the greenhouse

Here's a piece I wrote in March for another website. I was intending to include some allotment stories here, so, by way of a start...

Allotment Tales:
Late March

It's been ten weeks since I was last formally employed in exchange for money and I've settled into a routine so naturally, I can't quite believe it. My biggest fear now is having to go back to work, something that will have to be considered in due course unless providence shines its light upon me for the rest of my working life. For the first time in thirty years of working for a living I realise what ''working for yourself'' and ''being your own boss'' truly mean: literally that.

Needless to say all my working hours have been spent on the patch. We acquired a small greenhouse for nothing, we borrowed a van to collect it and replaced the missing glass by salvaging old wooden casement windows someone had thoughtfully donated to the communal allotment odds-and-sods store (which is in itself a fabulously thoughtful idea). Now we will grow exotics!

Had I still been employed - and I earned quite a decent wage - I may have given up waiting on freecycle and gotten my wallet out and bought a new greenhouse or polytunnel. It would have been so easy. Life is that easy. Too easy when you think of it. A brand new product being manufactured when a perfectly good one is going unused somewhere nearby. Consumerism has conditioned us to earn money by making or things for the marketplace so that we can go out and buy other things made by other people for the market place so they can earn money to buy stuff, maybe the things we made, to keep the economy going. Some people don't even make anything: they buy other people's made stuff, add ''value'' to it (good one that?) and resell it back to the market. Some call this enterprise. Of course, because bogus value has been added to it, it costs more so people need more money so they have to make more new things and persuade more people to make more purchases, and on and on. In control theory this is known as positive feedback; in layman's terms things get bigger and bigger until they go pop! And it's no good sticking a green star on it and calling it sustainable development or sustainable growth because there ain't no such thing. Eventually it'll go pop too; think about it.

Our allotment and that of my neighbours is shaded by trees. This reduces the amount of sunshine on our greenhouse end and reduces his growing potential. We got permission to cut them down but I like trees, so we pollarded them. This means cutting the tops down to the trunk at manageable proportions and allowing the tree to produce new shoots from beneath the bark, in turn these being cut each season to keep the height low and unobstruct sunshine. Now I've never done this before but if it goes to plan the new shoots harvested could be used for supporting beans and things rather than buying imported bamboo canes.

In any event I've recently learned that burning them or letting them rot is not as good as cooking them - turning them into charcoal. It's an astounding fact that the biosphere removes 18 times more CO2 than we humans pump into it. The trouble is this CO2 is soon returned to the atmosphere when the green stuff rots down or is burnt. Charcoal on the other hand is relatively inert and traps the carbon in for long periods. It has been proposed that if green waste is turned into charcoal rather than burnt or composted, and buried in landfills or in the ocean, the planet itself will go a long way to right the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But will we do that? No, because we are told composting is saving the planet. It's a crazy world, and one day it's going to end and it's our fault.
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I took the photo (above) today - greenhouse doing fine. no results yet on the pollarding.