You Dig?

I used to read sci-fi comics and the NME; I moved on to the Times and Mojo. Now as I drift into old age I find I am irresistibly drawn to gardening catalogues. I've given up gigging for digging. There, I’ve said it. How much longer before I start wearing beige knitwear with Werthers originals in the pockets?



A (younger) friend tried to get me to go to the Portmerion Festival the other day. It’s a special place – the location of The Prisoner series; it was a great bill, the weather forecast was good. I weighed up the merits of traipsing to Wales, watching bands, eating dodgy burgers and bedding down in a field, or staying at home and gently pottering in my garden. No competition, I pottered.

Not only did I save a fortune, I rather think I enjoyed myself more.

 This year I have over fifty tomato plants and they all seem to have fruit on them but they will not surrender their blushing globes easily, needing fairly constant love and attention. There are lower leaves to trim, there is watering to be done, a bit of weeding, suckers to pluck, snails to remove and canes to fix. How could I have ever considered abandoning my lovelies at this crucial stage in their development, even for the not inconsiderable charms of New Order or Primal Scream? Plus the fact, the idea of standing in a mosh pit in a foreign field is just a little too exciting for me these days.



Yes, gardening – specifically vegetable growing - is the new rock ‘n’ roll. Waiting lists for allotments stretch into decades, many enlightened schools in the area have put in veg beds, the Horniman has installed a very impressive World Food Garden (http://www.timmackley.co.uk/tag/horniman-gardens) and the Dulwich Vegetable Garden (http://www.dulwichgoinggreener.org.uk/dulwich-vegetable-garden), behind Roseberry Lodge in the park is now well established. It was where, the other Sunday a very congenial hoary-handed man of the soil was happy to take a five-minute break from his labours to talk manure.



But what to put in my bed? Onions, spuds and parsnips are all cheap and plentiful in the shops just down the road, as well as being dull so I don’t see the point in growing them. I’ve made a point of planting things that taste better than shop bought produce or things that you can’t easily get, or things that are expensive: I’ve had asparagus in for three years now. We had a crop of two spears last year which I admit is less than spectacular and doth not a dinner make but I’ve got high hopes that once they get going we’ll get about ten years of free asparagus out of the plants. More successful this summer was some delicious chard and a fair crop of raspberries.



There are set up costs of course, tools and compost to buy. The catalogue bursts with labour saving money-wasting gadgets. I figured out that the three raspberries I had last year stood me in at about seven quid each, but persevere and as the years go by the unit costs fall away.

My next crop is very ambitious; I’m planting fifty saffron crocuses, which will look pretty and yield little rust-coloured stigmas that weight-for-weight are more valuable than gold. To plant these, I of course needed to buy a special crocus-planting tool, which is £20 and may only get used once, but that’s less than the cost of a new shirt and since I don’t go out any more I don’t need a new shirt. 

Apparently 150 crocuses provide only one gramme of saffron (enough for 12 meals), while you would need to plant the equivalent of two football pitches to get a crop of one kilo.

Now I’m not suggesting we plant crocuses all over the sports fields but it has made me think about the bits of land there are scattered around the area that could benefit from the addition of a fruit tree or a tomato plant. The plant shop lady from Herne Hill grows tomatoes up beside the tree outside Pullens restaurant in a space of about ten square centimetres. 

Imagine if Dulwich was covered in fruit and veg and you could just help your self? That appeals to my old hippie mentality. Perhaps the council should plant fruit trees rather than ornamentals; cabbages rather than daffs; like Johnny Appleseed who travelled the USA planting apple trees wherever he went, I shall start scattering veg seeds in the verges of Dulwich. A little bit of guerrilla gardening would go a long way.



To think of all those years I wasted hanging around record shops on Saturdays when I should have been in the garden centre mulling over mulch. Now what on earth am I going to do with all these tomatoes?



© Steve Overbury 2012



Steve’s book London Babylon about the dark side of the Swinging Sixties is available from www.londonbabylon.co.uk priced £12.99. There are 414 pages of previously untold stories, anecdotes, pictures and spelling mistakes. Each visitor to the site is entitled to the two ‘missing’ chapters free.

See Steve’s blogs: London-babylon.blogspot.com, Spoot-shoot.blogspot.com, beastdulwich.blogspot.com/

Get off my land

For millennia, the Great North Woods were the domain of Mother Nature, then the king – guess which one - rudely robbed her. And when Henry VIII said to the people, ‘Get off my land,” what he really meant was, stop stealing my deer or I’ll cut your hands off.

He stripped out its oaks to build his navy until all that remained of the once great forest were two slivers, Sydenham Hill Wood and the adjacent Dulwich Wood, whose ownership passed down to the Dulwich Estate. In around 1802, it’s recorded that one ‘Matthews the hairyman’ used to live in a cave up there, just one of the renegades that must have sought sanctuary in the woods or used them for crime. There are two murders on record; God knows how many others there might have been over the centuries.

Now, you can accuse the College of many crimes, but messing up the woods isn’t one of them. Well, that’s if you don’t include the nasty pikestaff fence that separates them from the golf course, or the deeply unattractive Wates development that chewed into the pristine greenery. But at least that damage won’t be done again, or we hope not.

The Dulwich Estate can pride itself on having protected the village and its environs against the filthy excesses of the planners for centuries. Lots of us live here largely because of that and regularly enjoy ambling in the woods, catching occasional glimpses through the trees of the shimmering city just four miles to the north.

However, many Dulwich residents will be unaware that the best local views of London aren’t from the woods or the top of Dawson’s Heights flats, nor from One Tree Hill or Horniman Drive; they are exclusive to the gardeners of Grange Lane and Rosendale Road allotments. But don’t think for a moment you’ll ever see them. The twin vistas are jealously guarded by the allotment-eers and those who dare try to catch a peek of them should prepare themselves for a dust up with a hoary-handed son of the soil.

My encounter went something like this:

‘Good morning.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I was thinking about putting my name down for an allotment, how long is the list?’

‘You shouldn’t be on here you know,’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Why are you up here?

‘I was thinking about an allotment and I wanted to see the view.’

‘It’s private property.’

‘I know, but I’m only having a look at the view.’

‘It’s not allowed. There’s been vandalism up here.’

‘I’m sorry about that but do I really look like an allotment wrecker?’

‘They call the police, you know, the golf club does.’

‘Are you going to call the police?’

Then you spot the next-door allotment holder bearing down on you, hoe at the ready, and it’s clearly time to leave.

Go on then, call the police, and if they can be bothered to turn out at all; unless I’m standing next to a burning shed with an empty petrol can and a box of matches in my hand, what do you think they’ll do? And whose land is it anyway?

But by then the bucolic euphoria has slipped away and you slip away with it.

The pugnacious gardener was a recent allotment holder. I could tell by his recent allotment, staked out and raked but devoid of plants. No point telling him I had been going up there for years to stand in the little paradise of blooms, beehives and happy farmers gazing at the spectacular view. Everyone knows that the BT tower is to the right of the big wheel, Sadie, Sienna, Jude and you Primrose Hillbillies, not to the left.

To be fair, it does say on the Grange Lane gates that allotment holders should try and discourage trespassers but what is trespass anyway? It’s not a crime that’s for sure. However, this custodian seemed perfectly prepared to fight with fork and fists to protect his thirty-foot long patch of dirt. Him and his mate looked like they would think nothing of beating me to death with a spade and shovelling me under the compost heap until ripe enough to spread like mulch on their tomatoes.

But it’s deep within us all no matter how we masquerade as clean fingered urbanites. Land. Without your own patch you are nothing, just a serf. So I sympathise with the veg men while at the same time feeling a bit annoyed that they exclude me.

From Grange Lane you can scan an arc encompassing Battersea Power Station and the City; from Rosendale Road the sweep extends to the Dome off to the east. To be up there on a fine day lifts the heart. But you’ll never experience it unless you are prepared to battle scary allotment holders worthy of Matthews the hairyman himself. Get orf moi land!