Time for a Heart-Starter

I think I'm turning into my Dad. He used to go out on his motorcycle on Boxing Day morning and come back frozen.

Ditto, this morning

Easily rectified by what a Normandy farmer would describe as a Heart Starter. Village cafe before work starts; double espresso and a shot of Calvados.

If that doesn't get your heart started you're very dead indeed.

Christmas Eve, 1825, Fort Vancouver

As yet there has been scarcely any frost [writes David Douglas, botanist and plant collector, at the Hudson's Bay Co'y establishment on the Columbia River, 183 years ago today]. When dry, weather generally very pleasant during the day; the nights invariably cold and damp. [But this will very soon change]

On the 24th December the rain fell in such torrents, without the least intermission, that my little hut of Thuja bark, which stood in rather a low situation, was completely inundated; 14 inches of water was in it.

As my lodgings were not of the most comfortable sort (!), Mr McLoughlin [the Chief Factor] kindly invited me to a part of his house in a half-finished state. Therefore on Christmas Day all my little things were removed to my new dwelling

Happy Xmas David Douglas.

Roast Nuts Chesting on an Open Fire......

..... observed Wilma Wilbury this morning. And that was before we'd opened the drink.

It follows in a long tradition of Mixed Matadors which we collect in this house. Dark horses run deep, you know.

We have a long list and I'll share some in due course. But for the moment, have a great Xmas and remember:

All's well that ends.

Here be Russians

December 1825, Pacific Northwest

At the mouth of the [un-named] river there is a trading establishment on a woody island where ships come in the summer.

The people have large beards and are very wicked; they have hanged several of the natives to the rigging and have ever since been in much disrepute.

Douglas is in no doubt as to their identity..... as he showed me several small articles of Russian manufacture, among which were small copper Russian coins, metal combs etc, together with large malleable iron pots of very coarse workmanship, and very different from anything in the trade of the British Fur Company. [one can almost hear him saying "How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen".

The Rainy Season being Set In.....

....with my infirm state, totally banished every thought from my mind of being able to do much more in the way of botany for a season. It is with serious regret that I am compelled to resign my labours, so much sooner than if that accident had not befallen me............. writes David Douglas in December 1825, having fallen onto a rusty nail and incurred a suppurating knee, all this at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, Pacific Northwest.

At midday on the 18th the Express (two boats and 40 men) arrived from Hudson's Bay, which they left on the 21st of July [this is the westbound Express; readers will recall following Douglas and the eastbound Express earlier this year]. In this distant land, where there is only an annual post, they were by every person made welcome guests. I hastened to the landing place, congratulating myself on the news from England [but] I learned with much regret there were no letters, parcels or any article for me. I was exceedingly disappointed.

Looking Ahead

Two minutes after winter solstice, on a cold, damp non-skyclad plot (see previous), seemed like a good time to look around and MAKE A LIST.

You can never have too many lists; sometimes you need a "list of lists". Sometimes the list is a substitute for action. Expert listmakers put into their lists things they've already done, just so they can relish the sense of achievement of immediately ticking them off again. I wouldn't do that of course. Oh dear me no; well, not often.

So what is the LIST about and what's on it? It's stuff to do on the allotment next year, innit? ya need a list to give ya'self some structure, dun't cha? Here goes:::

• Move the straggly Mallow (to make room for the yet-to-be-ordered pile of ordure)
• Construct the ordure area (buy posts & post-hole spade)
• Order ordure
• Dig in ordure (listen, it's a crap job but someone's gotta do it).
• Complete digging of remaining plots
• Move "rotten rubbish wood", excavated from bottom of plot and still lurking there only marginally tidier than when un-excavated) to the top ere it goes to the tip.
• Construct chicken-wire-hurdles to keep pigeons off cabbages etc. Could I perhaps automate this, with a motion sensor to detect incoming pidg and unleash barrage of "**** Off, you fat B*st*rds"? There's money to be made in this.
• Burn other rubbish when dry, or encourage with paraffin
• Bring fallow plots back into production
• Leave more space around plants, and hoe more (more space = less chance of hoeing the innocent)
• Fix hole in water butt (concrete?). Ever the optimist, eh, that summer 09 will be so good that watering may be required?
• De-buttercup the raspberry plot (why do you build me up, buttock up?) before tying them in (buy posts) and adding more (buy raspberries).
• Buy & construct either a greenhouse or polytunnel
• Put a glass lid on the former cold frames to transform them into, wait for it, cold frames once again.
• Major Tidy (that's what we need, some military discipline. Attention, Major Tidy) of the bottom end of the plot excavated last year to uncover the grapevine
• Prune the grapevine, prune the blackberries, prune the Autumn Bliss (a state I aspire to), prune everything.
• Cut down the rogue hawthorn. That's a very British, Rogue Male, sort of name isn't it? hawthorn's the name, Rogue Hawthorn. I could have that as a pseudonym. Perhaps I May. that is of course a clever allusion, which you can follow by dint of looking-it-up.
• Shall i coppice the cobnut? Come, Felicity, let us coppice yon cobnut. Coppice yer cobnuts while yer may.

And that'll do. Happy Xmas & see you next year. Don't forget to coppice yer cobnuts.

Winter Solstice 2008

Today is the shortest day. The sun reaches it's highest elevation at 12:04 before giving up and heading south again (at least that's what it said in yesterday's Times). So from here on in it'll be getting progressively lighter. Yippee. I think that does begin to happen, in quite small ways, quite soon (like, it starts getting lighter again). It'll be noticeable by mid-January.

If I were a pagan I'd be dancing skyclad around an allotment bonfire to celebrate. I can hear the Salvation Army band in the background. Perhaps they know that acts of skycladness are imminent and are here to save me from myself.

But it's too wet for a bonfire and too cold for skyclad. you'll just have to visualise it.

The pleasure of a well-turned sod

Digging today! Digging!!

I love digging. I love to see an untidy piece of ground transformed into a uniformly turned over, waiting for winter cold, well-dug patch. Robins seem to like it too. One ate so much I'm surprised he could still fly.

It's been glorious here today. A really heavy frost overnight then clear blue sky and wall to wall sunshine which, as the plot faces due south, hit us full-on. It was almost (that's, almost) shirt-off weather. Days like this remind me why I have an allotment. It's my own bit of land to work, deeply rooted in my family agricultural background.

My dad was a farm labourer and in winter after school I was straight into the byre for evening milking. Although the byre had electricity, for the milking machines, for some reason (probably parsimony) it was lit by hurricane lamps and Tilley lamps. I can still see the soft glow of the hurricane lamps and the altogether fiercer light of the Tilley's, and remember the hissing sound they made.

The first house I can remember living in was lit entirely by paraffin lamps (and the toilet was an earth closet at the end of the garden). These lamps were a design classic - the Aladdin lamp, which was a staple of isolated homesteads across the USA and England throughout the first half of the 1900s. My parents kept theirs and used it regularly until they had central heating installed, because it was a source of heat as well as light. I still have it and it still works (very useful in power cuts!).

Anyone else got/used/seen an Aladdin lamp?

Khaki, Khaki

I saw a bloke yesterday, a pensioneer, sat in his car (a Rover) wearing a khaki car coat, with a khaki cap, khaki shirt, khaki cardigan and khaki tie. I couldn't see his trousers but suspect they were khaki too. Probably considers beige a dangerously avant-garde colour.

Kinderkopje

"Kinderkopje" in Dutch is Children's Cups, used to describe cobblestones. In the infamous Paris-Roubaix "Hell of the North" early season classic cycle race it's used to describe the appalling cobbles over which much of the race takes place. Colloquially, they are known as Babies Heads.

Why am I telling you this in an otherwise seemly allotmenting blog? Because the rhubarb stools I've just planted out resemble nothing so much as Hell of the North Kinderkopjes. Here's a pic.


I now have 8 large rhubarb plants, known round here as a Triangle. Surely you've heard of the rhubarb triangle? Hopefully I won't have to harvest it by candlelight, like they do at Oldroyds.

Last year I made a Rhubarb Bellini & commend it to your attention.

Parallel Blogging again?

All is quiet in the allotment blogosphere, although I have five "Kinderkopje" of rhubarb in the back of the car waiting to be put in. Not heard of Kinderkopje? All will be revealed, with photos. For now I'll just tantalise you with "Hell of the North".

Needless to say, the car smells heavily of earth.

Anyway, all being quiet on the planting front, I'm toying with the idea of revisiting Davey-boy Douglas in the Pacific Northwest, circa 1826. You've already seen him travelling across the Continent with the Hudson's Bay Express to York Factory but he'd had adventures aplenty before then in an almost unexplored part of North America. Remember, this was only 20 years after Lewis and Clark.

I'm minded to start with some extracts from Autumn 1825 so that I can get him teed up ready for 1826/2009. 2009 is the Year of Scots Homecoming and our Douglas film project is aiming to premiere next autumn in Scotland. Seems appropriate somehow to be following Douglas himself in parallel. Any views? Interested? Couldn't give a stuff? Hello? Anyone there?

Try this for a taster, from October 4th 1825, Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River:

"In consequence of receiving a wound on my left knee by falling on a rusty nail when employed packing the last of my seed boxes, I am prevented from proceeding with my collection to the ship. On the 7th my leg became violently inflamed and a large abscess formed on the knee-joint which did not suppurate until the 16th. It is needless to observe that I was unable to continue my journeys or increase my seed collection during the time. This very unfortunate circumstance gave me much uneasiness with regard to my harvest of seed."

Never fall on a rusty nail!

The Last Raspberry

I’m quite pleased to be eating the last raspberry on 9th November, considering that last year the whole crop was worse than useless and I ended up grubbing the pathetic little stumps out. No chance of that this year, in fact I think I’m going to get some more – we like raspberries!! They desperately need weeding but they’re not alone in that.

The plot is generally looking at its worst at the moment; dull, drab and grey without any autumn digging done and generally sodden.

But I’ve looked at the weather forecast for Churchill, Manitoba (just up the coast from where I spent part of the summer at York Factory) and that puts it in perspective. It’s now frozen in and will stay that way until April. Daytime temperatures next week won’t get above freezing and night-time will get down to -14C. And it’ll get a lot lower than that; it’s still only November and the sea hasn’t frozen yet. I’m quite attracted to those temperatures but it would make allotmenting a bit tough. They did try, in the late 1800s, to develop gardens at York Factory but the soil was poor and wet and the growing season was simply too short for anything but quick stuff like lettuce. I think it’s safe to assume that the grizzled traders of the Hudson’s Bay Co’y weren’t heavy consumers of lettuce.

Bear Necessities

I mentioned in my post on August 23rd that a polar bear had walked around the building we were filming in in Northern Manitoba just two days before we got there.

And here he is, doing just that.

It was Forty Years Ago today

Well, more or less. I came to Sheffield as an 18 year old student in October 1968, and never left. Here I still am. Until two years ago I hadn’t lived more than a mile in any direction from where I lived when I first came to Sheffield. One of the main roads into & out of Sheffield is West Street and I’ve spent my entire career, in various different jobs in the University and Civil Service, within a mile of West Street. If I were a sheep I’d be “hefted to my hill”. I’ve sometimes thought of myself like that.

Sounds boring doesn’t it. And yet, and yet…. It doesn’t feel that way. Sheffield is where I met my wife, married, raised two children, had two allotments and used as a springboard for piles of interesting journeys. We thought hard about leaving entirely when the place sank into a slough of despond in the 90’s. Sheffield has a massive chip on its shoulder about not being Leeds, the regional capital. In the aftermath of the end of the steel industry that caused a “nobody loves us, everybody hates us, we’re going down the garden to eat worms” attitude. But it never will be the regional capital and has now, thankfully, reinvigorated itself and carved/is carving a different identity altogether.

None of that has anything to do with allotmentaria but I thought you’d want to know. If you don’t, well I’ve told you anyway!!

As for the allotment, it’s looking much better now. I had a massive strimming session today so most of it now looks halfway tidy. There’s more to do of course and I need to get some manure delivered so I can spend a happy weekend shovelling.......

I feel like a Dixie Chick

“I ain’t hoed a row since I don’t know when”

But I did get back to the allotment today, with a newly repaired strimmer and made vast amounts of strim, strim, strimmy progress. Mid-way through the afternoon Chris & Susan (who share the entrance and other half of the double-width plot) arrived, with concern about was I all right, had noticed crops going unpicked, vegetation climbing to the skies etc. Explained that I’ve had a travelling summer and an allotment neglected at a critical moment, of which there have been many, never gets back under control until autumn. I was quite touched at this concern.

And now it feels, courtesy of a mega-strim, that it is heading back to the straight and narrow. I did begin to consider whether keeping the allotment was truly viable; I’m 60 in 18mths time and intend to do more travelling so don’t want to be constrained by my cabbages, so to speak. But nor do I want to walk away from something I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in, and which I do want to maintain as an active energetic interest for a zillion years to come. I think I do need to think rather harder about how much of it lies fallow next year so I can concentrate on doing the bits I have in cultivation rather better.

As ever, there are competing priorities:

• Normal life at home
• Work which pays the bills
• An OU course I’m starting next week (Beyond Google; information mgmt)
• Continuing work on the David Douglas movie project which has taken a lot of time this year and will take more next year.
• Short Way Round on the scooter (with apologies to Avril Lavigne, “I am a scutr boi, she said blow yr hutr boi”)
  
  But, if you want something done ask a busy man (or woman).
  
  Finally, to help explain why I do all this, here is a puny little Bishop of Llandaff who did eventually come good(ish).

Think I’ll start the Bishops off in pots next year cos starting them in the ground was no use whatsoever.

And a piece de resistance of some totally unexpected Autumn Bliss raspberoonies, which went down very well with ice cream as dessert for Woody & Wilma Wilbury this evening. This is seriously good news because it means they’ve established properly and I should be able to get a decent crop off them next year.

It's like a Jungle sometimes.

In fact it's like a jungle right now, due to being away following David Douglas. Truth is, the allotment looks awful. But, given the choice of travelling where I've been and having a tidy allotment, travel wins hands down.

Today was the first opportunity to get at it and I made little real impression. Mowed the central path and the side path.

Had to stop in the end as the humidity was so high I was sweating cobs. All of which prefaced a massive thunderstorm later. Why is it so wet? It's been awful just lately.

JOURNEY'S END (for both of us)

August 27th & 28th, 1827

Entered Steel River, a stream of some magnitude but not so rapid as the last. Breakfasted at its junction with the York River [nowadays the Hayes River]. Continued until dusk when we put to shore, boiled the kettle and embarked under sail. Aurora borealis beautiful [we were prevented from seeing the Aurora by the storm which kept us benighted]. The idea of finishing my journey and expectations of hearing from England made the night pass swiftly.

At sunrise on Tuesday I had the pleasing scene of beholding York Factory two miles distant, the sun glittering on the roofs of the house (being covered in tin) and in the bay riding at anchor the company's ship from England [the Prince of Wales].

The hearty welcome I had to the shores of the Atlantic from Mr McTavish and others was to me not a little gratifying [altho the York Factory Journal merely records that they arrived!]. In the most polite manner everything that could add to my comfort was instantly handed, including a new suit of clothing, linen etc [the Pants] ready to put on [altho this would all be accounted for and paid for by the Horticultural Society of course]. No letters from England

Regret the death of my Calumet Eagle; was strangled a few days ago with the cord by which he was tied by the leg; fell over the eavings of one of the houses and was found dead in the morning. What can give one more pain - this animal I carried 2000 miles and now lost him, I might say, at home.

It now only remains to state that I have had great assistance, civility and friendly attentions from the various persons I have formed an acquaintance with during my stay in North America.

And here our journeys come together. In 2008 I can only echo Douglas's sentiments above.

It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have followed his travels to York Factory in remote Manitoba. Like him, our party has been assisted at every stage with every kindness, particularly by Ian Campbell and Doug Gibbs (and Nelson the dog) of Parks Canada at York Factory, and Bronwen Quarry of the Manitoba Archives, all of whom went far beyond the call of duty to help us illuminate the Douglas story.

Tomorrow, August 28th, 2008 - the 181st anniversary of Douglas's arrival at York Factory - I fly out of Winnipeg and back home. Thank you for your patience in following this parallel blog through 1827 and 2008; not many people have commented but I know people have been watching it. Normal allotment service will resume in due course.

August 25th, 1827

In the course of the morning the boat was considerably injured descending this stream, the water being low. At noon, while descending a rapid, the boat struck heavily on the rock and shattered seven of the timbers and planking. Just had time to reach a small island when she was filled. My hands tied up - could not get off. [He then notes, for no apparent reason, that three of his planted specimens are all fresh and berates himself for not doing more of that] (Why did you not bring Gaultheria alive - across the continent - 2900 miles? It could be done.

August 25th, 2008

We've spent the day at the Hudson's Bay Co'y Archives in Winnipeg, looking at their records from 1827 through to 1834. This is fascinating stuff - they were obsessive record keepers so that everything could be brought to account.

In the 1827 York Factory Account Books we found the list of materials issued to Douglas at York Factory for his journey home, and which would eventually be paid for by the Horticultural Society. They include a gallon of rum, for a four week journey!! But also - David Douglas's Underpants. The records include 2 pairs of white flannel drawers at nine shillings and eightpence each. Only two pairs of pants for a 4 week sea journey. They'd have been a bit whiffy by the end, altho once he'd got the gallon of rum down his neck I doubt he'd have noticed.

26th August, 1827

Employed all day at the boat until three o'clock when we set out again, the boat making a great deal of water.

August 23rd, 1827

Thunder & lightning during the night. As usual made an early start and reached Oxford House at ten, where we took breakfast [all these places still exist. Oxford House is a small community housing the Oxford House Cree Nation]. Proceeded at eleven and passed some very bad rapids. Launched the boat at Trout Fall Portage, where the remainder of the day was spent repairing the boat [by this time they aren't in small canoes any more but in York Boats, large boats specifically developed for freight on Lake Winnipeg and the Hayes River]

Friday 24th August 1827

On leaving Trout Fall we found the boat still made water but as the wind was favourable no time was lost. Entered Lower Jack River at sundown where we camped, a small narrow stream with low banks.

Sunday August 24th, 2008 - We're Out!!!

The storm finally eased after keeping us detained for two extra days. Saw two polar bears on the day we left and two bald eagles. We've finally completed our filming at York Factory; on the last day we were able to touch permafrost, which in this location is about 18" below the floor of the main building.

So, an hour on a bush plane, four tedious hours in Gillam (one of the least exciting places in this world) and a flight back to Winnipeg and we're back in the Fort Garry Hotel [located on the site of the original Red River Settlement visited by Douglas in 1827]

Aug 21st, 1827

Started a little before day. Passed through a small lake and creek until we arrived at White Fall portage at ten - a small cataract with high rocks on one side, adorned by timber. At four, left and passed the upper or small hill gate where the boat was lightened previous to running the rapid. Navigation intricate [and flying over it you can see why - it's MAMBA country, Mile After Mile of Bugger All, except for endless small lakes and streams. The country is 50% water]

Wednesday 22nd August, 1827

At seven came to Hill Gate, a rocky rapid narrow part of the river, where considerable time was lost lowering the boat with the line. Timber gradually becomes smaller as we approach the coast [indeed, thin poor soil, marshy conditions & cold climate = poor growth]. Shortly after noon entered Oxford Lake, a small narrow but beautiful sheet of water with bold rocky banks and numerous islands.