Last spring, my oldest daughter and I set out to tame our blackberry thicket. Half a dozen bushes, each with a decade’s worth of dead canes, had come with our house, and we were determined to make them accessible to hungry children. (Do you have any idea how much berries cost at the grocery store, even in the height of summer? Do you have an idea how many hours of peaceful book-reading you can stitch together out of the time your kids are hunting for fruit in their own yard? It’s a win-win.) But after we’d cut down all the dead canes, I explained that we also needed to shorten the living ones, especially the second-year canes that would be bearing fruit later in the summer. At this point, scratched and sweaty from our work, she balked: was Mom trying to deprive the children of their rightful blackberries? But I explained that on blackberries, like most woody plants, the terminal bud suppresses growth from all lower buds; removing it makes them all grow new shoots, each of which will have flowers and eventually fruit. Cutting back the canes in March means more berries in July. At which point I could see a light dawning in her eyes as she exclaimed, “Oh! We’re memorizing the Parable of the True Vine in school but I never knew why Jesus says pruning the vines makes more fruit …”
It’s pretty trite by now to point out that Biblical metaphors that would have made perfect sense for an agricultural society are opaque to a modern audience for whom vineyards are about the tasting room and trimming your wick extends the burn time of your favorite scented candle. There’s probably whole books out there exploring the material culture of first century Judaea to provide context to the New Testament.1 But at least pruning is a “known unknown”: John 15:2 jumps out as confusing, and anyone who does a little gardening can figure out the answer. Plenty of things aren’t like that at all. Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. Are they any good? Should I read them? I’ve mentally plotted out a structure for one of my own, where each chapter is themed around the main image of one of the parables — oil, wine, seeds, fish, sheep, cloth, salt — and explores all the practicalities: the wine chapter would cover viticulture techniques but also land ownership (were the vintners usually tenants? what did their workforce look like?), seeds would cover how grain was planted, harvested, milled, and cooked, etc. The only problem is that I don’t actually know anything about any of this.
October 19, 2024
QotD: From blackberry picking to Bible verses
August 22, 2024
QotD: The changing role of the Medieval housewife in England
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
May 25, 2024
Another thing for progressives to obsess about – “horticultural appropriation”
In Spiked, Lauren Smith wonders if your garden — yes, your garden — is a nest of racist appropriation:
Is your garden a bed of racist colonialism?
Is your garden racist? As incredible as this may seem, it’s a question many gardeners are being forced to ask themselves. The innocent act of planting a few flowers can now get you branded with the r-word.
A piece in the June issue of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World magazine claims that the weeds of racism have sprung up in some unlikely places. Landscape designer Jackie Herald argues that choosing to plant non-native species in British gardens can constitute “horticultural appropriation”, because they were originally brought to the UK as a result of colonialism.
Herald writes: “Embedded within cross-cultural borrowing is horticultural appropriation, something that’s all too easy for our nation of gardeners to carry on regardless. In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted did come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by plant hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade.”
So, instead of picking out plants willy-nilly, Herald tries to choose plants that “connect to my client’s cultural heritage”. That means you had better check your 23&Me results before filling your flowerbeds, otherwise you could be horticulturally appropriating plants that don’t align with your racial heritage.
Uprooting racism from your garden might be more tricky than you’d think. Not least as some of the UK’s best-loved flowers are products of “colonialism”. Magnolias, for example, came from colonial Virginia and camellias from China.
Apparently, the most problematic perennial of all is wisteria, that inoffensive purple plant you often see hanging around the doors of posh houses. In 2022, Transport for London published a sightseeing guide called Art on the Underground, which claimed that wisteria has “colonial roots” (presumably no pun intended). This is because it was brought to England in the early 19th century from China. The guide also highlighted the supposedly racist nature of using words like “exotic”, “native” or “invasive” to describe plants. According to TfL, these can cultivate painful memories of “histories of conquest” and are best avoided.
August 26, 2023
QotD: The psychological value of “making”
This makes perfect sense, of course: I don’t have a deep and intimate knowledge of these things because I don’t need one. Still, though, it’s important to have a certain very basic familiarity with how the things around you work — enough, say, to know what to Google when something breaks and how to put the results into practice, or to turn fifteen feet of arching blackberry cane into an actual bush — because it gives you power over your world. The particular powers don’t really matter (it’s easy enough to pay someone else to fix your plumbing or grow your berries); the key is the patterns of thought they engender. There are, for example, apparently some enormous number of people who don’t change the batteries in their beeping smoke detectors. I have no idea whether it’s drug-induced apathy, ignorance of how things work (in the same way that drilling a hole in your wall to hang something seems scary if you don’t know that your wall is
a liejust painted drywall in front of empty space between the studs), or simply a pathological lack of personal agency, but it’s hard to believe you can change anything dissatisfactory about your life if you can’t change a 9V battery.Making and doing things, even when you don’t have to, is practice in believing that you can change your own world. It’s weightlifting for agency. You can outsource the making of your physical world, but social worlds — the arrangement of your family life, your personal relationships, the organizations and institutions you’re involved in — must be created by the participants themselves. A good society would be one where the default “builder-grade” scripts lead to human flourishing, but unfortunately that isn’t ours, so you have to be able to decide on your own changes. Start practicing now: find one little thing about your physical environment that annoys you and fix it. Put the new toilet paper roll actually on the holder. Replace the burned-out lightbulb. Hang the artwork that’s listing drunkenly against the wall. Pull some weeds. And then, once you’ve warmed up a little bit, go and make something new.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. They’re oak dining chairs, probably (judging by the construction) about a hundred years old, and they looked a lot better on Facebook Marketplace than in real life. When I showed up to buy them, the sellers turned out to be an elderly couple moving to assisted living in six hours; they admired my baby and showed me pictures of their grandchildren and explained they had inherited the chairs from the wife’s mother, who in turn had gotten them from her friend’s mother, and by this point I couldn’t really say “yeah I can tell” and leave, so home they came. When I took apart the seats to recover them I discovered the original horsehair padding and some extremely questionable techniques applied over the years, but anyway now my chairs have eight-way hand-tied springs and I have some new calluses.
May 29, 2023
How to Plant a Culinary Herb Garden! DIY Kitchen Garden
Food Wishes
Published 1 Jun 2015[Note, description is from the Food Wishes blog. Chef John’s plant selection is Thyme (English, French, and Lemon), Chives, Italian Parsley, Sage, Oregano (Greek and Italian), Tuscan Blue Rosemary, Basil (Genovese or Sweet), and Spearmint.]
I mentioned several times during this “how to plant your own culinary herb garden” video that I’d give a lot more specific information on the blog, but now that I’m here, I realize there’s not much more to tell you.
Herbs are very easy to grow, and besides basil, which doesn’t like to dry out, they only require occasional watering. Any well-drained soil will work, but your best bet is to grab a bag of ready-to-use planting mix. Feel free to double check with the person at the nursery, but it’s basically potting soil with benefits. And, I did say nursery. Drive the extra mile, and talk to people that just sell plants.
I consider these herbs must-haves, but there are many more varieties you can try. I’ve done things like tarragon and cilantro in the past, and while they are a little more temperamental, they can be successfully cultivated.
Nothing beats being able to go out into the garden, and just take a pinch of this and a pinch of that. When you consider the cost of one of these plants is just a little more than for a single bunch at the market, why not have a few pots around, even if they’re on the windowsill? I hope you plant your garden soon. Enjoy!
NOTE: I’m not a gardening expert, so asking me specific question about soil types and weather issues will result in many a guess. My advice would be to use this video as an inspiration, and then check out some local gardening websites.
April 3, 2023
The poison garden of Alnwick
Tom Scott
Published 29 May 2017Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there’s the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!
For more information about visiting the Castle, Garden, and poison garden: https://alnwickgarden.com/
(And yes, it’s pronounced “Annick”.)
(more…)
February 17, 2023
QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities
Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.
Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
January 17, 2023
Growing an Ancient Roman Garden
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Aug 2022
November 2, 2019
How to make a Planter out of Pallet Wood | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 31 Oct 2019Paul takes a break from his day to day of furniture making to show you how to create this very straightforward planter — which is made entirely out of pallet wood!
Paul hopped into a skip (with permission of course) grabbed some pallets and got creating. Using only a few simple hand tools and following alongside Paul with these easy steps, you can create a planter too!
Paul is now ready to start growing some vegetables in his garden when the growing seasons arrive. Why don’t you get ready for Spring this Autumn and create yourself a simple planter for your garden!
——————–Want to learn more about woodworking?
Go to Woodworking Masterclasses for weekly project episodes: http://bit.ly/2JeH3a9
Go to Common Woodworking for step-by-step beginner guides and courses: http://bit.ly/35VQV2o
http://bit.ly/2BXmuei for Paul’s latest ventures on his blog
