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Heatwave in Scotland

Water shortage in Scotland? Too much sunlight? No, I’m not joking. Having restrained myself from planting out my seedlings in March and April, until the risk of snow had passed, I then had to cope with scorching sunlight and drought in May. I quickly used up the contents of my water butt, and started saving washing-up water for the flowers containers in the front garden. As I lugged yet another watering-can from the kitchen sink round the back of my house to keep the potatoes going, I decided that I might need to reduce the area of my raised beds a little next year. And every afternoon as the sun came round, I had to move the seed trays off the back windowsill because the double-glazing concentrates the sunlight so effectively that they were getting too hot. We’re back to normal again now, of course.

It’s weird to have to cope with hot dry weather, when you are set up to mitigate the effects of not enough sun and too much rain. Still, I suppose our usual experience will come in handy when global warming reaches the point when the Gulf Stream shuts down. Orkney will probably end up a much colder place…

Artichokes, just like 19^th century Kirkwall

As I mentioned in my post of March 12^th, Patrick Neill, in his “A Tour through some of the islands of Orkney and Shetland” 1806, (pp 6-.7), visited Kirkwall and recorded that “In all the gardens which we had an opportunity of seeing at Kirkwall, artichokes were growing with uncommon luxuriance…”   Maisie Stevens’ book “Parish Life in Eighteenth-century Scotland” (1995), based on the Old Statistical Account  compiled between 1791 and 1799 by Sir John Sinclair, also mentions artichokes (page 39). She noted that artichokes were flourishing in gardens in the parish of Orphir: “Cabbages and garden roots grow in great perfection; and perhaps the finest and largest artichokes in the world are to be found in this country, in the common kail-yards, springing up amongst the grass without any cultivation.”

Globe artichokes still grow in one of the allotments beside Victoria Road in the centre of Kirkwall. I am very fond of them, and we only seem to get them in tins in Orkney. So when I saw some artichoke plants for sale in the local garden centre, I decided to try them. So far, so good….

Sawfly

Following my disaster with the strawberry plants, I decided to try some different fruit this year. Anyway, all but one of the strawberry plants died during the winter. So I invested in a healthy-looking gooseberry bush, placed it in the sunniest spot and watered it carefully. At first all went well. Lots of tiny fruits appeared all over the branches. Alas! Disaster soon struck. To begin with, all the leaves at the end of each branch crumpled up in a most peculiar way. An internet search suggested a number of causes, including too much or too little water and various aphids and mildews. I couldn’t identify which it was likely to be, so I just cut the affected leaves off and hoped for the best. Next thing I knew, every single leaf had disappeared, leaving just the bare branches with their tiny fruits. Almost certainly sawfly larvae, although I didn’t notice in time to actually catch them at it. I don’t seem to have much luck with fruit.

Self-seeded crops

I mentioned in a previous post (5^th December 2024) that during WWII, gardeners who were ‘Digging For Victory’ were encouraged to leave some of their vegetables to go to seed, so as to have their own seeds for next year. Seeds were not rationed but they were in short supply at times. According to a recent blog post, at one point in 1942 the famous Suttons Seed company  “had run out of runner beans, onions, leeks, cress and early potatoes and that orders could not be delivered in under 3 weeks”. The government gave advice on which plants were suitable for home seed saving, and how and when to do it. Good job there weren’t any terminator genes around at that point – we might have lost the war!

My nasturtiums and marigolds, both annuals which I grow as companion plants, have always seeded themselves. When I saw my parsley (biennial) vigorously sprouting seed heads, I decided to try saving seed this year as an experiment. Apparently, you have to let the plant flower and leave the seed heads to dry out and turn brown. Then you snip them off and collect them in paper bags to finish drying for up to a fortnight. When they are completely dry, you can rub the husks off the seeds before bagging them for storage. But Nature got ahead of me, and I discovered that it had seeded itself and was surrounded by new little plants. Much satisfaction. I’m also very fond of parsley.

Since I now have more parsley than I can expect to eat before autumn, I have tried freezing some, using a recipe I found online. Apparently frozen parsley taste better than dried parsley, although it loses its texture and can’t be used as a garnish. I rinsed the parsley without chopping it, patted it dry and double-bagged it in two plastic bags, rolling them up to exclude the air before putting them in the freezer. Results to be reported!

How to dry apples

Preserving fruit and vegetables for the winter is just as important as growing them. It is a skill that all housewives had to learn before the days of supermarkets and freezers.  I am interested in methods of preservation that don’t involve large quantities of sugar or salt, or high-tech solutions such as freezers. I decided that I would try drying apple slices this year. I have successfully dried herbs before, hanging them in paper bags or old nylons in the airing cupboard. After a short internet search, I sliced a large unblemished apple very thinly, dried off the slices with some kitchen paper and then put them into the oven on a lightly-oiled baking sheet for two hours. They came out sweet and chewy.

Most of the internet recipes recommended dipping them in dilute lemon juice first to stop them browning, which I didn’t bother with, and cooking them at a higher temperature than I did, i.e. nearly 200 degrees C. Fiona Houston in her book “The Garden Cottage Diaries: My Year in the Eighteenth Century” (p 85) recommends dipping them in a dilute salt solution, both to prevent browning and to discourage surface mould. Using her method they are supposed to be hung up to dry very slowly for 24 to 48 hours over a heat source. This is really only a possibility if you have an Aga or Rayburn stove which is permanently hot. Alas, like most modern homes in Orkney, I’m all-electric. Ruth Goodman, in the Wartime Farm book (“Wartime Farm” Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands 2012,  p126) also recommends dipping them in salt solution and drying them slowly. Her preferred locations for drying are a greenhouse, or hung up halfway up the stairs with the window open, then finished off packed in paper bags. Orkney homes are notoriously damp, with many people having to keep a dehumidifier running a lot of the time, so that method doesn’t seem too practical either. Although the strong winds up here are notably efficient at drying washing, freshly-caught fish, and pottery awaiting firing, even on cold grey days.

I’m not sure that my apple slices came out of the oven dry enough to keep for months, but I have put them into a brown paper bag in the airing cupboard.  We shall see.

The season continues…

Growing fruit and vegetables in very tiny spaces has become very popular recently. Whether you are interested in food security or “wellness”, it has become a trending topic.  I currently have three fascinating books on the subject (see below).  All these books tell you how to construct a raised bed, prepare the soil, and suggest a succession of plants that go well together and will provide vegetables all year round. Two of them suggest a raised bed 1m square i.e. 3 feet square, the third a slightly larger bed, 3m x 1.2m i.e. 10 x 4 feet. I find the concept interesting. You might call it “micro-market-gardening”.

It is easy to see why this has become popular. Too many people now live in houses and flats with hardly any garden space. Many people have very busy lives, with a lot of commitments and no time to dig and weed. We have an aging population. Lots of people don’t have the physical ability to cultivate an allotment, even if they could get one. Digging with fork and spade is quite difficult if you are 90 years old or waiting for a hip replacement. Furthermore, there are long waiting lists for allotments in Britain. Land is in short supply and demand is high. In fact, councils are currently experimenting with dividing the standard 250-300m² allotment into half, quarter, or even smaller sizes.

Obviously, growing food in tiny raised beds and containers is not going to feed the average household, or even one person. Lolo Houbein (page 74) suggests that you could grow one tenth of your vegetables in a one-metre square plot, although this seems a little optimistic to me, especially in the north of Britain. And she reports (page 76) that unspecified  “scientists” have calculated that one person needs a 10 x 10 metre plot to grow all their own food, including staple carbohydrates, and a family of four would need a 20 x20 metre plot. Whether you agree with this or not, I would guess that every little helps. As in World War II, you probably can’t grow enough wheat and potatoes in your garden to make any serious difference, but you can grow a useful amount of veggies. Besides, it’s fun.

Since I got old and decrepit, I have confined my vegetable cultivation to containers and very small raised beds. They probably add up to about 3 square metres of growing space. I use three cheap little fabric raised beds, which are supposed to survive for about ten years, a couple of potato bags and four large-ish flowerpots. I fill them with a mixture of bought compost from the local garden centre, and free compost, which Orkney Island Council gives away at the local recycling centre. Well done them, and many thanks to the very kind attendant who helped me fill my bags and get them into my car. I have managed to grow quite a useful amount of fresh fruit and vegetables in them.

If you are using containers or very small raised beds, you need to water frequently, and maintain the fertility of the soil. The two most important pieces of equipment I have found, apart from the beds themselves, are a compost heap and a water butt. The best thing of all is the small compost bin which now lives beside the kitchen sink, so that I have no excuse for not saving all my vegetable peelings. I saw some lovely water butts in France this Easter, shaped vaguely like a classical pithos (storage jar)…

Raised beds and containers of any shape are easier to position to capture light and warmth. The soil will warm up more quickly in spring and drain more quickly if there is a lot of rain. Which there often is in Scotland. They don’t need a lot of heavy digging; they are easier to weed; they are easier to protect from birds and cats (with a piece of netting); and wind (with a moveable windbreak). Slugs are still a problem, but for containers, I have found that if you can fill them with absolutely fresh compost, smear Vaseline around the rims, and make sure that none of the vegetables droop over the edge as far as the ground, the slugs can’t reach them.

Plants need light as well as warmth, and if you are growing as much food as possible in a 1m square bed, the plants are supposed to be packed close together, with low-growing plants arranged below taller ones. Singapore (see previous post) lies almost on the Equator and therefore receives massive amounts of sunlight, so it is possible to grow a lot of plants in a small space, as in an equatorial jungle. ‘Allotments’ in Singapore are raised beds 2m x 1m, as compared to 250 square metres in the UK.  Since we have much lower light levels in Britain, especially in the north of Scotland, we are unlikely to be able to plant as densely or to grow as much in a small space. It is important to site your beds and containers to get as much light as possible and use any available wall to reflect heat as well as provide shelter from wind. This is much easier to do if you are using containers and raised beds.

Most of my containers are against the back wall of my house, the position which gets the most sunlight, and where during the night the wall can radiate back the heat it has absorbed during the day. I like the idea of laying a sheet of black plastic over your bed in late winter/early spring, to help the soil warm up more quickly at the start of the growing season. Black surfaces absorb more heat than light-coloured ones. All of my fabric raised beds are dark coloured. Although my garden is a little small for a greenhouse, I’m thinking of getting a small cold frame.

In Britain, again as opposed to the Equator, there are distinct growing seasons, and in the north of Scotland they are very short ones. At the beginning of March this year, the weather was so sunny and warm that I was sorely tempted to start planting. I’m glad I didn’t, because the next week it was snowing.  This isn’t unusual for Orkney. I have been re-reading the diary of Patrick Fea, who farmed the lands at Stove at the south end of the island of Sanday in the 18^th century. He recorded the weather at the start of every day’s entry and frequently mentioned snow in March and April.  By the beginning of May things had only just started growing.

I have a small sunny garden to grow things in, but that isn’t actually necessary for micro-market gardening. Nowadays the internet is full of blogs and websites about growing useful quantities of herbs and vegetables in pots on balconies or windowsills or rooftops, in various kinds of planters attached to walls, or climbing up trellises. My personal favourite is “Vertical Veg”.

So if you have the odd 10 minutes to spare, and a container of some sort, grow some lettuce!

“One Magic Square: Grow your own food on one square metre” Lolo Houbein 2015

“Grow all you can eat in 3 square feet: inventive ideas for growing food in a small space” Dorling Kindersley 2015

“Veg in one bed: How to grow an abundance of food in one raised bed, month by month” Huw Richards 2019.

 “The Diary of Patrick Fea of Stove, Orkney, 1766 – 96”, transcribed and edited by W.S.Hewison; foreword by Alexander Fenton

I had never heard the word “organoponico” until I got hold of a book by Monty Don, “Around the World in 80 Gardens” (BBC 2007). He had a chapter on them. Organoponicos were a form of urban farming developed in Cuba in response to a sudden devastating emergency. When Cuba became a communist state in 1959, agriculture was taken into the hands of the state.  Farming was mechanised and industrialised in the same way as in the Soviet Union. Cuba’s nearest neighbour, the United States, strongly objected to communism and set up a trade embargo which is still in place, and for many years Cuba traded mainly with the Soviet Union, exchanging sugar cane for practically everything else. The Cubans created a state whose excellent education and health services were acknowledged internationally, although the material goods which are considered a mark of success in Europe, such as private cars, shops, restaurants and cafes, were few and far between. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, their trade ended practically overnight and there were no more imported foods, medicines, fertilisers, or fuel. The population began to starve, especially in cities. Organoponicos were a response to this.

The Cubans began to concentrate on growing food for domestic consumption rather than export. They started growing food in allotments and city gardens. It was a community-led movement but supported by the government. Staple crops for calories were still grown in the countryside (remember WWII Britain) and people were encouraged to move from the city to the land, but fruit, vegetables and medicinal herbs were grown in these city gardens. Sage magazine reported in 2018 that around 350 square kilometres of ‘land’ in Havana – rooftops, balconies, communal spaces, derelict sites and parts of the green belt – had been converted into market gardens, and half of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the city were produced in these gardens and sold locally. The author of the article reported it as “the largest conversion from conventional to alternative, organic agriculture in the world’s history”.

It was a startlingly environmentally-friendly way of growing food by the standards of today. Since the Cubans couldn’t import fertilisers, they had to use organic methods such as composting. It was no longer possible to use hydroponics, which rely on chemicals added to the water the plants are rooted in.  Tools were mended, reused and recycled as long as possible, since they were so difficult to replace that nothing could be wasted. They could not use machinery as they could no longer import fuel, so they used human and animal labour, as they had done in the past. It was a very labour-intensive way of growing food, and many of the gardeners had to learn on the job, as they had never done any gardening before.  Most of them were volunteers, who worked for the food they grew and for the good of the community.

The results, as reported by Monty Don, were amazing: in 2005 over 90% of Havana’s fruit and vegetables were grown inside the city limits, in over 7000 separate organoponicos. Each garden had its own market stall. Some began to employ workers for wages as well as using community volunteers, and they started to process things like fruit juice and dried fruit. The gardens gave, and still give, local people access to inexpensive, fresh, healthy food, they give the workers a small but important share in the profits, the market stalls attached to each garden are a place for people to gather, and it has cut food miles drastically. Cuba still had to import some of its food, and there has been food rationing, but overall the method was a successful solution to a particular emergency and a fascinating experiment in organic farming.

Urban farming i.e. growing food within the boundaries of a city among the streets and buildings is a practice which goes back millennia, all over the world.  For centuries, many people in British towns had vegetable plots in their back gardens. Patrick Neill, in his “A Tour through some of the islands of Orkney and Shetland” 1806, pp 6-.7, visited Kirkwall and records that “What was formerly the palace garden is now rented in small patches, or hundreds (as much ground as will raise 100 cabbages) by the town’s people, who plant it with kitchen-stuffs…  In all the gardens which we had an opportunity of seeing at Kirkwall, artichokes were growing with uncommon luxuriance. Cabbages and cauliflowers were also in high perfection…” The idea has become increasingly popular recently, as the world population continues to rise in spite of all warnings, and cities take over more and more of the earth’s surface.

Some forms of urban farming, like the organoponicos, are linked to organic practices, encouragement of wildlife, community involvement, and the reduction of food miles. They are also places for city children to learn that food doesn’t actually originate in brightly-coloured plastic packets. Some urban market gardens include bee-keeping, and many include animals.  There are organisations in the UK for promoting city farms and community gardens, and there are now quite a large number of these. At the moment they tend to stress education, mental health and community engagement rather than being primarily for growing vitally-needed food. They come in all sizes, from quite large farms such as the 100-acre Lauriston Farm in NW Edinburgh, to a tiny project I particularly liked in Thurso (Caithness), where wooden tubs had been placed at intervals along a street and planted with herbs and vegetables. Passers-by were invited to help themselves. There is a similar project in Inverness alongside the river.

However, urban farming also has its industrialized, business-oriented side, some linked to the large supermarket chains. If you search the internet for “urban farming companies” you will get a long list of names. These use high-tech machinery, are AI -controlled, use artificial lighting, and hydroponics, where the plants are grown in water with nutrients added rather than in soil. Light levels, humidity and temperature are strictly controlled, and crop yields are high and dependable. The water can be recycled, and the lighting and heating can use LEDs and renewable energy. To save space, the hydroponic troughs can be stacked vertically on slow-moving machinery. These known as ‘vertical farms'.  Another form of hydroponic gardening is aquaponics, where the vegetables are grown in troughs flushed through with the waste water from tanks of fish, helping to clean the water for recycling while providing the vegetables with nutrients from the fish waste. Although it is as environmentally-friendly as possible, it is farming for profit by businesses, high-tech agriculture which employs few people. There is certainly going to be a place for it, but it seems to me that it has one crucial difference from organoponicos; it relies on trade links and long-distance transport. Do not tell me that that all the electronic components for the heat/light/humidity/machine controls, and all the AI equipment, all the parts for the greenhouses and conveyor belts, are manufactured in the UK, or even in Europe. If we suffered a sudden interruption to our international trade, as the Cubans did, urban hi-tech farming would become very difficult.

As of 2020, organoponicos were still an important part of agriculture in Cuba. They may not stand up forever to modern economic and social pressures. The idea is not popular among some political and business circles, for obvious reasons, and there is a will in some circles for it to fail. The relentless rise of the world’s population may be more than it can cope with successfully. But it remains an inspiring example of what can be done in an emergency. Just in case we end up facing one.

I first developed an interest in food security during the Covid pandemic. Living in a group of storm-lashed islands off the north-east coast of Scotland, I already knew that fruit and vegetables don’t always turn up on the shelves of Tesco whenever you want them. However, you knew they would get there when the wind dropped. During the pandemic, empty shelves in the supermarket didn’t happen only when winter gales stopped the container lorries crossing the Pentland Firth. Life without lettuce suddenly became a real possibility.

During lockdown I was shut up alone in my house for long periods and there wasn’t much I could do to pass the time except gardening, starting a blog and surfing the Internet. I’ve always done a bit of gardening, ever since I took over the family vegetable patch when my father got too old. I started to think more seriously about growing some of my own food.

I started to follow the Singapore National Parks board website during lockdown, mainly because I visited my son in 2017 when he was on a two years’ postdoc there. Also it had pretty pictures of the world I could no longer visit. Singapore is a city-state with an area of 719 square km, slightly smaller than Orkney which has an area of 990 square km. However, Singapore has a population density of 8,592 people per square km, while Orkney's population density is 22 people per square km. The Singapore government is making a great effort to grow as much of their own food as possible. Areas between the high-rise blocks of flats where most of the population live have been turned into communal gardens, gardens have been established on rooftops, people can apply for an allotment, and during lockdown everyone was entitled to a free flowerpot and a packet of seeds so that they could grow herbs and salad on balconies. There is excellent free gardening advice on their website.  All these measures apparently have the added benefit of bringing people together, combating social isolation and distrust between the different ethnic groups, and giving the elderly something useful to do, since many of the jobs involved can be done by the less able-bodied.

I also thought about the ‘Dig for Victory’ program in Britain during the Second World War. During WWII, Britain made a massive, sustained effort to grow more of its own food, to waste as little of it as possible, and to distribute it as fairly as possible by rationing. Winning the war required that not only servicemen but also civilians remained healthy. Both sides in the conflict attempted to starve the other into surrender by blockading merchant ships carrying food from outside Europe. The population of the UK was already too high to feed without importing a lot of food, but the aim was to produce as much as possible at home. Fortunately the measures taken worked, and although people were often hungry, Britain never experienced mass starvation as parts of Europe did.

At the start of WWII, the UK had a population of nearly 50 million people (“Wartime Farm” p16) and imported 70% of its food (“Wartime Farm” p.14), much of it from the British Empire or Commonwealth. Farming had been neglected during the inter-war years because the government priority was the financial sector, manufacturing and free trade (“Wartime Farm” p.16-17). Britain imported over 5 million tons of unground wheat plus 400,000 tons of flour and meal before the war (“Fighting Fit” p.180) i.e. 88% of our wheat and flour (“Wartime Farm” p.18). 50% of meat was produced in the UK but a large amount of feedstuffs were imported; all the milk and 94% of our potatoes were produced here, but only 9% of our butter and 16% of our sugar, oils and fats were home-produced (“Wartime Farm” p.18).

The authorities therefore adopted policies to maximise food production at home, and to prioritise certain food imports. They also made careful scientific analyses of how to maximise the benefits of the foods being imported. It was found more efficient for imports to contain more calorie-dense foods such as meat, eggs, etc as these took up less space in transit. (Fighting Fit p.203).  Farmers were directed to turn over as much land as possible to arable farming, and to concentrate on providing the maximum number of calories as efficiently as possible by growing grain and potatoes rather than animal feedstuffs. One acre of land could grow enough wheat to feed 21 people, but only enough meat for one person (Fighting Fit p.204). Not only were pastures ploughed up, but any available odd bits of land e.g. Windsor Great Park. They managed to increase the acreage of arable land from 12 million in 1939 to 18 million in 1944 (“Wartime Farm p.28). They could not, however, produce anywhere near the amount of grain required for the nation’s staple, bread.

The government introduced legislation to force bakers and millers to produce brown bread rather than white, made of high-extraction flour, i.e. flour where the wheat germ and bran were not extracted. This was not only more nutritious but you could get significantly more loaves of bread from the same amount of grain. It was a very unpopular measure, both with the public for reasons of taste and with the bakers and millers for reasons of profit, but it was enforced. The flour was fortified with extra vitamins and minerals to improve its nutritional value even further.

Market gardens grew vegetables instead of flowers.  Since feedstuffs for cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens were largely imported, meat and egg production took a major hit, but milk was still considered important. Hay and silage for dairy cattle came from any available land, such as roadside verges, railway embankments and churchyards.

The general public could not realistically grow enough of the staple foods which provided calories, but they were encouraged to grow their own vegetables – “Dig for Victory” – and given instructions on how to do so. They were also taught how to control pests, how to save seed for next year, and how to preserve what they had grown. If you are growing vegetables seriously, this is just as important as knowing when to stick which seeds into the ground. One problem during wartime was that sugar was rationed, so that it was less easy to preserve fruit as jam. Pre-war most sugar came from imported sugar-cane, but now over 95% came from home-grown sugar beet. Various ways around this were suggested, such as jam recipes including salt or saccharine. People were encouraged to keep bees to offset the sugar shortage. People were also told how to dry vegetables such as apples, or store them carefully.

Children were encouraged to forage for wild fruits and nuts.  Although they didn’t usually collect enough to make a whole meal, they could make a significant contribution to meals based on other ingredients. Children also collected rosehips, which were made into syrup to provide vitamin C for children since citrus fruits were largely unavailable.

Farms in those days relied less on machinery, so there was a shortage of labour for growing food when most of the able-bodied males were serving in the armed forces. As well as supplying as many tractors and combine harvesters as possible, the government recruited women as “Land Girls”. At that point, women in Britain were not expected to do this sort of work, although in other times and places it was perfectly normal for women to work in the fields.

Rationing of staple foods such as meat and fish was introduced. People were expected to fill up, i.e. get most of their calories, from brown bread and potatoes. They were encouraged to eat potatoes rather than bread, as these did not have to be imported, although potatoes were not a totally reliable crop. Nevertheless, the diet of the poor (70% of the population) was enormously improved during the war, and the massive health divide between rich and poor was much reduced. Temporarily – after the war Britain returned to the state where poverty was linked to poor diet (Fighting Fit p.210-211). As indeed we have seen recently.

Today Britain has a population of just over 69 million and we import a large percentage of our food. Food produced in Britain includes most of our cereals, meat, dairy products and eggs. Less of our fruit and vegetables (17% and 55% respectively) are produced in Britain, due to climate, seasonality, and the preferences of both consumers and producers. Tomatoes are one of the most popular vegetables in Britain, but most are imported, especially during the winter.  The UK also imports vast quantities of lettuce. However, even domestic food production and distribution is reliant on imported products such as fertiliser and packaging, so it is not immune to supply chain problems.  And farmers have recently been complaining about a shortage of labour at harvest time.  Weather, pandemic disease, political changes and war have all recently meant that we can't rely on having all the imported fruit and vegetables we have become accustomed to. Maybe it's time to think ahead about how we cam become more self-sufficient?

“Fighting Fit: the Wartime Battle for Britain’s Health”  Laura Dawes 2016

“Wartime Farm” Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands 2012

It’s early November. Winter has come, and the gardening season is over. My tiny vegetable patch is going to sleep. It’s been a good year, in spite of a poor growing season: I’ve eaten fresh potatoes, handfuls of peas, ruby chard, abundant parsley and mint. I still have a small patch of leeks. My only real disappointment has been my new strawberry plants. Beautiful plump scarlet fruits, but when I turned them over, every single one had been hollowed out underneath. Not by slugs, but by woodlice. Do woodlice eat strawberries? Oh yes!

 I think that the most important thing I have finally learned from growing my own vegetables is that every few years your entire crop of a particular plant will fail, even if it has done really well previously. You can make it less likely to happen, and you can prepare for it by planting a variety of crops, but you can’t stop it happening entirely. You just have to learn to put up with it. The history of agriculture is the history of a perpetual struggle. There have always been pests, from birds to potato blight. The images in medieval manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter of monstrous birds stealing seed corn from a sack, or boys in the fields scaring birds with slings, are replaced today by photos of thousands of greylag geese sitting smugly in the barley fields of Orkney, which they have just stripped bare. Local farmers have to be given a licence to shoot a specified number of the birds every year. During the mid-19^th century (1845-52), a fungus-like disease called Phytophthora infestans – late blight – destroyed much of the potato crop in Europe. In Ireland, where for political and economic reasons a large proportion of the population were dependent on potatoes as their staple food and no-one intervened to help them, millions starved to death or were forced to emigrate. Scotland was badly hit as well. I have had to give up planting Brussels sprouts or indeed any brassicas, after two really good years, because somehow my vegetable patch has become infected with clubroot. The sprouts stood up to a plague of caterpillars but the virus defeated them. At least nowadays we know what causes it.

The Romans, who didn't know why these things happened, depended heavily on divine intervention. Their staple crop was wheat, and they had a large number of minor gods and goddesses to protect their crops at every stage from sowing to storage, including protection from diseases. A favourite of mine is Robigus who protected wheat from diseases, especially wheat rust, a nasty fungal disease. There are several kinds of wheat rust, the commonest being Puccinia triticina, wheat leaf rust. (Wheat rust still causes significant crop losses world-wide, but scientists have apparently identified a gene which facilitates wheat rust and are hoping to turn it off.) Robigus had his own festival on April 25th, the Robigalia, at which a dog was sacrificed. According to Ovid’s Fasti, the dog represented the Dog Star, Sirius. The weather at the rising of the Dog Star tended to be hot and dry and crops ripened too soon, which the Romans believed made them susceptible to wheat rust (Ovid, Fasti 4.905 – 941).

The most effective way to kill insects, fungi and viruses is to drench your crops in powerful pesticides. However we now realise that soaking your food and your fields in toxic chemicals carries its own dangers, even if it is more effective than sacrificing a dog. If you are a commercial market gardener, however, dependent on the requirements of a supermarket chain to remain in business, you may not have much choice about using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Don’t forget that supermarket chains feed most of the population nowadays, so we are all involved.

Anyway, pesticides don’t always work. Take slugs, for example. I remember one year after I had taken over my father’s vegetable patch and was trying to grow potatoes, perpetual spinach and French beans. I had a friend who was into organic gardening, so I tried to protect my plants from slugs by encircling them with coffee grounds, crushed eggshells and collars cut from plastic bottles. One set of neighbours invested in expensive nematodes which were supposed to kill slugs the ‘natural’ way. The old gentleman on the other side used the traditional blue slug pellets full of who-knows-what chemicals. All our crops got eaten, without exception. The sight of three rows of potatoes entirely stripped of their leaves, when they had done brilliantly in previous years, discouraged me so much that I gave up growing anything for years. The only thing I have ever found to have any effect on slugs whatsoever is little saucers of beer (I usually cheer myself up by drinking the other half of the bottle, so even if it doesn’t stop the slugs it’s not a total write-off).

Companion planting is another non-toxic method of pest control which I use. I always plant marigolds and nasturtiums among my vegetables. I can’t remember which vegetables they are supposed to protect from pests, or indeed whether they really do anything, but they certainly look pretty and they are self-seeding. My habit of dotting my onion sets around my containers is supposed to help as well. I have just learned that planting onions, leeks or chives among your strawberries is supposed to deter pests. I’ll try it.

The sobering thought in all this is that if you are currently gardening as an amateur in the UK, you can always go down to the supermarket and buy a bag of potatoes or beans. If you have a bad year, it’s disappointing but you won’t starve. But if you are dependent on what you grow for staying alive, it’s another story. You had better have a surplus stored from a previous year, or good neighbours who will share.