10.3.24 – bread and frogspawn

in the garden

This newsletter was meant to be out on Wednesday, but lately my life has been hijacked by a proliferation of migraines and autistic burnout. Anyone who suffers from chronic illness will know what this means: the housework and projects abandoned, the long periods of time spent looking at the mess of arrested life and work without the ability to do anything about it, the exhaustion and frustration, the infuriating boredom.

For the first time in years, I’ve begun a sourdough starter. I can think of just one other time in my life when the only logical answer to everything wrong was the constant making and eating and planning of bread. I had forgotten how pleasurable and familiar a process it is to care for a starter, so similar to caring for the garden. (I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that the last time I took good care of a starter was just before I had my first proper garden.) In these periods of pain and fatigue, the garden feels very far away; both front and back gardens are so full of hard-graft landscaping jobs just now that the gentle attentiveness and caretaking of plants feels mournfully out of reach. Feeding the starter, scooping into its mousse-like matrix to make bread, pouring out its hungry acetone-stinking goop, all of it touches a similar satisfaction of mutual sustainment that I get from cutting bouquets of parsley, moving volunteer foxgloves, de-slugging lettuces.

I feed my starter and bake my bread and think about starving people massacred trying to get flour. I think about the gaunt faces of starved children and the hauntingly thin legs of malnourished infants. I know I’m not the only person right now who doesn’t know how to live like this. I don’t know how to grasp my way towards a joy about being alive, pulling myself out of the depression that so often accompanies burnout and chronic pain, when everything I do and breathe and eat and drink happens in a world where people are being starved to death, shot to death, begging as they die to be buried alongside the ones they love, holding shroud-wrapped bodies that are too small, too stained with blood, too dead. When the tiredness abates I sow my seeds and plant young brassicas and think of the man who tilled lines of soil where his house used to be, and of the small boy who pressed young plants into the earth outside his family’s tent because he said it made their home beautiful. I feel nauseous more than once in a day when I see something else I didn’t mean to see, don’t want to see, feel compelled to see as an act of witness.

I wish I could march, I wish I could use my body as an obstacle in protest, I wish I even had the bandwidth to be more vocal against these atrocities on social media. Free Palestine! I wish I could do more than make a garden, feed a starter, and remind my offline loved ones which brands to boycott. I am finding that it is harder for me to be optimistic or to believe with my whole chest in radical futures when I am too immobilised for too long, too disconnected from the insistent liveliness of plants and bread and people. Stillness makes room for grief and horror, whether or not it’s welcome; I am grateful to the sourdough microbes, the garden mushrooms, the unfurling rhubarb, to the new young seedlings for connecting me to liveliness outside of myself, for being so reassuringly kinetic. I am finding that, when it comes to both witnessing genocide and living with chronic pain and disability, where it is not possible to feel better, it is helpful and necessary to at least touch living things, to feel alive.

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – March

The first newsletter of every month this year will include an excerpt from gardener John Reid’s 1683 book The Gardn’ner’s Kalendar, an addendum to his book The Scots Gard’ner.

Re-delve, mix, and rake your ground for immediate use. Delve about the roots of all your trees. Yet plant trees and rather greens. Also prune such except resinous. Propagate by laying, circumposition, and especially by cuttings. Sow the seeds of most trees and hardie greens. Cover those trees whose roots lay bair and delve down the manures that lay about your young trees all winter, covering on leitter again topt with earth to prevent drought in summer: this is a material observation and more especially for such as are late planted. Slit the bark of ill-thriving trees. Fell such as grow croked in the nurserie. Graffing is yet in season (but too late for stone fruit), cut off the heads of them inoculated.

Set peas, beans, cabbage, asparagus, liquorish. Sow parsley, beets, endive, succory, bugloss, burrage, sellery, fennell, marigold. Plant shallot, garleeks, potatoes, skirrets. Sow onions, lettice, cresses, parsneep, beet-rave, radish, &c. And on the hotbed coleflower, and if you please, cucumber, &c.

Slip and set physick herbes, July-flowers, and other fibrous-rooted flowers. Be careful of the tender plants; the piercing colds are now on foot. Turn your fruit in the room but open not yet the windows.

Catch moles, mice, snails, worms, destroy frogs’ spawn, &c.

Half open passages for bees, they begin to flit; keep them close night and morning: yet you may remove them.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

            Both green and housed herbes and roots: also pickled, housed, and conserved fruits, with their wines as in the former months.

I did a double-take at the end: destroy frogs’ spawn? What possible benefits could be derived from destroying frog spawn when it’s frogs who do all the best pest control? Reid does not elaborate on the motive behind this instruction in any other part of the Kalendar or The Scots Gard’ner. I can only imagine he had one of three reasons: first and most dubiously, he might have wished to avoid injury. In her chapter “In Dock, Out Nettle: Negotiating Health Risks in the Early Modern Garden” (found in The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain), Emily Cock describes the myriad views on “creepy crawlies” held by early modern gardeners. On frogs, she writes,

“Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts (1607) and The Historie of Serpents (1608) discuss a staggering array of living creatures and their interactions with humans, both positive and negative. These include the animals that could be found around the home garden, such as frogs and toads: the green frog, for example, has uses in treating fevers and preventing hair growth, but it is also poisonous and makes cattle unwell if they accidentally eat them and causes men’s hands to blister if held (Topsell 1608).”

Also mentioned is Thomas Hill’s The Gardener’s Labyrinth (1577), in which Hill suggests that frogs’ chirping through summer evenings “are wonte to be disquieters to the weried husbandmen through their dayly laboure”. Perhaps Reid held the same concern. To quiet the frogs, Hill proposes hanging a bright lantern, “that by the brightness of the same light, it may so shine upon them, as it were the Sunne, which handled on this wise, wil after cause them to leave their chirping and loud noise making: a practise tried by many of latter years.” He further adds that one might bury in a nearby bank the stomach of a goat, after which frogs will no longer congregate around that spot.

Third, and most likely, I think Reid simply disliked the aesthetic of frogspawn in his garden ponds, or else found a proliferation of frogs to be irritating. At the end of the 17^th century, the landscape across the whole of the British Isles featured a great deal more wetland than it does now; perhaps it made little difference to Reid’s slug population to destroy the frogspawn within his garden when so many other clutches in the surrounding landscape would develop successfully.

Regardless, you may follow his advice to sow parsley, beets, marigold, and lettuce this month, but if you are so lucky to have frogspawn in your garden ponds this year, do happily ignore him.

reading

I first started reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk in September 2021, when it called to me from the impressive library of our holiday cottage in Glen Lyon. I later bought a second-hand copy, and it’s been one of those books I dip in and out of at random, bowled over by how good it is but too distracted by other things to linger with it. Well I’m lingering now.