Having spent over a decade as a foreign correspondent in Kabul, Lalage Snow faced a very different kind of challenge when she took on an allotment near Sherborne with three young children in tow. In an extract from My Family and Other Seedlings, she reflects on the small triumphs of her first June
Summer was very much in the air and in the ground; there was heat now, and a lot of it, a lengthening to the days, a clarity to the sky at night which remained warm and, blow me down with a piece of couch grass, but the allotment was beginning to take shape. The carrots were growing, albeit in a wonky line, and the maize was inching up daily.
It was, I thought much later, like the early days of having a newborn. In those really early days after arriving in this world, babies don’t do much other than sleep, eat and occasionally yell or wriggle if they find themselves unable to do either. Thus rather inert, they can lull the new parent into thinking they’ve got ‘a chilled one’. The allotment was like this then and I felt smug. Having been planted, there wasn’t a great deal to do apart from water. Nailing it, I thought.
My brother had given me five bamboo cloches for my birthday and that evening I bundled the cloches into the back of my car with a tray of courgette and chard seedlings and made for the allotment. The soil was warm when I dug my hands in (of course I forgot the trowel, of course I did) and began planting them out.
With the sun sloping slowly towards dusk I had a good feeling as I planted and set the lampshades, I mean cloches, over them. A very good feeling indeed. If nothing else here worked, these seedlings would surely flourish.
‘You’ve got your hands full.’
‘You’ve got your work cut out.’
‘You must be so busy.’
These are the sorts of things perfect strangers said to me when they saw me with three children so young and close together in age. I preferred to look at it in a different way. Companionship.
The thought occurred to me when I first saw them helping each other with coat zips and then later, helping each other to undress for the bath and looking at each other with absolute trust and faith. This is not to say they didn’t fight and wind each other up – often – but for the most part, the children were learning how to help each other. They were each other’s companions.
Companion planting is just what it says on the tin; it is the theory that some plants perform better when planted alongside others. It is all about creating happy plant communities. Some plant combinations aid pollination, others boost growth or repel pests and a few are said to prevent blight.
The three sisters is a common combination and originates from native American tribes. Maize, squash and (French) beans are planted together, the former providing the frame for the latter, the large leaves of the squashes planted at the base provide shade for the ground, keeping the soil moist and weeds at bay. This method is thought to date back five or six thousand years but there are dozens of other combinations. Carrots and onions, for example. The strong allium smell of the onions is said to repel carrot fly. Carrots and leeks also work well for the same reason. Marigolds repel whitefly from tomatoes while nasturtiums are said to lure aphids away from brassicas like Brussels sprouts. Borage flowers are a magnet for hoverflies whose larvae feed on the blackfly on broad beans.
The benefits of companion planting are largely anecdotal and some gardeners scoff at the notion. Not least because with companion vegetable planting there is little space for uniformity and neatness. The benefits of the children being so close in age were plain for me to see; when they weren’t at each other’s necks, scratching or kicking each other, they were each other’s companions and always would be. And coming up in the rear was baby Kit, the third in the triumvirate of companions.
Our bean seedlings needed transplanting to the plot. All we needed to do was find space amid the weeds.
There is still some debate as to how the runner bean was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the 16th or 17th centuries, but the triangles of bamboo canes or neat bean rows are a ubiquitous part of English vegetable or kitchen gardens. Indeed, the bean row left over by the pub landlord was one of the very first things to have drawn me to the allotments in the first place.
Often confused with the French bean, the runner bean is native to the chilly altitudes of Mexico and Central America where its wild ancestors grew and were foraged some nine thousand years ago.
The runner bean was the last of the New World discoveries to be brought back to the Old World by Cortés and his conquistadors where it was valued more for its pretty scarlet and white flowers than its beans. The climbing blooms lent themselves well to garlands and decorative displays fashionable at that time.
But while the French bean (which by the way is not actually French but South American) is coveted the world over from China to America, Italy to Russia, the runner bean is beloved only in Britain. And even then, the jury is still out. Picked when small and juicy they are delicious but miss a day’s harvest and those sweet little fingers will become fat and fibrous with strings which will easily lodge themselves between teeth.
But if the failures to grow thus far were anything to go by, we were far from having a glut.
Kit was bursting out of his moses basket. Try as I might – and I did – I just couldn’t wedge him in anymore and with a heavy heart I packed it away into the attic.
I mourned this graduation to ‘the next stage’ because time was flying. My children were growing and I had barely drawn breath to notice. Just stop, I wanted to say to the Peter Rabbit clock ticking loudly on the bedroom wall. Just stop ticking and tocking and inching forward and let me pause. Let me enjoy these seedlings of ours before it is all too late and they are lurching into independence seeking light and thinking little of their roots.
I had added to my tools a hoe that my father had kindly donated. The only problem was I had not a clue how to use it. A long handle, one flat square of metal like a small spade at an angle attached to a U-shaped piece. It wasn’t obvious at all. I adopted what I thought might be a suitable hoeing posture and scraped at the ground but to little effect. I hit it and then I tried digging with it. No. Not obvious at all.
Hoe abandoned, we constructed a teepee-style frame using bamboo canes and tying them together using an old wire found in the long grass. Together we bedded in the seedlings, pushing the earth firmly around their roots. We wrapped netting loosely around the canes and used stones to fasten it to the ground. The allotment might be the Wild West but this was the saloon of safety.
‘I’m hungry,’ Harry said as we admired our handiwork.
There were young mange tout hanging like emeralds from the pea sticks. ‘Here!’ I said, handing him one and holding my breath. I waited for a slow smile to spread across his impish face. This was what it was all about, I thought. Sweet tender home-grown veg from plot to mouth in seconds.
Harry chewed. He frowned. He chewed a little more and then he spat it out like chewing tobacco, declaring it disgusting and asking if I had any biscuits. I picked one. It was sweet, crunchy, juicy and oh so full of flavour. The boy was clearly off his rocker but there was no point forcing the issue so I gave him a spade and together we dug a few more holes for the remaining corn seedlings.
‘A potato, Mumma!’ he yelped.
A pale cold orb of a new potato was just sitting there and waiting to be discovered. ‘And another,’ Harry jumped up and down on a seedling. ‘Another!’
I knew nothing about growing potatoes. Absolutely nothing about first and second earlies, main crops, chitting and seeding. Nothing about the way they grew as a family underground, nothing about their flowers and nothing about earthing up or digging up either. All that came much later.
Like explorers searching for the treasure of Eldorado, we dug with a frenzy, unearthing more and more volunteer potatoes. They hung together like oversized pearls and all thoughts of the shunned mange tout vanished. Harry jumped up and down at every discovery. Never mind mange tout or peas; this was our gold.
We ate them for tea as a potato salad and I’d like to think that they were the best potatoes we had ever tasted.
We were getting there, I thought as I laid my weary head on the pillow that night. It was both harder and easier than imagined to keep the plot going but with the free food bountiful the results of the allotment challenge were already visible.
This was to be a summer of glowing health indeed. We had been through almost a dozen sicknesses, survived slugs and rabbits and were out the other side stronger and wiser.
And then I was sick..
My Family and Other Seedlings: A Year on a Dorset Allotment by Lalage Snow is published by Quercus, priced £10.49
