I’m going to be 37 on Sunday, and so this song has been going around my head. It’s a very dark vision of turning 37: suburbia, frustrated fantasies, boredom, a losing of identity under kids and husband, and ultimately suicide, but I’ve always strangely liked it, and been particularly intrigued by the line: ‘At the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair.’ I suppose I’ve always wondered how I would feel when I reached 37, and whether any of that would relate to me. And whether I would have managed to ride through Paris etc…by now.
The day before I turn 37 will see the last of my Guardian Q&A columns, by neat coincidence. They are little things, but I have done them for a long time, almost ten years* according to my editor (I’m sure it’s closer to eight, but am not a great record keeper), and I feel a need for a little self-indulgence over this, so humour me. I started off under Christopher Lloyd (I was meant to be the cheeky younger female to his er…cheeky older male). Then after his death I shared it with Carol Klein, then a page of my own for a while, and then finally in with a load of other questions about removing stains from toilets and where to buy verjus in Doncaster. Perhaps I should have seen that the end was nigh. At every previous redesign it has clung on, to my amazement and relief, and it is by a very long way the longest running column in the magazine. I got it within months of turning freelance and it really marked the start of something. So it’s been a little thing in the magazine but a big deal to me.
It isn’t a bad turn of events though. It was time, I think. I will still be in the magazine every week doing tips, and I have a spanking new features contract, plus I get to tout my wares to other papers, which is exciting if terrifying.
And I like the timing of it, I like the fact that, at the age of 37 I’m being propelled out of what has been a pretty easy, cosy gig into a new and challenging time, and that I can listen to that song with pity and understanding, but not recognition. Boredom is not an option. I haven’t actually driven a sports car through Paris with the warm wind in my hair, but I’m not about to rule that out just yet.

* Pity plug: you can buy the book of a collection of the columns here

The other day I got the kids to pollinate the peach tree. You get a soft brush and brush gently over the inner bits of the open flowers. You do it cos bees are a bit rubbish at this time of year (before someone shouts at me they’re not really, they’re great, but there arent that many of them about). So for guaranteed pollination you do this:

You can sing the song too if you like. Yeah.

PS Have realised since I posted this that I didnt say: my son made the film. It’s nothing to do with me really (I provided paintbrushes). He is also the one singing the song.

This last couple of weeks I have found myself cheering the removal of a dictator I was only vaguely previously aware of, feeling emotional about the liberation of a people that I had previously presumed were liberated, feeling ignorant. But my real, deep puzzlement has been over emerging hints of our involvement. Why is there film of Tony Blair hugging Gaddafi? How come the tear gas used in Libya comes from a British firm? Why, precisely, do we appear to be friends with these people?

Then this morning I saw something that made the penny drop. Naomi Klein, on twitter, wrote : ‘Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.’

I know it seems stupid to try to draw a line between what is going on in the Middle East and my garden, one so momentous the other so small and insignificant, but it exists, so I thought I’d come on here and try to connect a few dots between what is happening on the news and us, the gardeners and cooks.

We (not just gardeners, all of us) have become dependant on oil for everything, but almost above all for food. From the tractors that plough the fields to the manufacture of chemical fertilisers that are sprinkled on to the tired soils to fluff them into performing one more time, to the harvesting machinery, preparation and packaging systems, distribution network and more. Our entire food system is tied to that stuff that Gaddafi has (or had). We are so very addicted that we turn our faces away from his massive cruelty (and dictatorships throughout the Middle East) in order to ensure ourselves a constant, uninterrupted supply.

Growing and buying organically, so that you are not encouraging the use of oil-based fertilisers and pesticides, buying seasonally and locally, to cut out air miles, buying raw products and cooking them from scratch, using every scrap of land to produce in a sustainable way, all these things seem like small things, but because of the disproportionate extent to which food is embroiled in this they are not. Each is a big deal, a political action. Every way that we can make ourselves less dependent on oil helps to release the wicked grip it has on us.

I’m not going to pretend to know anything like the full history of how this horror in the Middle East has come about, but I do know it hasn’t occurred because of some lone nutter. We have all been a party to this, and these people know it and they hate us for it. The ridiculous thing is that the alternative is so good, the organic approach, the local sourcing, the community growing, the cooking from scratch: it’s not a problem.

This post is not about wagging my finger or telling anyone off. I reckon many of you are already doing most of this stuff, but I just wanted to make that link explicit, cheer you on, remind you that every little bit of our easy living comes at a price to somebody and that we’re seeing it on the news every night at the moment. Gardeners and cooks have a real and important role, because we have the land (little bits often, but land nonetheless) or the skills, or both to stop being spoon fed and to grow up and start taking responsibility for ourselves.

I am bad at spotting potential significant blogging moments. I somehow convinced myself that this blog was a full month and a bit older than it really is and so missed the opportunity to mark its momentous first birthday (Jan 7th as it turns out. No flowers, really). I think I once managed to write a ‘wimmins issues’ type post just a couple of days after International Women’s Day, which wasnt bad going, but now here I am on about resolutions on the eve of February.

But I am writing off January. Bad-health luck has left me in bed, a&e and emergency dentists for much of it. Work has suffered, I have suffered, the kids have suffered, and there’s been a sudden rush on number-recognition telephone buying among those I rely on for help. It’s been pants, but with last week’s root canal work I seem to have turned a corner. I feel well and healthy and vital for the first time since before Christmas, so – rather than melodramatically taking to my bed and writing off the whole year – I am setting January coolly aside and starting my resolutions afresh. And here they are:

1) Go back to netball – I managed this once before the tooth pain floored me. It was great – no, really! – and if I say it here I have to do it.

2) Stop saying ‘bugger’ – I seem to have lit upon this as acceptable now that my expletive of choice is out of the question, but it is almost as unedifying as The Bad Word, when a big-eyed, blonde, be-ringletted three-year old takes a liking to saying it. A lot.

3) Go out into the garden more: and hopefully – by extension – blog more frequently. Gardening alone is always a kind of meditation and clears the mind to let ideas in. When I don’t garden I don’t blog, and I’d like to blog more often. Wont make rash promises on that one though, given my past form.

4) Tackle the veg box head on, the moment it arrives on the doorstep.

While I was ill there was an inevitable slowing down of cooking from scratch, and we have ended up with quite an alarming root veg backlog, which is something no-one wants. And every thursday – ill or well – more parsnips arrive. I have been making a sort of curried parsnip soup like it’s going out of fashion, but I decided to try something fancy the other day and make some root veg crisps, like the ones you buy at huge expense on long train journeys. I thought it might make the kids eat root veg. Ha…

So, here comes the third in my very occasional series of recipes I made from the veg box* or allotment (here’s one and two). I took two beetroots, two oversized carrots, and two parsnips, sliced them up as fine as I could (you most probably have a fancy attachment on your fancy food processor that will do a better job), tossed them in a bit of sunflower oil sea salt and pepper and arranged them on separate trays (so they didn’t all turn beetrooty: no flies on me) in a hot oven. This, I think now, was a mistake. The ones on the edges burnt, the ones in the middle were soggy. I wonder if a low, slow oven might be better, to dry them out a bit and cook them more evenly. Thoughts welcome.

Despite their shortcomings and their dissimilarity to those posh packet ones, they looked beautiful, and tasted delicious, and it strikes me only now that they would make a perfect topping to lift that nth bowl of parsnip soup to another level. As it was the kids wouldn’t touch them (you saw that coming, dintcha?) but some friends happened to pop in at that moment and I looked like one of those proper mums who always has a healthy, home-made, organic root vegetable-based snack on the go. Always a bonus.

*If you are in the Bristol area (or even if you’re not) and if you happen to see this post before the 1st February (I know, this is getting less likely, but still, bear with me…) this is your very last chance to invest in The Community Farm, an exciting new Bristolian community funded agriculture venture and the people from whom I buy my very fine veg box. Buy! Support! Members get discounts on the very fine veg boxes too…

Spiced chestnut and walnut loaf

I have flu, and I have been baking. I’m not sure what the link is. I think there was an edge of delirium to me dragging my aching, snot-ridden carcass out of bed, turning the oven on, and getting jiggy with the yeast and the kneading, and I know there is a hint of displacement about it. Christmas is seriously looming. I havent done anything about this. But still, there is now a fresh, slightly Christmassy loaf in the house.

What inspired the baking, apart from the fever, was that – it being Christmas time – we have chestnuts in the house. Just vacuum-packed ones, so far, although the real thing will follow shortly, if I manage to get to the shops before Christmas Day. And I have a bit of a thing about chestnuts. And the thing is this: a couple of years ago I went to a talk at out local gardening group entitled: Feeding ourselves in post-peak-oil-Britain. The essence of the talk was that our food systems are ludicrously dependent on oil, from the churning up of soil with tractors to the fertilising of it to the packaging and transportation of it. Oil isn’t going to last forever, and there are some that think that ‘peak oil’ – the point at which production goes into decline – is not far off or has already been reached. The talk was by someone from Transition Bristol, and the idea all these transition groups have is to start to prepare now for this eventuality.

Some of the most energy-hungry crops are the ones we depend on the most, said the speaker – the grains from which we get our breads. Fields must be ploughed every year, soils fertilised etc…This is because we fight against nature to create the conditions in which these grains will grow. Our natural vegetation in the UK is woodland, not prairie. If there were a crop we could grow in a woodland environment that would fill the same gap as grains do, we’d be mad not to grow it, wouldn’t we? Step forward sweet chestnuts. The nuts have a similar nutritional make-up to many grains and can be made into flour (or just baked and eaten – yum) and they just need planting, growing and harvesting. No annual tractor action, no vast input of fossil fuels.

And so the woman from Transition Bristol suggested we grow them. And we – all city gardeners with small or medium plots – all guffawed. But it planted the seed in my mind and in fact this year I did try to give it a go. Mark Diacono very kindly gave me one of his trees, and I planted it in a root control bag, to see if it’s possible to grow this saviour tree in a city garden. Unfortunately I killed it. I’m pretty sure this was all about neglect, and nothing at all to do with the root control bag. I am going to have another go next year.

So instead I have bought some chestnuts and made a loaf out of them, which through my flu-haze seemed like some kind of a symbolic act, and also a nod towards some sort of festiveness, in which this house is so sadly lacking. I didn’t grind the chestnuts into flour. I just opened the packet, mashed them up and chucked them in, but it made a really moist, textured loaf, kind of the consistency of a rye bread. It’s really very lovely actually. I adapted the recipe from Anne Sheasby’s spiced walnut bread in The Big Book of Bread. If you fancy a piece of germ-ridden chestnut bread and a hot ribena, you know where to come. Merry Christmas!

Spiced chestnut and walnut bread

575g strong plain wholemeal flour

1 and a half teaspoons salt

1 sachet easy-blend dried yeast

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

a pinch of dried cloves

75g walnut halves, roughly chopped

250 g cooked chestnuts

about 300ml warm water

a little milk, for glazing

The recipe says to add the walnuts after the first proving, but I just chucked it all in together, mixed, kneaded, left it to rise, then kneaded it again, shaped it into a loaf and left it to rise for a further 45 minutes. It baked at gas mark 7 (220C/425F) for ten minutes and then I turned it down to gas mark 5 (190C/375F) for a further 25 minutes.

 

I got an award! Photo by Mike Wyatt/GMG

I have had one of those days where you find yourself staring at a spot on the floor, with a silly smile on your face. One of those days where you have a feeling of rosiness, and things being all fine with the world, when you have that constant sense – even if you temporarily forget what – that something really, really good has happened. Yesterday was the Garden Media Guild awards lunch. I have been attending this shindig for a very long time, about ten years I reckon, and always loved it for the glamour it sprinkles on the gardening world. But I have never won or even been shortlisted for a thing, and have always gone home lightly pissed but empty-handed. But this year I entered this blog, and it won.

I was thrilled enough at being on the shortlist, which included three of my absolute favourite blogs in the world, Mark Diacono’s Otter Farm blog, James Alexander-Sinclair’s Blogging from Blackpitts and Dawn Isaac’s Little Green Fingers. But the moment Alan Gray said ‘And the winner is… Lia Leendertz’ ranks up there with the real crackers, career-wise (these are the two others: being called to my neighbour’s phone in the depths of the Italian countryside to take a call from Ian Hodgson, editor of The Garden, telling me to set off for home because he was giving me my first garden journalist job; and getting the phonecall on Lyme Regis seafront from Susie Steiner at The Guardian giving me my regular slot at Weekend. The feeling is almost precisely the same; glee combined with wonder at having actually reached a longed-for milestone, against all expectations).

So I wobbled my way to the front, thinking ‘Am I making a fool of myself here? Did they really just call my name?’, and Alan Gray read out lovely things the judges had said about the blog, and they took a picture in which I tried not to grin like an idiot and they gave me a certificate and £250. And when I got back to the table I was shaking.

This blog is almost exactly a year old and I love writing it. I love the comments and the sense of community, and the fact that I can write what I want when i want and, wonderfully, people seem to be interested and want to join in. I love the fact that it is the most political of posts that have attracted the most comments, and how that gives lie to the cosy, inward-looking image that many people have of gardeners. And on a more personal level I rely on the support I get from fellow bloggers and twitterers. So I know I’m being gushy and uncool and over-emotional – I am a little tired and more than a little hung over – but I think this is a perfect opportunity to say thanks to all those who encouraged me to set this up in the first place, gave me advice or answered my annoying questions when I was struggling with the technical side of things, and to everyone who has left comments, or even just visited quietly. No blog works in a vacuum, so thank you.

I will be sitting, staring, smiling in slight disbelief for a little while yet.

Kids, sparklers

Last Saturday late afternoon we went up to the allotment, kids, friends, and all. Everyone had bought a few fireworks. The walk up is always good. The site is just behind the street parallel with ours so it doesn’t take long, even with straggling toddlers. It’s through the lane, across a road, along the prison wall and then we’re through the allotment gate and up the main site path. It was strangely mild and still, and a few other people had the same idea, with smoky fires dotted around. It’s been, until the last few days, a brilliant autumn, still and dry, and as we walked up it seemed like every death-throes leaf was clinging on to every tree or bush. Plants I never considered to have autumn colour – buddleias! roses! – did have. Smoky, still and colourful. It was a perfect autumn evening.

We lit a fire in the brazier and got the barbecue going. The kids climbed the trees, and (I’m afraid) the women chatted and got the food out on the table: sausages, rolls, some pre-baked potatoes, chestnuts for roasting, chocolate brownies, while the men grunted and poked the fires. I wandered off and looked the allotment over, glass of wine in hand. The allotment is at the top of a hill and as darkness fell I could see fireworks going off right across Bristol. I could see my kids playing and my friends nattering and my husband…erm… poking. After a little while and to great excitement and some tears we started setting off our own little fireworks, getting through – I think – a couple of Roman candles, a misbehaving Catherine wheel and two small rockets before it started raining. Just a little at first and then harder, and colder. Very quickly we were all soaking and cold, and food was being gathered up and stuffed into bags and small children bundled into prams. We all dashed off into the night, our separate ways, home to electric lights and roofs and ovens. It was a soggy end to what was looking like being the perfect autumn evening.

I dont feel too sad about all this tho. On starting to share the allotment with our friends we all made a decision to use the plot as a place not just to grow food but to mark the seasons, celebrating summer with barbecues and winter with wassailing, showing the kids what the turning of the year really means and giving them the memories to measure it by. And the thing about doing such things is that they sometimes go wrong. I actually think that’s why outdoor stuff is so great, that knowledge that this enjoyment is on a knife-edge, misery and magic are at the mercy of the elements. It’s the reason camping is so much more special than B&Bing. It can be utterly, utterly grim, but when it’s good it’s so damn good: fires and stars and music. I have no doubt the kids will remember last Saturday, far more than an ordinary Saturday evening, just as I remember the time my friend fell off a rock on holiday and all the many times my mum’s van broke down in the dark in the middle of no-where. The night we went to the allotment for fireworks, and climbed the trees, and then it rained, and we ran home carrying hot chestnuts.

 

Dandelion roots about to meet their maker

 

It’s autumn, so it’s time for ‘garden experts’ that offer ‘advice’ in ‘national newspapers’ and the like to tell you to feed your lawn. Phosphates encourage root expansion, and a dose now sees roots burrow down deep throughout winter, to better support those hard-working blades come next year. I can understand why one might reach for the ‘weed n feed’ at the garden centre.

So it also seems the perfect moment to have a bit of a rant about fertilisers. I reckon they have to be the next ‘peat’ in terms of gardeners coming to realise that the benefits they are getting aren’t worth the damage they are doing. Here, from a post on Mark Diacono’s blog (sparked, rather neatly, by an early post on this blog) is a recipe for nitrogen fertiliser:

“For 1 tonne of nitrogen fertiliser. You will need:

- 1 tonne of oil
- 108 tonnes of water

and as well as your tonne of nitrogen fertiliser you will produce 7 tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases in the process. And as it breaks down nitrogen fertiliser releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.”

It’s terrifying stuff, and it seems incredible that gardeners rely on it without much clue as to how it’s made. I even reviewed a ‘Self-Sufficiency’ book recently for Gardens Illustrated that included a picture of pushing plugs of fertiliser pellets into pots. It’s possibly the least ‘self-sufficient’ thing you can do, gardening-wise, but I guess it shows the extent to which it isn’t considered an issue.

The story with phosphates is slightly different. Our agriculture is dependent on phosphate fertilisers derived from phosphate rock, a finite source which we are charging through at a rate of knots. The UK imports 206,000 tons per year from 4 north African countries. At current use there is about 30 years global supplies left, after which, essentially, we’re all up that rather unpleasantly named creek.

It seems a little daft to be sprinkling it on our lawns. I tried a while ago to find a sustainable, organic alternative to autumn lawn and tree fertilisers in response to a question from a Guardian reader and entirely failed, but during my search I stumbled upon a little gem of information. Dandelion roots are extremely rich in phosphates. It seems so logical once you know it: those fierce, indefatigable, infuriating roots – of course they must contain the absolute essence of rootiness! The very stuff of root itself! So here’s another, nicer recipe from me:

Take:

Some dandelions (as many as you can find)

Some water

A bucket

Dig up the dandelions. I’ve snapped off the leaves of mine to make them as purely phosphate as possible, without a hint of leafy nitrogen, but that’s possibly unnecessary. Chop them up into small bits, pour on water and leave for a few weeks. Strain off (the roots may even be dead enough to go onto the compost heap, but I never told you that. If unsure, dunk ‘em in water for another few weeks first), dilute and water onto your lawn, trees and bushes, or anything that you want to encourage to develop a strong root system. Feel chuffed, if possibly very slightly smug, that you have fertilised your garden from the ultimate renewable source (well I’ve never managed to kill one) and without the teeniest recourse to distant fast-depleting mines.

This is a picture of my old Aeonium collection: several of these are already dead, more will be soon

My horticultural weakness is aeoniums. I love the big, succulent look of them, and they remind me of my summer holidays in Cornwall. They are an indulgence in the proper old, horticultural style in that they are not fully hardy. They need cosseting over winter, not to be allowed to fall below 5degrees C, and that means heating.

Well last year I made a big song and dance about not cosseting them, about not heating my greenhouse. I realise that the amount of heat is negligible compared with that involved in heating the house, but it just seemed such a symbol of gardening decadence: an oil heater, burning away all night, night after night, in a little house made out of glass. It was my Dubai golf course. It sat in the middle of my ‘low-carbon garden’ sticking the Vs up at it and then pulling its pants down and mooning it, through the glass, for good measure.

So I said I wasn’t going to do it. I said it nice and public like, on the Guardian website, in order to encourage others to follow my lead and give it a go. And then – oh you KNOW the next bit – we had the longest, hardest winter since 1963. I have no idea how many plant deaths that post was responsible for, at least several, but I know what happened in my own greenhouse. A lot of them made it through those long, frozen weeks, particularly the more common types such as Aeonium ‘Zwartkopf’ and A. arborescens, and a lot died, particularly the more unusual and satisfyingly lush types that I got from tiny breeders, such as A. ‘Green Eye’, and A. ‘Sunburst’.

Anyway, I am undaunted. I am doing it again. I actually went back to Cornwall, re-bought a load of the things that had died, and am now going to leave them in the greenhouse, unheated over winter. I sort of can’t help myself with this aeonium replenishing lark. It’s like a horticultural tic. But the plan is not quite as mad as it sounds. Last winter was exceptional; there’s a chance it could happen again this year, but I don’t think so (if that isn’t giving my plants the kiss of death, I don’t know what is).

And so – Actual Gardening Advice Alert! – here’s a quick run-through of how to not heat your greenhouse. Mine is already insulated with bubble-wrap (I never took it off in spring. Used it as greenhouse shading. Eh? Eh? Not as stupid as I look…), so after clearing away all the manky tomatoes and sweeping it out, I moved the table away from the south-facing side, to allow as much light in as possible, parcel-taped cardboard to about hip height all the way around (except for on the south side), parcel-taped cardboard all the way up the north-facing side, which is against a fence anyway, so no light loss. Also I filled up the water-butt, so it acts as a kind of heat store. ‘Heat’ is most probably too strong a word in the dead of a February night, but even so, it regulates the temperature of the air around it, apparently.

There is one thing I will be doing differently. I ended last year’s post with the words ‘If I can’t grow certain plants without blasting them with a heater all winter, I most probably shouldn’t be growing them at all’ and I will add this time: if I can’t grow certain plants without driving to Cornwall every summer to buy them again, I should definitely learn to live without. If they die, that’s it. I will stoically accept the limitations of my climate. Honest.

I am going to write about cooking. I haven’t done this before for lots of reasons. 1) I am a garden writer and this is a gardening blog, 2) there are lots of people who do it better than I ever could, and 3) I am not a great cook. But I do cook. Also it strikes me more and more that cooking from scratch – cutting out the packaging and the pre-prepped food and the food miles – is a political act. Producing your own ingredients isn’t enough: I have grown plenty of produce simply to feed the compost heap and I reckon I’m not alone. At the Soil Association Conference early this year I went to a talk given by Mike Small pioneer of the Fife Diet, the idea behind which is that you eat only ingredients from within a 100 mile radius. When asked what the main challenge was he said that it wasn’t the sourcing of ingredients. It was the cooking of everything from scratch. This made me want to jump on my chair and yell ‘amen, brother!’. It spoke to me. I would love to spend hours in the kitchen but I work, I have two young kids and a not-so-well husband. Many days I simply move something from freezer to oven to table and on the days that I don’t sacrifices have to be made. The kids end up fighting or watching telly (or both in quick succession), I work later into the evening, the washing gets left on the line all night, blogs get neglected, whatever. But I think it’s important and I want to do it.

So my aim is to do an occasional series telling you about stuff I’m cooking from scratch or preserving, either from allotment produce or from the veg box. It wont be professionally done, it wont be particularly original, it may even be a cry for help (of the ‘tell me what else to do with these parsnips!’ variety, nothing more alarming, I promise). Having said I will do it will make me both cook and blog a bit more regularly, I hope.

posh baked beans

So before I chunter on too long about why, I’d better do it. We picked the first of our borlotti beans from the allotment on Sunday and I miraculously and blissfully got a free couple of hours, son going off to a neighbour’s to play, and everyone else going to sleep. I chopped and fried up some little chestnut-skinned shallots and garlic, and then chucked in the beans, stirred them round a bit then poured on a carton of passata (this is the only ‘not from the allotment’ bit *smug face*), then let it bubble endlessly until it got so thick and gloopy that it started hurling thick clots of tomato paste high into the air, like a bubbling hot mud pool. Things were getting messy so I chucked it in the oven and then, last thing, chopped up some parsley and thyme and stirred that in. I think I have made something like this before, but couldn’t find the recipe anywhere, so I don’t know what it’s called (Michelle Wheeler tells me it might be fagioli in umido, but she isn’t sure) and I would welcome any thoughts on names or, indeed, how it should really be done. Feel free to chip in with borlotti ideas too, as I will be needing them.

In the end I settled on ‘posh baked beans’ in a bid to get the kids to eat it, this, of course, being the wickedly twisting ankle in the grow, cook, eat triathlon, just as the finish line is in sight. One of them refused point-blank, wouldn’t even let it touch her lips, the other ate one spoonful and announced that he thought he liked it, but that he wasn’t going to eat any more. Deep breath. Gritted teeth. It’s important to try.