Saturday 16 March 2024

Planting for pollinators

This time of year, as you plant your gardens, you must remember to invest part of our garden to reimburse the armies of pollinators that work for you. You could bring pollinators in by the box-load if you keep bees, and you get honey and wax from the arrangement. Bee hives can be kept easily on a small plot of land, a backyard, a balcony or even a rooftop, so long as the bees’ flight path to and from their headquarters is located away from humans’ personal space.  They tend to like simple flowers with an easy landing pad, like poached-egg flower, daisies or dandelions -- and they also need water, so set a little floating pad for them in the bird bath.  

Honeybees, however, are only one of 20,000 species of bee in the world, and we can encourage the rest of them as well. They don’t give us honey or wax but they do pollinate our gardens – sometimes more effectively, according to some experts – and many are stingless. Dozens of species are bumblebees, which live in small colonies, but most are solitary, often named according to where they make their hole – miners, carpenters, masons and plasterers. Some gardeners give bees a pre-made home --boring holes in wood or stacking reeds or bamboo for carpenter or orchard bees, stacking adobe bricks for mason bees or building a small, cotton-lined box with a large entrance hole for bumblebees.

One of the champion bee flowers, in our experience, is borrage – my bees go nuts for it. It also makes a great herb to add to salad, with a tangy melony flavour. Almost all herbs, in fact, make great bee fodder – thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, sage and mint.

Hedgerows often provide the best source of bee flowers. Blackberry brambles, in hundreds of varieties, grow widely here and make another flower beloved of bees, and of course they grow in the margins where their thorns and the bees are out of your way. Sally or pussy willows seem to be a particular favourite of bumblebees in our observation – at times we have seen dozens of bumblebees on a single tree near our house.  They also love hawthorn, which and usually starts flowering in May.

Come summer, whole fields here erupt with red and white clover, which have many uses -- bees love them, we and animals can eat them, and they actually put nitrogen back into the soil. They like moist earth and warm days, and beekeepers say that, once the flowers emerge, their beehives start filling up with honey.

Bees and other bugs use many other flowers common to our area, and which our local beekeeping society recommends – poppies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, zinnias, wallflowers, bellflowers, dahlias, hellebores and roses. In exchange they service many vegetables, including artichokes, lamb’s ears, asparagus, brassicas, broad beans, cucumbers, cherries, apples, currants, gooseberries and courgettes.

You can draw insects other than bees to your garden, of course, but you want to be choosy about which ones. We all love butterflies, but they spend most of their lives as the caterpillars that we spend picking off our crops, so you want to encourage only those species that eat the plants you don’t want anyway. 

Few words sound less appealing than “parasite” and “wasp,” yet parasitic wasps can be very useful in the garden, preying on the bugs that would eat your plants and doing no harm to humans. Sally Jean Cunningham, author of Great Garden Companions, cite herbs like caraway, anise, mint, chamomile, dill, fennel, yarrow and cicely for drawing wasps, along with wildflowers like cornspurrey, lamb’s quarters, wild mustards, oxeyes, red sorrel and clover. Similarly, some gardeners buy ladybirds to unleash on their aphids, or even recommend planting nettles to attract aphids to attract ladybirds.

Finally, you can plant species designed to repel certain insects you don’t want – many gardeners recommend hyssop and thyme for cabbage moths, or marigolds for nematodes. Such recommendations often carry a high folklore-to-evidence ratio, though, so experiment in your own garden and take notes on what seems to work.

If we and other large animals were to disappear, the vast majority of the world that remained would get along just fine. But if they were to disappear, the soil would become sterile, the lands desert, and almost all life would perish. As you walk through your garden, thousands of them are labouring like elves around your feet, unthanked and occasionally swatted. As you plant your garden this year, make sure to give something back.

 Photo: my daughter collecting the honey from our hive.

Wednesday 6 March 2024

The Generosity of Community

I wrote a few weeks ago about the value of social capital – how it was once common for neighbours to have each other over for music and stories, for families to eat together, and for many other kinds of gatherings. Similar forms of gathering were once common throughout the Western World, but lingered in Ireland here than in most places, perhaps because prosperity arrived here later.

In most other Western countries – in most of Europe and North America --- people acquired televisions and cars in the 1950s, so people began spending more time driving and watching telly than with their family or with neighbours – what we might call “electronic culture,” rather than human culture. Here, perhaps, the trend took place more in the last 20 years, according to most people I talk to.  

Either way, though, the trend is difficult to resist; we all find it easier to deal with a television or video game than another person, or to just drive to pick up a pizza than to cook a meal. The more people turn to electronic culture, moreover, the more difficult it becomes to stand against the tide; you can’t play cards with friends if no one else plays, and you can’t meet with neighbours for storytelling if all your neighbours are just playing video games.  

If prosperity helped erode that community culture, though, going back is not as easy when prosperity fades – people become accustomed to simply getting a pizza rather than cooking, or spending 20 euros at the cinema rather than sing or tell stories together, and children grow up accustomed to such a life. In other words, we grow accustomed to buying distractions, and when we have less money to buy them – say, when people are laid off or have their salaries cut in this on-going depression – they feel the poverty more keenly. An Irish family today, even one hit hard by the depression, might still be making twice the money they were in the 1980s, yet feel poorer.  

When people do feel poverty more keenly, it is once again that social network – a real one, and not just a web site – that can alleviate their burden, either through loaning us money, repairing your car in exchange for a favour, or minding our children. We think of such behaviours as helping an immediate problem in the short term, but they help build a network of trust in the long term.

“Other things being equal, people who trust their fellow citizens more volunteer more often, contribute more regularly, participate more often in politics and community organizations, serve more readily on juries, give blood more frequently, comply more fully with their tax obligations, are more tolerant of minority views, and display many other forms of civic virtue,” wrote sociologist Robert Putnam.  

“Moreover, people who are more active in community life are less likely (even in private) to condone cheating on taxes, insurance claims, bank loan forms, and employment applications. Conversely, experimental psychologists have shown that people who believe that others are honest are themselves less likely to lie, cheat, or steal and are more likely to respect the rights of others. In that sense, honesty, civic engagement and social trust are mutually reinforcing.”

As times get difficult and more people need such assistance, though, that same erosion of community also makes people less likely to give to charities, and charitable donations have declined across the Western World. As a general rule, wrote sociologist Robert Putnam, we are likely to give more in the presence of other people. “Joiners,” Putnam wrote, “are nearly ten times as generous with their time and money as non-joiners.”

If this all sounds quite grim, we can also look at the glass-half-full side: Even when people are not being pressured to give their time and money to help others, they still do so, without realising how many other people are doing the same. A recent survey found that the amount that people gave was greater than the amount everyone imagined everyone else gave; in other words, we are better people than we realise, but now that we live much more isolated lives, we don’t see it or encourage it in each other.

That trend can be reversed, though, and more easily here than in most places, as it is so much newer here than in other Western countries. Older people here remember a time when people had much closer communities, so reviving them should be much easier here than in most Western countries. The Irish don’t have to start from scratch rebuilding. 

Photo: Musicians at Wren Day.

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Saturday 24 February 2024

Wild Food

All food was wild once, and all the vegetables in rows at the grocers were bred over centuries from what we now call weeds. Their most promising pieces were swelled and sweetened, made fleshy or fertile, made unrecognisable to fit our tastes. 

Yet colour and tastes go in and out of fashion with each generation; look how swiftly the perfectly white eggs of supermarkets were replaced by brown ones, with an identical taste but a trendy “natural” image. The centuries have done the same to our crops, leaving behind legions of purple carrots, blue potatoes and other victims of our whims.

In the last century, moreover, we have shipped more and more food across the planet, so that rows of Australian maize or Moroccan tomatoes can fill shelves in Iowa or Scotland. Our crops had to be bred to stand out as consumer products and yet survive the journey, leading to the massive sizes and cardboard flavours of supermarket produce.  The “fresh vegetables” most of us grew up with were, typically, nothing of the kind.  

Genuinely fresh and wild food still exists all around us, though, and this time of year the Irish hedgerows create a vertical salad bar of fruits and berries. Many wild plants are edible and few were bred into groceries, and even those that were domesticated can still be found in their original form -- which often tastes better, as anyone knows who has tasted a wild strawberry.

Hawthorn trees will soon be sprouting shoots, and lindens after them, and both have leaves that when young are edible and delicious. The fruits of the hawthorn, while bland in taste, are also edible and can make an addition to wines and jams.

When summer comes properly, Fat Hen will appear everywhere. It was apparently much more widely eaten in ancient times than today; it formed part of the meal given to Tollund man, one of the “bog bodies” fished out of Denmark. It is basically a wild version of spinach, and its pale green leaves can be cooked the same way. The garlic –flavoured leaves of Jack-by-the-hedge first emerge in spring, but a new crop sometimes appears this month, so this is a good time to go looking for it. Its large, deeply green, heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers make a great ingredient in salads or sauteed. The shamrock-like leaves of wild sorrel carpet forest floors beginning in spring, and can still be seen this time of year. Its lemony leaves make a perfect addition to salads. They can also be cooked, but be warned that they wilt almost instantly, and in an herbal mix should be added lastly. 

In later summer, the blackberries and raspberries will appear. Many people here take the traditional route of preserving them in jams for winter vitamins, but you can also make them into wine, fruit leathers, add them to salads or spread them with meat. Dandelion leaves are best when young, but the roots should now be at their fullest; try pulling them out and roasting them like coffee. 

Rosehips look similar to haws and are almost as numerous along the hedges. Packed with Vitamin C, their syrup has famously been used as a medicine, but they can also be made into jam or wine. Most of their bulk, though, consists of the sharp seeds, which can be a fiddly job to remove.  Elderberries darken with the days here, and are just at the right stage to be made into wine, jam, pies, syrup, meat sauce or cordial. To make the syrup, boil the elderberries and stir in sugar as you would jam, but without the pectin to make it firm.

Medlars were a popular fruit in medieval times but are rarely recognised anymore, perhaps because they must be slightly over-ripe to be edible, and did not fit well with our modern demand that fruit sit for days on store shelves. Nonetheless, they are very tasty and make a great a pie filling, so remember their appearance and keep an eye out.  

Do remember not to remove plants from the roadside, where they could have been bathing in toxic fumes, or from anywhere you think might have been sprayed with pesticides. Do look up what these plants look like to make sure you pick them and not a similar-looking poisonous plant, but most of these look very distinctive, and telling them apart is quite easy to do. 

Have fun! 

 


Saturday 17 February 2024

Straw-bale gardening

Many of the straw bales you see across the fields of County Kildare these days are mammoth cylinders that you would have difficulty moving without farm equipment. But on some horse farms you can still find the older kind of straw bales – rectangular, metre-long, hefted by hand.

Straw bales have many uses – as seats, as compost bins, as borders to a garden to keep out rabbits. On the Great Plains of North America, people stacked them inside a frame to create walls, which were then covered in mud plaster. People still do this today to create sheds, barns, homes and even churches, and they provide great insulating walls – and are no more a fire hazard than wood.

If you don’t have the wood or time to build regular garden beds, you could plant a garden directly inside your bales.

First line up bales, long side to long side, to create a garden bed, and water them as you would the rest of your garden for a few days. For a week or so after that, keep watering but add nitrogen and phosphorous -- stir some chicken manure in your watering can, leave it for a few days and pour the resulting liquid over the bales, or add urine in whatever way will not upset your neighbours.

After doing this for two weeks – just water for a few days, then water-with-fertilizer for a week and a half – punch a row of holes in the bales. Set a handful of rich compost into the hole, and plant a seedling in the earth. Sprinkle some earth on top across the entire top of the bale, and water as you would any other garden plants. The straw bale decays as the plant grows, until the plant can stretch more roots directly through the composting straw.

The best straw bales for a garden are wheat, oats, rye or barley straw. These consist of stalks left from harvesting grain; they have been through a combine harvester and had the seeds threshed from them, leaving none or very few left. I got mine from a farmer in Maynooth who still uses the small bales.

Hay bales for gardening are less popular as they have the whole stalk and seed heads with mucho seeds. They also often have other weeds and grass seeds to cause trouble. Use what you can get locally — it may even be lucerne, pea straw, vetch or alfalfa bales. Corn and linseed (flax) bales are not so good as they are very coarse, and linseed straw takes a long time to decompose due to the oil residue left on the stalks.

An approach like this is not for everyone – it requires a great deal of water, which was not a problem for me, who lives along the canals. Other people might find it too much trouble. But it can allow elderly and people with back problems to garden a raised bed without having to bend over all the time. It helps make the garden unreachable by rabbits and many pests. It helps cut down on the amount of soil you have to use, and since all soil contains weed seeds, it cuts down on the amount of weeding.

Most of all, this approach can work well for homeowners with what I call suburban soil: a thin layer of grass and topsoil, covering clay and builders’ rubble from the construction of the house. Such people need to build up their soil, and straw bales allow you to bring in the organic material to do so – and straw makes a light and easily portable material.

By the time your gardening project is done for the year, the straw bales will be well-decomposed, and you can simply take apart the soil and wet straw and spread it over your garden as winter approaches. The straw will keep weeds down like mulch, but unlike mulch is already partly decomposing and will finish turning back into soil quickly, and can be mixed with the rest of the soil come spring.

If you’re just starting to garden, try doing this with bales the first year, and that gives you an additional year to build wooden or stone beds; by the time they’re done, you have the soil to fill them. In effect, you will have created soil without having to lift the mineral and water content that comprises most of the soil’s weight.

 

Photo by Mohamed Haddi, courtesy of WikiCommons.