It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

We are having the finest summer for six years, though given that means about one week of sunshine that's more a reflection on the vileness of the weather in previous years. The spring though was, in Britain at least, the coldest for half a century.

Combine those two phenomena and it is making gardening a bit of a bugger, which for those of us who enjoy eating food we grow is beyond annoying. We are at least three weeks further back in the growing year than we would normally be, and now the ground is exceptionally dry so to prevent everything running to seed or dying off watering is needed.

In a spare moment the other day I calculated we had 44 different fruits and vegetables on our allotment (and you can add to that another two or three like fennel grown in the garden but not the plot). That isn't counting different varieties of the same thing either. So in spite of the conditions we can hope for some plenty to come, which is probably one definition of the allotment gardener.

The Fragility of Self-Reliance

For me self-sufficiency is a myth, as to play a full role in modern life - wear decent clothes, enjoy the benefits of any electronic device, use the most effective medicines etc - we rely on wider society. What many people mean by self-sufficiency is growing most of their own food, better expressed as self-reliance. We are happy to grow a small percentage of our own food: we have hens for eggs, and an allotment that provides a large proportion of our vegetables from say June to mid-October, plus beds in the garden for herbs and additional veg, especially salads. But we are far from self-reliant and certainly not self-sufficient.

The dangers of such a path have been emphasized this year by what has happened to our fruit harvest. The combination of a dry spring and horribly wet summer and early autumn, with frequent damaging winds, has left us with barely a fruit on our two cooking apple trees, nothing on the eater, nothing on the cherry, nothing on the pear. The cobnut bushes produced a less than exciting 100g of shelled fruit, made into pesto and long gone already. If we had chosen a true peasant existence we would be done for.