23>Gardentalk

 It's strange to be sowing again.


Patches of bare earth are appearing in among the great garden greenness.
If I had seedlings ready, they could go happily straight into that warm, cultivated ground, but I think I was too transfixed by the burgeoning growth of my crops last month to think ahead.
I am proving to be an extreme gardener though: planting as early as I dared in the Spring in my enthusiasm, and now in late July.
We had a couple of damp, dark days last week that felt like the Autumn. Literally, I felt it in my bones, as an ominous ache in my thighs.

 

The dread of Winter must be an inherited squirrel instinct > Look to your woodpile and where to store the potatoes, it says.
We invest such a deep store of expectation in The Summer that disappointment is inevitable. Our childhood is stored there, gilded in sunshine, along with the flowers of early romance.
Idylliotic creatures that we are.
As I remember, the summer was often wellies and waddingtons games, rather than basking on the beach.
A good, moist tilth though, and one the slugs and weeds have been waiting for.
One reason not to plant late crops is that they won't be ready before the weather gets too cold. What is ready, huh?




There is an underlying assumption that plants have to be large to be worthwhile. This is true in forests too.
I see it as The Big Willy syndrome; a relic male oversight of the living world that favours largeness as a symbol of prowess.
To this end, trees are spaced to optimise growth, towards a day of reckoning when they are 'mature'.
I have come to appreciate coppice and smallwood use as a more harmonious treatment of many woodlands.




Now I see similar male dogma rooted in the garden. The allotmenteer competing to produce prize leeks.
I like to eat delicate leeks, the size of a pencil. I grew some onions from seed this year, and got lovely dense billiard balls of onion which I prefer to big ones.



As I pored over gardening books, I saw a picture of some onions grown clustered together. They looked so snug.
Then I read that turnips can be planted this way, sowing about four seed together. (The turnip is a vegetable that has escaped from the tyranny of size, having had a renaissance as a tender salad crop).



I tried this and it works well. They do seem to grow better this way.
So I am looking at what other roots would benefit.

Planting in clumps rather than lines makes so much sense. Just like us, plants, for the most part, like to live in community.
I have been planting my ash seedlings close together. Part of that is because it's a windy site. I don't expect or want to get high single-stem trees there, but anticipate healthy coppice.



Ash seedlings in the wild grow as thick
as grass, yet somehow glean themselves, without any sign of pain, of surplus trees, as the group grows in stature. They grow as a cooperative organism. Ashitude. They are the ultimate republican tree.



So to plant trees to their ultimate young adult spacing is to rob them of their childhood.
To conscript them into an army.
Social control patterns reminiscent of an earlier time.



Let your trees live in tribes again.



Set your vegetables free!