flower have, this very day, been devastated by severe winds which have caused them to bend in half. What the result of this will be I don't know but since its still a waning moon, if they look very sad, I'll prune them down to below the bend and see if they sprout up again.

Having depressed myself – and you fellow green-fingers – by talking about these failures, its time to cheer us all up again by showing you some of the marvels that have occurred.


Due to the intense rain this year, just about everything has doubled in size - particularly the mulberry, the snapdragons (which I wasn't even sure would over-winter, given we had a bit of snow), this purple shrub that I don't even know the name of but that was given to us by a fellow greenie (you know who you are!) and my other half has now divided into two plants and the little lemon and orange trees which after years of languishing (in another garden before here) are finally beginning to get up and at it!


The wild rocket, as usual, has gone mad and providing great ground cover and the mint is, predictably taking over everything and I've had to start pulling it up but we're really enjoying our regular cups of 'hierba buena' and are able to give it away as gifts as well. Apart from the fact that it smells divine when you walk amongst it.


Its been our policy so far to let anything run riot that will until we need the space because our experience of gardening in Spain so far has taught us that evaporation of water is generally the greatest enemy so we want as much ground-cover as possible. Its probably a dangerous policy to follow as I know that plants such as mint and wild rocket are impossible to stop I still prefer it to bare ground or rampant grasses and weeds which is what we had before and are gradually taming into submission. In other words, I'd rather have a weed I can eat or drink than one that just irritates me! The calendulas have also finally taken hold and are spreading themselves – with a little help from me – around the garden.


The other successes so far are the seed potatoes that another greenie friend gave (thank heavens for friends!). Previously we've only ever used ones that we bought to eat and have sprouted in our kitchen drawer and the difference is very noticeable.


As you can see, I've begun my experiment with growing tomatoes upside down in buckets. I read about it somewhere and this year seemed the perfect year to try it – partly because we are getting short on space and want to try and make more use of vertical space to compensate, and partly because last year the tomatoes were hit by a disease that hit all the tomatoes in the region and so we didn't want to plant them in the same place again and in a garden our size that doesn't leave so much choice!


I've also done my first, properly laid out companion bed – made a lot easier by purchasing the plantlets rather than growing them from seed: The lettuces are interspersed with Italian green peppers which grow very tall and bushy and will shade the lettuces from the fierce summer sun. They are surrounded by onions which I hope will provide a living fence to keep the cat – and her neighbour friends – off the bed (a perennial problem, temporarily solved, as you can see by the strategic placement of some very prickly rose prunings).


We've also reclaimed the old water deposit for a rain collection point and we've got a new 'lean to' – which my other half and his brother built from left over materials from the bits of the house we had to rebuild. One of the side benefits of this, apart from the cat having an extra snooze spot is that we have somewhere dry to stand and watch the rain or to take cover from the baking summer sun as well as a much needed place to store all the usual garden paraphernalia.



With the idea of writing this blogpost, I went and took a new photo of the garden from more or less the same vantage point as the original, what a difference!

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Nispero, Mango or other Sweet Chutney

Ingredients
1/2kg fruit
Up to 1 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 tsp chilli powder
400-425g sugar
4 tsp salt
2 tsp chopped ginger
2 cloves garlic
3/4 tsp cardamom seeds/powder

Peel and remove stones from fruit and cut up into small chunks.
Cook fruit, garlic and ginger in water on low heat. When tender, add sugar, vinegar, chilli, cardamoms and salt and stir until thick and golden. Remove from heat and leave to cool. Put in airtight jars or jars previously heated in oven.

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Chuck the Green Tomato Chutney?

Because we live in a continental zone where the summers are scorching and all but the hardiest plants withdraw into themselves, our best time for tomatoes is actually autumn when the days are still balmy and the night-time temperatures don't fall too low. As a result we are able to still pick fresh tomatoes for salad right into November. Unfortunately this year at the end of November it was very cold and bucketing down with rain and salads had really lost their appeal to be replaced in our affections by steaming bowls of hot broth or curry. As a result the tomato plants were left languishing. It was too wet for any but really hardy types - of which I am definitely not one - to go out in the garden anyway, so although I had that nagging feeling of something left undone, I consciously pushed any thoughts of dealing with the tomato plants to the back of my mind for 'When it stops raining.'

Now, almost a month later, the rain has finally stopped and we are able to return to the garden to assess the benefits and damage this unprecedented rainfall and unseasonable cold snap has had on the plants.

At first sight the tomatoes looked a sorry sight with their leaves wilted and many tomatoes on the ground but closer inspection revealed a great number of healthy tomatoes - albeit green ones - still on the plants. I decided to dismantle the tomato patch ready to plant something else when we return from holiday after New Year and at the same time salvage as many tomatoes as possible. It was easy to spot any that had frozen as they had a sort of transparent appearance but in fact there were extremely few of those and apart from that there were a number which had been burrowed by insects but not that many given we don't use any pesticides. The final count of the haul was a hefty two and a half kilos - not bad for an abandoned tomato patch in at the end of December!

Had we been staying at home I would have taken some of the green tomatoes into the house to redden - done in the dark on newspaper contrary to what common sense might dictate - but since we are going to be away I decided that haul was best turned into chutney. Since I am a hopeless addict of Indian food, I scoured the internet for an Indian green tomato chutney and after rejecting a few for containing ingredients that are expensive or difficult to obtain here in the Spanish hinterland or that ones I'm allergic to - I finally settled on one which I found at The Cooks Cottage which is a site worth visiting just for the visuals!

Unfortunately the recipe proved to have way too much vinegar (or, perhaps it was simply that malt vinegar is much less sharp than the wine vinegar I used? We don't have malt here.) and the result was less than happy. I scoured the internet for solutions to getting rid of the vinegary taste and was slightly comforted to find that this had happened to many more people than me and with a variety of chutney recipes from across the web. Solutions included everything from adding the same amount of ingredients again - minus the vinegar, of course - to adding fresh coriander, more sugar, apple juice or more apples. I tried just about all of them and also added some more chilli and bay leaves...

The result? Well, its touch and go. I've bottled it and decided to leave it for a few months to see how it tastes then. Will I chuck the chutney? Watch this space!

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Spanish 'Migas' recipe: Uses for leftover bread 1

'Migas' are tiny cubes of fried bread and are traditionally served as a tapas in Spain with freshly fried sardines and sometimes with spicey sausage (chorizo), bacon etc. As with all breadcrumb recipes, it is a way of using up stale bread leftovers that dates back to times of scarcity. Here is a recipe for the sardine version.




Ingredients
stale bread,
green peppers (usually the small pointed variety grown and sold everywhere in Spain)
fresh sardines
olive oil
garlic cloves - unpeeled and cut in half lenghtwise
salt
water

Quantities of ingredients are up to the discretion of the cook!

Instructions
Cut the bread into small cubes, the smaller the better.
In a frying pan, fry the green peppers and sardines in olive oil.
In another frying pan with clean oil, fry the garlic cloves.
Add water to the breadcrumbs so that they go spongey and throw in a pinch of salt. Then transfer the bread to the frying pan with the garlic, stirring them continually until they are golden brown but still soft.

Serve the fried peppers and sardines on a bed of 'migas'.

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Grow Your Own: The Movie

The good old British allotment is seriously back in fashion these days with many council waiting lists for allotments running in the hundreds. Consumers are turning their backs on heavily-suspect supermarket veggies in favour of growing at least some of their own, pesticide-free, seasonal produce. However, it is now becoming apparent that the benefits of having a garden or allotment go beyond just the reaping of the produce itself. A number of projects dotted across the country are making use of gardening in a new and innovative way: Assisting victims of torture to regain balance in their lives by using a unique form of horticultural therapy.

The first projects of this kind were set up by Jenny Grut, psychotherapist and co-author of the book The Healing Fields: Working with Psychotherapy and Nature to Rebuild Shattered Lives (Sonja Linden, Jenny Grut - 2002. Frances Lincoln Ltd, ISBN 0711220271) with the help of the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, has been responsible for setting up a scheme called the Natural Growth Project in a garden near Hampstead Heath in London, and two further London allotments at Ealing and Colindale. There are now similar allotment schemes for trauma and torture victims in Oxford, Coventry and Newcastle using the therapeutic qualities of gardening to assist healing from extreme traumatic and life-threatening events.

In 2001 Margrit Ruegg - a Swiss-born psychotherapist hugely influenced by Grutt - who has lived in Liverpool for 30 years, began a similar small project in Liverpool to help traumatised refugees and asylum seekers (many of whom are not allowed to work, and thus have no way to occupy their time) regain a foothold on their lives by providing them with allotments to cultivate whilst offering them on-site psychotherapy between digging, planting and weeding. The project thereby aims to help them come to terms with the horrors of their past and find some peace in their lives by working the land. Many of these people have been subjected to torture and find it hard to talk about their experience in formal settings. Outside, it is often easier and more natural for them to communicate and express their feelings about their traumatic past, thus setting them on the road to healing.

Ruegg - a family therapist before launching the project in 2001- began with just three plots, a greenhouse and a shed. Now the Liverpool-based Family Refugee Support Project boasts seven municipal allotment plots and serves 18 families from Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Burma, Congo, Iran, the Ivory Coast, Kosovo and Zimbabwe. To qualify, refugees must have suffered trauma or post-traumatic stress and be referred by health or education professionals.

The project offers psychotherapy to parents and children alongside working on the land at the allotment site. Each family is offered a piece of land, tools, horticultural and psychotherapeutic support, practical support, signposting to other services and individual, family and group support meetings at the Toxteth base.

This successful project is now the subject of a new film called "Grow Your Own" set on a Liverpool allotment, with a story devised by two local friends: Frank Cottrell Boyce (whose scripts for films such as Hilary and Jackie and Welcome to Sarajevo have made him one of Britain's leading screenwriters) and Carl Hunter, a documentary filmmaker.

Hunter, who has made some 30 documentaries for television, was approached by Margrit Ruegg to make a short fundraising film about the project, which he did. But Hunter found himself intrigued by the stories of the refugees and asylum seekers he met. He took the stories he heard to Channel 4, which gave him funds to direct three three-minute films, each about one person on the allotments. Eventually Boyce created a plot drawing directly on the true stories told to him by Hunter and the film was born.

The film is a comedy, which Boyce and Hunter seemed more accessible than a gritty, social-realist treatment. Perhaps this is why they have taken the license to use a Chinese man - played by Benedict Wong (Dirty Pretty Things) - in one of the main roles although there are currently no Chinese refugees on the Liverpool project.The comic treatment is also given to the film's website. Check it out at:

http://www.growyourownthemovie.co.uk/

In an interview about the project with Ruegg herself in British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, she says that the key to the success of the project is the healthy outdoor environment which is ideal for clients who were imprisoned or interrogated in confined spaces:

"Culturally, a small consulting-room is not the best place for their therapy. The shed, which doubles as an consulting room and office, feels totally unthreatening."

Ruegg goes on to say:

"It's better to be under the sky and in fresh air, feeling the elements."

A sentiment with which we fellow gardeners will find it impossible but not to agree.

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