May Day

1 5 2010

May Day is mild, grey overhead and green in my garden below, spattered with cherry petals and slowly surging with snails come out to appreciate the wet and eat anything going. You can't beat heavy overnight rain then a calm grey morning after a dry spell when the garden seems to breathe and quivers with raindrops, the vegetable bed dark with rain and compost and speckled with the perilous fluorescent blue of slug pellets to protect the spinach and carrot seedlings from snails and slugs. It's them or my crop, letting slugs and snails browse at their ease is plain bad farming so I control them in places where I want a crop to grow and leave plenty of garden for them to live in. Farming? My father was an agricultural scientist working for the then Ministry of Agriculture, I grew up on a series of different Ministry farms and learned farming by keeping my eyes peeled - terrible phrase that, almost Shakespearean - and playing all over the farms, my Dad had told me how to keep safe from agricultural machinery. Now I grow soft fruit and a few vegetables and have a pond for toads and newts, watching newts surface and sink effortlessly, just a few tiny air bubbles in the clear brown water, is balm to the soul after dodging heavy traffic and pedestrians with trophy fighting dogs going to the shops.

The big Victorian asylums used to have farms where the patients grew food for the hospital, plenty of fresh air and exercise and satisfying labour for poor souls sick in their minds and whatever Foucault might say about margins and madness the asylums were built where there was "good" air and farming land available, you only have to read Jane Austen to understand the health concerns about good fresh air being necessary for fitness. London's expansion was affected by the prevailing westerly winds in the UK, more expensive homes were built to the west where the air was fresh and there were no third class tickets on the trains serving these expensive suburbs, going east where the air was staler and polluted by industry the terraced dwellings for the workforce were built. Later on in the last century the asylum farms fell into disuse, it was popularly thought agricultural labour demeaned the patients and I bet no-one asked them but imposed idleness because they thought, if one can dignify the state of mind as thought, they knew what was best. Now that the asylums have been closed and the surplus grounds and farmland sold to developers the idea of agricultural labour to promote dignity and a healthier frame of mind is coming back into fashion.

Good farming practice is a science and takes you out of yourself, there are all those pests to outwit and control, there are plant nurseries that will cheerfully sell you diseased fruit canes to be found out about the hard way, and there is the soil to maintain with manure and compost and to be cleared of pernicious weeds. You have to pay attention to the weather forecasts so you know whether your fruit flowers will be frosted if you don't wrap them in cloth overnight, whether or not you need to irrigate, my father would walk outside every evening to study the sky and cloud formations for indications of what weather to expect the next day therefore whether they could plough, or harvest, or lift potatoes and so on. It gets my goat when weather forecasters simper and apologise if they expect rain, one, they don't cause the weather, two, what about the farmers they do grow our food, three, why simplify to the point of absurdity when weather is fascinating and would interest lots of people if intelligently explained? The stallholders in the market always listen to the farming programmes on the radio, the weather forecasts are intelligent and what goes on on farms will affect the prices and availability of the produce they sell, it's sound business sense. If their spelling is anything to go by they're not highly educated in the formal sense, they are intelligent people earning a living by using their brains. I'll leave you with a brilliant bit of banter I heard shouted by a stallholder, "Five pounds of bananas for a pound, eat here or take away!" Best wishes, Anne Rees.