The gardening week (August - Week 4, 2023)

The big autumn replanting starts early

Readers of this newsletter get to see my gardening week video, a little earlier than it’s made public on youtube, so feel free to take an early look. I also give special attention to answering comments from subscribers to this newsletter, provided you ask those questions today!

The philosophy of gardening

I’m not much of a philosopher, I’m a bit too pragmatic for too much, thinking about thinking, and prefer to be in the moment as much as I can. Occasionally though I come across some philosophical ideas that resonate with me, stoicism for example helped me deal with 20 years of illness and some of the kids health challenges too.

In today’s article I thought I would touch on a few philosophical ideas from Japanese culture, which I’ve always enjoyed and which apply especially well to gardening as well as life in general.

I’m going to start with Kaizen, which is the act of making small, incremental changes to achieve goals and improve life. I’ve been a keen practitioner of Kaizen for most of my life and when I started gardening it really helped me to deal with the challenges and failures, seeing every succession as an opportunity to seek out small improvements. At a larger scale, every year Debbie and I sit down and step through our gardening year, looking for opportunities for small improvements, ways to eliminate annoyances, things to stop growing, start growing etc. This is more than just planning, because it’s focused not on the output - lots of food - but rather on improving the life-experience of being a gardener. Of course we don’t do this just for gardening, but as that’s a big part of our life it gets a lot of focus.

We’ve found the best time to do this life review is on a long drive. We brainstorm ideas on the outbound journey and then a few days later, on the way back we revisit those ideas and make decisions, having mulled them over

Years ago, for example, we decided that we didn’t want to spend our summer doing bulk harvests and preserving food for winter. Instead we’d rather eat seasonally and grow only what we needed to eat in summer, with just a few exceptions, then we would continue harvesting all year round.

The logic being, we’d much rather enjoy the good weather too be outside and use winter gardening to nudge us outside and enjoying ourselves in winter too. Standing in front of a hot stove in summer can’t be anyone’s idea of fun.

In my life I’ve found that nothing’s as motivating as progress and Kaizen is a way of making life all about progress, even though that progress may be small and incremental.

I sum this up as trying to live in a protopia, ie a world that, in the main, is always improving.

Ikigai is the belief that aligning purpose, passions, skills, and values leads to a long and happy life. I’ve always been a bit of a purpose junkie and when I retired I used growing my own food and later, creating gardening content (videos, books, newsletter) as a big part of my purpose in life. Sharing the abundance with friends and family and the content with thousands of people has multiplied that sense of purpose considerably.

But gardening delivers more than just purpose, it’s definitely something to get passionate. I find that passion develops in a hobby when it involves a lot of intellectual and physical effort to deliver a big reward and when progress is evident but the opportunity for further improvement is considerable. Add to that a bit of creativity in the way we garden and the beauty of our garden structures and planting schemes and we have the full package.

Although gardening looks simple to many outsiders, there’s considerable skill involved, especially to achieve self-sufficiency, beautifully and efficiently.

To cap it all the whole physical and mental process of gardening couldn’t really have been designed better to enhance mental and physical health.

The final element of Ikigai is value alignment and here again growing my own food is in perfect, here’s just a few of the values I live by that gardening delivers on : living simply, appreciating nature, slowing down, always learning, living frugally, learning from mistakes, being generous and living sustainably.

Oubaitori , which urges people to avoid comparisons and stay focused on their unique journeys. I’ve only recently become aware of Oubaitori, although I’ve long practiced the idea of competing only with myself. One of my favourite sayings, which I’ve indoctrinated the kids with over the years, is “don’t compare your inside with other peoples outside”, this is such a powerful observation now, especially in the world of social media, where people craft a glossy outside, whilst often being in inner and invisible torment inside.

It’s one of the reasons why I try hard to talk about and show the realities of my gardening life. How much time I spend gardening, how I sometimes get a bit of burnout, how disappointing a crop failure can be.

Anyway you will notice that I don’t try to be popular in my Youtube videos, I just try to be honest and true to myself. I specifically avoid anything fancy, or designed to try attract an audience. I don’t design thumbnails, use clickbait titles, implore people to subscribe and share, do intros or use fancy cameras (just my iPhone). I just try and make the videos that I like to make, in the way I like to make them and covering the topics that would have helped me in my gardening journey.

Wabi-Sabi, which embodies imperfection and transience to create beauty. As gardeners we hardly need to be told to appreciate imperfection but I’ve gradually learned to revel in it. Debbie though, is especially good at this, she embraces imperfect food, always seeking to make the most of everything we grow through creativity. She even seeks out leaves that have been nibbled, for example, because they are healthier!

The transience of gardening is particularly mentally refreshing, as we compost away the past every season to create a new start, full of promise. I especially like this about my bed system. I love the ‘clean sweep’ that I’m able to achieve, creating a - mostly - slug and snail free, freshly weeded and mulched bed, pristinely replanted; it’s a great joy and one of the reasons that I like to do so many successions!

Shinrin-Yoku, which means 'forest bathing' and promotes immersing oneself in nature for physical and spiritual benefits. It’s all the rage at the moment 'forest bathing' can be easily equated to ‘allotment bathing’. Surrounded by nature, tending our plants, harvesting, basking in the community spirit, in our own little world, but surrounded by others, happily enjoying theirs. Sharing advice, labour, spares and surpluses, bartering and gifting.

We get to enjoy natural community living, at it’s best, in a way that’s ever more difficult at home where we can go months and not see the people two doors away.

Anyway that’s enough reflection, I write this in Blackpool Caffe Nero, a lovely place to spend a rainy morning, half way through a bike ride.

My writing spot for Wednesday

I finished editing at Costa coffee in Didcot

Seedling progress

I did a video this week on my seeding progress, everything’s going to plan so far, although maybe my salad onions are growing too strongly, enjoying the sunshine and showers too much. That means lots to eat in Autumn and early winter and I will sow an extra batch for late winter and early spring.

Sowings for the week

Since my early succession of spinach has gone to seed, I’ve sown an extra replacement batch and I will have to juggle my spinach around a little. I’m always happy to risk this though for 3 weeks of extra harvest, because it’s so quick, cheap and easy to sow another batch.

Other than that, there’s no sowings for me this week, but If you’re quick there’s still time to sow leafy greens that you’ve missed so far, provided you find a sunny spot for them, so here’s a link to everything that I’ve sown so far. I’m not so sure about late root veggies like radish/turnips, you might be lucky, more likely with radish, but turnips will probably make it with a cover, otherwise just eat the greens.

Germinated this week

It’s been a good weed for germinating seedlings. Most of mine germinated on the polytunnel floor (which is almost slug free) and in the shade of the rampant summer squash. I then immediately moved them on top of my IBC tanks, which so far is slug and snail free. Click on the image below for more details.

Plantings for the week

My last water melon is showing signs of ripening, so I harvested that and popped in an extra bed of Asian greens and lettuce. I have a lot of these in the ground now, but they will help me cope with the early spinach showing signs of going to seed. For more details of my plantings, click the image below.

For everything that I’ve planted so far, you can look at this link.

Sowing’s for next week

No sowing next week, it will be too late for most crops to grow to maturity outside and it’s too early to sow my under-cover crops, so I’m going on holiday for a few days instead, walking the farmland adjacent to the Cotswolds.

Get ready for September!

In last week’s newsletter I gave a preview of my plans for September, which starts next week, oh how time flies! September is probably my most important sowing month of the year, but it’s also a fairly easy month to sow in, because I’m not really worrying about the cold, most seeds have already been test sown in August and I’m well practiced. I’m also looking forward to a rest, by mid-October I will be 90% finished and enjoying autumn non-gardening hobbies.

Even now though I’m having to make changes to my plans. For example my early spinach is starting to go to seed, which is always a risk, but one worth taking for spinach in salads in August. That means though that I will be using the spinach I sowed last week to replace the early bed and sowing another batch for cooking leaves.

If you find yourself changing plans this late in the year don’t delay, procrastination in September should be avoided at all costs!

You can get a preview of what I’m sowing in this video:

But for more details and a more up to date list check out my live plan here.

Bulk harvests

Although I try to avoid bulk harvests, preferring to harvest fresh food, some bulk harvests are inevitable and to be savoured.

Right now the focus is on preserving fruits. We’ve eaten a lot of fresh plums, but a few made it into jam and we saved some gooseberries to make a few marmalades. A huge number of tomatoes have been turned into passata and tomato stock and windfall apples have been stewed.

Here’s one batch of preserves that we did this week.

I’m often asked about recipes. We are thinking about how best to do this, but for now we have put the recipes for our various preserves online. You can find them here, or click on the image below and click/tap on a specific recipe for more details.

Weekly Harvests

I didn’t really do a harvest this week, because we are away, but we picked ingredients for a roast meal and added to that potatoes and garlic from the store. We also picked melons for pudding.