the impassioned world of hoes

This is a foot-note/addendum/correction/apologia to the Hoe in Art and History post of April 3.  And other posts and pages on hoes.

Tara (whose surname may or may not be Chillington, it really doesn’t matter) has commented that I failed to mention Chillington Tools, who have been making hoes for a century:-

This is a question more than a comment.

How come with all what you have written here you do not mention possibly the worlds leading manufacturer of these tools who have been in business for over 100 years but show photographs of people who most probably are using them.

Tara – how could I refuse such a call? I have fallen well short of my intentions, which generally are to research what I write about, and link to where good things are to be found. So here goes:
“The Chillington Tool Company has been supplying the agricultural and construction industries with quality hot forged Hoes and Forks for over one hundred years. Using Quality high carbon steel, Chillington sets the highest standard for quality worldwide.
Chillington manufactures a large selection of patterns in a wide range of sizes.
Chillington Hoes and Forks are sold throughout the world under a number of different brand names, the most famous being the “Crocodile”.
All Chillington products are recognised as the hallmark of quality, durability and reliability.”

Now the fact is that in all my trawling through The InterWebs, the name Chillington never came up. Possibly the key to this lies in the sentences I lifted from their own site – ‘… sold throughout the world under a number of different brand names’.

Another aspect to all this is that as I live in France, and Google mainly in French, and France is a larger and more agriculturally productive country than the UK, with an active artisanal metal-working industry which supplies a number of large African countries that were former colonies – my slant on handtools and hoes might be less than UK-centric.

Chillingtons hoes certainly deserve their place in any history of the hoe – any company that has survived for 100 years merits our admiration. And it may well be firms like Chillington Tools that are studied by rising young economists, to discover how businesses can be sustainable, rather than get-rich-quick machines.

I’m always prepared to be told-off, and ready to make amends – and especially pleased to find myself promoting hoe-makers, whatever their nationality. Here’s to another century of worthwhile digging!

our Three Sisters garden

We have lost momentum in the communal potager at Sue’s.

The weather continues to be intermittently maussade with damp grey clouds blown in by the vent marin from the Med. Charles is too busy spraying the vines with copper sulfate against mildiou et oïdium, plus rigging up a 1950’s engine-and-pump contraption for irrigating his own grand potager, to plough our patch.

The big plan for Sue’s garden will have to be scrapped, and a smaller area worked instead. The plantlings are getting leggy. We have to do it by hand.

None of us fancy deep-digging a four-metre-square plot in temperatures of 26 C. Then it occurred to me that the Amerindian method called Three Sisters planting would suit exactly the plants I was raising – and that their  ‘hillock’ cultivation closely resembled the ‘ados’ method of this region.

There are many sources of info on 3 Sisters gardens on the web – but this came from an interesting discussion on the  women not dabbling in normal group-blog :

Corn benefits beans by providing a trellis.
Squash benefits both beans and corn by providing a way to cool the soil and reduce weeds.
The beans are the special key to this relationship … beans (a legume) draw nitrogen from the air and with the help of symbiotic bacteria (in the nodules) convert the nitrogen to a form that other plants (including the legume itself) can use.
Beans release sugars from their roots. The symbiotic bacteria like this sugar and by eating it become much more productive at nitrogen fixation. Eventually, the stored plant-friendy nitrogen is released in minute amounts to other plants and into the fuits of the plant as well as in the decaying material.
Another benefit of the 3 sisters is that it reduces the needed space. It essentially concentrates the growing area by combining complementary growing needs – thus we are able to produce more yield from a smaller space.

Whether planting a nitrogen-fixer with the non-nitro fixers has immediate benefit or not, is still debated in agronomy and plant physiological sciences. One researcher used a radioactive tracer to “follow” the nitrogen in a field of rye and clover (grass and legume, respectfully) and it found that 80% of the nitrogen being used by the rye came directly from the clover (this suggests there is immediate benefit and is why in many cultures the world over, legumes and other nitrogen-fixers have been planted with the non-nitro fixing plants (there are more examples beyond the 3 sisters and pasture).

Sweet corn developes an extraordinarily complex root-system, and needs 50 – 80 cms. depth. The soil was tilled only to 20 cm. – so I thought I’d dig the rest with just the one tool – a hoe (or azarda, or la trinque, or le cantonnier. Here’s how it went, yesterday and today :

The 3 Sisters are sweet corn, bean(or pea) and squash (or melon), and the plot was 4m. x 4m. So I thought – 3 rows of 3 ados. Corn needs wind to pollinate its neighbour, so I thought – stagger the rows. Squash needs space to ramble – so I should leave nearly a metre between each hillock and each row. It fitted perfectly.

I try to measure these things – but my plans with posts and strings don’t work. What does work is the simple large step that a person can make, and then grind the foot in the soil. That’s a metre. These heaps have to be a metre apart. Getting them centred and staggered was a problem. Until I lined each dig-point up, and then made a cross with the hoe. I hoed out to the diameter that I wanted, and then hacked hard to bring up the compacted earth.

The big hoe is good at this – it’s long and sharp and heavy. Large compacted slabs of soil can be levered up, and dragged to the perimeter. Keeping a steady shuffling motion, all four points of the original compass can be worked up.

So far – so good : this is defining the perimeter. Then one attacks the middle – with renewed force, because this is nearing sub-soil, and it’s getting stoney. I left all this dull soil in a central heap, and then flung in a large amount of semi-composted muck.

Muck is a term that I gratefully import from John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency – it means anything you can throw at the plants. Some people are extemely persnickety about what you put on, or under, your preciousnesses. Muck is his general word for everything he offers his. As a non-expert (indeed, an anti-expert) I like the idea of generalised ‘muck’. It has an Old English sound to it. He seems to say – it really doesn’t matter. What you throw on your plants, what you do with your compost. Very liberating. Give them what you can, what you’ve got.

The great thing about the long-handled hoe is that you don’t tread the soil. And in this circular bed system, you can stay outside the perimeter all the time. Earth and compost can be drawn in, and worked (because the hoe can hook-up, where a spade cannot) and you can keep up a satisfying circular shuffling motion around your ados or raised heap.

I’m a light-weight, muscular man, of 59 years. And this is an emergency-digging situation. The big hoe was too much for Sue and for Mary – on their first try-out. But I feel that with a little training, they too could be hacking large chunks of sub-soil using the leveraging-power of the long heavy blade, and the long handle. I do think that technique and teaching can turn heavy-duty tilling into no-sweat gardening. Make that lo-sweat.

There’s no denying that swinging a big heavy hoe is tiring – but if the alternative is digging and wiggling with a spade and/or a fork English-style, with double-bent back . . . then sorry, I’m no fan. Make no mistake – this is peasant work. But in two short afternoons, Sue and I dug and planted all nine beds.

Big scythe and small tractor

This is where it starts. The scythe I bought months ago gets a taste of the whetstone and goes to work for the first time in decades. I was amazed at how efficient it was – sweeping aside the sheeves of grass into a heap in a way that a strimmer could not manage. Rythmic and moorish exercise – not noisy and back-acheing mayhem.

First things first : the grass and weeds have to go somewhere – so I’ve put together three bins from pallets I’d scavenged over the winter from building sites. With all the rain there’s several heaps that won’t all fit in. When I fetch in the horse manure next week I’ll mix it all up together, bin what I can and cover the rest with a tarp. It should all be ready come autumn, when a month of double-digging will see it all in the ground.

This is Sunday May 10, and most of the scything is done. I need to clear the back strip and straighten up the drive-way, but the dead trees are a nuisance – by law all bonfires are banned from April through to October.

Charles, our ‘petit vigneron’ and best French friend, spontaneously offered to help with the clearance.

The narrow little vine-tractor is handy in confined spaces; here he’s giving the ground a passe or two with the rotavator, to a depth of 5 centimetres. He has to change the kit on the back next week to do some harrowing in his vines – and will return to break up the next 20 centimetres.

As Raphael remarks on his blog Un Potager en Languedoc, tout stagne during this wet and cold spring. Early plantings of seedlings remain ’stagnant’ in the cool soil – so we’re hopeful our late start won’t matter.

The area now looks huge, and daunting – but with the three of us: me Mary and Sue, and Charles! – and a not too-ambitious first year plan, it should come good.

With two gardens to manage, plus our summer ArtHoliday courses, there won’t be the time to sit and blog. But I feel more confident now that we might be able to feed ourselves – whatever else happens in the world.

Getting a handle on it

The handle or shaft length on a hoe is crucial for efficiency and comfort. Short handles may feel more familiar but they mean more bending over, and more strain on the back. Greg Baka of  Easy Digging is a strong advocate of the long handle and all his hoe handles are shipped 59″ long as he believes the correct ergonomic length should be between armpit and shoulder. It was on his site that I found the link to the report below, on the hoe in Africa.

Others - like  Simon Drummond of Get Digging who imports azadas himself and Kate McEvoy of Realseeds think shorter is better – 36″ to 47″. They are however united in their enthusiasm for the hoe. I discovered the advantages of the long handle, on spades and forks, in Ireland – but the grub hoe/azada/essade was largely unknown there. Here in le Languedoc the Robinia tree grows like weeds and provides me with strong slim and unrottable shafts from its straightish branches.

Andy Graham of  HoboTraveller filmed two girls in Kpalime, Togo, West Africa using the short hoe  here [also in Video Library, right]

The hand hoe is probably the most important tool for women farmers in Africa, but also one that causes them considerable problems.

IFAD [International Fund for Agricultural Development], FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] and the Government of Japan conducted a study of the agricultural implements used by women farmers in Africa. It found that, for a number of both cultural and economic reasons, most men and women farmers used primarily hand tools. The hand hoe is the tool most used in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Both men and women use it. In some areas, such as in the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso and parts of Uganda, it is virtually the only tool used by poorer women farmers.

But its traditional design creates problems for users. The study found some variations in the design and manufacture of hoes. Except in Senegal, the hoe is invariably of the traditional ‘chop-down-and-pull’ type, and with a short handle. The way the hoe’s blade fits to the handle varies from country to country. There hoes with a tang fitting, socket fitting or eye-ring fitting. The hoe with the eye-ring fitting is usually the industrially manufactured version, whereas those with the other two types of fittings are made by local blacksmiths. These are cheaper but more likely to need to be replaced annually because of their poor quality. Even these cost about USD 1.75, which is expensive for the poorer farmers, such as those in central Burkina Faso. Hoes with socket fittings are generally sold without handles, which the farmer or a specialized craftsman in the village can make from local wood.

The women in the study focus groups noted that of all their tasks on the land, weeding with a hand-hoe was the hardest and most time consuming job, causing both fatigue and backache. A major reason for this are traditional hoes’ short handles, which necessitates women’s bending over almost double to use them. Only in Senegal, where inter-row cultivation with animal traction is usually practised and long-handled push-pull hoes are in use, was weeding seen as less difficult. The short-handled hoe is effective and provides considerable control, but with some tasks and easier soil situations, a lighter, long-handled hoe would work perfectly well and be far easier for women to use. The hand hoe is therefore a tool that has room for improvement.  Given the obvious drawbacks for women users of the traditional model hoe – problematic handle length and weight – it is surprising that the hoe’s design has proven so resistant to change.

Different ethnic groups seem to be fiercely attached to the handle lengths to which they are accustomed. For instance, in the study area in Zambia, migration brought together ethnic groups from different parts of the country and with differing hoe handle lengths. While these groups have lived and worked together for many years in harmony, each group has retained its own accustomed hoe handle length. Attempts to introduce long-handled hoes, such as those by a German-financed project in Zimbabwe, have apparently been unsuccessful (at the time of the research). Lighter Chinese hoes have been imported into the countries of eastern and southern Africa, but farmers there seem to be unaware of these lighter hoes and buy whatever hoes are sold locally.

Choices in local markets are limited. The push-pull hoe in Senegal (similar to the Dutch hoe used in Europe) is an exception to the rule. It has a long handle and a farmer can use it while in an upright position. This hoe was introduced in Senegal in the mid-thirties. In central Senegal, it has now displaced the traditional hoe for weeding purposes. The study notes that as members of the French army the Senegalese were great travelers, and are therefore probably more open to the world and more innovative. Also, the light soils in Senegal make the push-pull hoe easier to use than in some neighbouring countries. What are the factors that have made the hand hoe so resistant to design change and innovation?

* There is a widespread belief (except in Senegal) that weeding is performed properly only when the worker is bent double and armed with a short-handled hoe. People who use hoes with long handles (the Langi tribe in Uganda and the Fulani in Burkina Faso, who are mainly nomadic herders; prisoners; or workers on commercial farms) are considered to be lazy and incompetent. In fact, the study found that length of the handle is very linked to culture, tradition and ethnic identity.

* Manufacturers of tools were found to undertake no market research, and are seemingly unaware of the changes that have taken place in African farming (e.g., women are now doing by far the most work on the land).

* Men are usually the ones who buy the tools, including hoes, even though their wives are more likely to be the tools’ users. The study found that even if they acknowledge that the women need lighter or differently designed hoes, the men still choose the traditional ‘male’ model of hoe when making the actual purchase.

* Women and men are often unaware of some of the hoe alternatives on the market or those alternatives are not available in many local markets. When women are shown the lighter models, they are usually interested in owning them. The study found that women farmers repeatedly complained about the hoe and said that they wanted a lighter one for weeding.

But handle length is another issue: Women seem to feel that a longer handle is inappropriate for them, even though it would be more comfortable for them to use. They are anxious to have improvements made in their hoes, but primarily in quality and durability, rather than in the hoe’s design. Some women (for instance, in Burkina Faso) did say that they would like longer handles for their hoes, but their husbands would not allow them.

Adapted from: IFAD/FAO/Government of Japan. 1998. Agricultural Implements Used by Women Farmers in Africa. Rome.

A jangle of hoes

Every noun should have its own collective term. As in ‘ a murder of crows’ [ All This Time. The Soul Cages 1991]  – Sting was an English teacher, too.  So I propose, for my collection of hoes,  either ‘a tangle’ or a ‘jangle’. It describes the result of gathering up an armful of them, prior to assaulting some part of the garden. I rarely use a fork or a spade now – but I do seem to need about four hoes on each job.

Late last year I thought I’d better stop adding to the pile – so I took this photo of them artfully arranged on the house-well [ and showing off one of our mosaics.]

There are 12, counting the fork-hoe. But addictions and obsessions are hard to throw off, particularly when neighbours find out, and offer me their rusty scrap-iron for inclusion. So now there are 17.

Now many of them are so worn that I may never re-square and resharpen them – and others have functions so obscure that it may be years before I ever grow the plant that calls for their particular talents. That long one for example. It’s 1ft. 8 ins. long. And weighs 4lb. 4oz. [2kg. and 50cm.] It would take a giant to wield it – and nobody around here has a clue as to its use.

The three along the top row on the left are in frequent service – the big rectangle [ called le cantonnier, after the road-mender, employed by every canton before roads were paved] for breaking new ground – and then the leaf-shaped pair for shaping into furrows. The other two on the top row, right, can move large heaps of stones or gravel with ease – or spread and level great quantities of earth.

I never came across such variety in West Cork, back when I worked on a smallholding – hoes weren’t used at all. Here in France there’s a bewildering diversity, each with regional variations :

hoyau (long thin flat hoe), essade (your standard hoe), essadon (narrow-shouldered, widening and flairing out at cutting edge), essadonet (narrow flair), foussoir ( de Savoie – a hoe), rabassiere espagnol (wide and shallow), picole (narrow and long with curved shoulder), piquelle (pointy, leaf-shaped), bigorne, and bigard of Provence – also known as crocs (fork-hoes), and bigot (all flat two-toothed rake-hoes) – rascle (wide flat rake-like tool), râteau à remblais ou tirebillon (wide flat rake-like with 3 teeth), binette (small narrow light hoe), sape Sartene (leaf-shape like a piquelle but straight-shouldered), sape de Bonifacio (more hoe-like, but narrow at cutting edge which is concave . . .) houe de Bastia (standard hoe, but flairing in at cutting edge and angled shoulders), houe de Saone et Loire (same width and angled shoulders, but longer), houe lorraine, plain rectangular, mègle or meigle a pointed hoe of Burgundy, marre, wide and flat for onions in Brittany and in Médoc. And the bêchoir or bêchard, the féchou, the écobue,  the besoche, the déchaussoir, the moutardelle – and lastly the trinque, our local slang term here in the Midi, from the sound of it hitting the stoney ground . . . otherwise known as le cantonnier – the man and his heavy hoe an ubiquitous figure, keeping the ways serviceable for cart, and carriage – the poor and the rich alike.

There is a famous children’s song from the early 19th. century ‘Sur la route de Louviers’  -

- which later gained an infamous  and lewd version, featuring a Roadmender who shagged anyone, and a Fine Lady – who also . . .

LA BELLE ET LE CANTONNIER    chanson paillarde [crude country song]
(Musique : Sur la route de Louviers)

Sur la route de Louviers (bis)
Il y avait un cantonnier (bis)
Et qui baisait (bis)
Et qui baisait comme un voyou
Au lieu d’ casser des cailloux

Un’ bell’ dam’ vient à passer (bis)
Dans un beau caross’ doré (bis)
Elle y baisait (bis)!
Elle y baisait comme un voyou
A en fair’ craquer les roues.

Elle aperçut l’ cantonnier (bis)
Dans le fond d’un grand fossé (bis)
Et qui baisait (bis)
Et qui baisait comme un voyou
Un’ fillette aux cheveux roux

Ell’ lui dit: “Brav’ cantonnier (bis)
Avec moi veux-tu monter? (bis)
Pour me baiser (bis)
Pour me baiser comme un voyou
Le préfet est mon époux”

A ces mots, le cantonnier (bis)
Laiss’ la rousse dans le fossé (bis)
Et va baiser (bis)
Et va baiser comme un voyou
La bell’ dam’ plein’ de bijoux

Le lend’main par arrêté (bis)
Fut nommé chef cantonnier (bis)
Parc’ qu’y baisait (bis)
Parc’ qu’y baisait comme un voyou
Au lieu d’ casser des cailloux

Voici la moralité (bis)
Dans la vie pour arriver (bis)
Il faut baiser (bis)
Il faut baiser comm’ des voyous
Les bell’s dam’s qui ont des sous !

Now, this may all be quite entertaining and educational – but it’s only half the story. There’s the handle or shaft of the hoe to consider and the crucial question of its length – but that’s for another post.

In the meantime – check for handle lengths in the Hoe in Art and History, and The hoe at work Pages, right. If you’ve nothing more worthwhile to do, or are similarly obsessive.

The hoe in art and history

With the hoe – it seems to me – we see the start of techne. In the beginning of course was the stone, and the stick -and out of the stick grew many things : the staff, the spit, the scratcher and the spear. But join the stone to the stick and we move from tool to technology.

Larry Kinsella at FlintKnapper.com made this deerhide-wrapped hoe. With use the edges become glossy, smooth and blunt – time to nap a new sharp facet.

The Chalcolithic Age saw the arrival of copper implements, soon replaced by bronze. Egyptian heiroglyphs of the Late Bronze age [16th century BC to the 11th century BC] show the hoe for the first time in writing.

These are from Gardiner’s list of Egyptian heiroglyphs of some agricultural implements – U7, U13, U20 and 21 seem to be variants of the hoe. The hoe has entered art and history.

For more – see the hoes in art and history page, right.

The hoe – past and future

I’m currently enjoying ‘Land Girls’ by Angela Huth.

It’s an affectionate portrait of three young women who join the Women’s Land Army.

Much of their time is spent hoeing – and a quick stroll through internet images reveals this to be fairly universal, throughout the ages. It is largely women’s work.

I’ve gathered some of them together under the Page title Hoes in Work – seen in the side panel to the right. Paintings and posters on this theme appear on the Hoes in Art Page.

A brief study of the hoe, its history and use is on the Hoe parent page.

Prior to the Second World War, agriculture in Britain was in a state of decline. Food imports were up to 70% and in 1939 the possibility of a German Prior to the Second World War, agriculture in Britain was in a state of decline. Food imports were up to 70% and in 1939 the possibility of a German sea-blockade provoked the fear of national starvation. Women were needed to bring in the harvest and to put 2 million acres under the plough at a time when thousands of men were once more leaving the land to join the forces.

The future may see people once again filling the landscape. Technology like this prototype, from the German DFG Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) 722, may be the way forward in  post-Peak Oil agriculture, where chemical weed-killers and diesel-power are too expensive.

Or possibly the present enormous agri-farms will be broken up, to be worked under village or commune control. Then a machine like this might be more suitable:

This has been developed by PhysicalWeeding – the trading name of Steam Weeding Ltd, a company that designs specialist physical weeding machinery for the European, New Zealand and Australian markets. It is owned and run by Dr Charles ‘Merf’ Merfield, an international organic horticultural scientist specialising in weed management and machinery, and Tim Chamberlain -  a pioneering and multi-award winning organic farmer from New Zealand.Visit their SteamWeeding site to see more.

You can even get a grant for it in Ireland!

Meanwhile at the big-garden or small-holding level, there’s a device that appeals to me – and to ‘Farmer Lynn’ of the friendly, modest but extremely impressive tinyfarmblog – it’s the Valley Oak wheel hoe :

and its Swiss counterpart the Glaser wheel hoe [www.glaser-swissmade.com]

They both offer various blades and attachments – and both cost about $350.

Hmm. Maybe it’s back to something I could knock together out of the bits of old vineyard equipment lying around. Like this early model – with Thomas W. Barnett wheel-hoeing onions on his small farm at Bountiful in Utah 1921.

But when it comes down to it – nothing beats a hand-hoe for simplicity and versatility and cost. And nothing beats this man for fitness and determination: he produced a ton [edit: 2.5 tons - phew!] of potatoes on his croft – plus a mountain of other vegetables – with a hoe.

Read his inspiring crofting blog here at Musings from a Stonehead .

Compost revisited

Excuses, excuses : Work – Christmas – Family – Illness, I have enough excuses to explain away the lack of posts here. My best is this though, borrowed from a Frenchman :-  ‘Eet ees ze Lazeeness!’  – with a Gallic shrug if possible.

The work was intended to provide enough money to enable me to slouch through the bitter end of winter just reading and writing. But the weather has been benevolent, and the worsening state of the world has doubled the urgency of expanding  the kitchen garden. This is from one of LondonBanker’s last blogs:-

Deflation has become inevitable. The bankers, lawmakers, regulators and academics who collaborated in the betrayal still hold power, like the well-armed brigands in the fortress, and their continued collaboration to prevent accountability must inevitably discourage honest savers from risking further loss. Even so, it is the savers/peons who hold the ultimate power as they can starve the brigands. LondonBanker.blogspot.com  Friday, 12 December 2008

I like the idea of starving the brigands – but I don’t see it happening. And first, as a peon [albeit with too much house,  insufficient land and no savings] I must ensure that we don’t starve first.

Time to revisit the compost bins. A post from mid-october shows my carefully constructed wire-and-lino containers, and the plastic bins bought via La Mairie and part-subsidised by our village commune. Another photo shows a heap of compost made last summer.

I had consulted several sources online and I felt confident that with my previous experience I could cook up a good amount much faster this time. The bins were filled with a mix of leaf and strawy horse-manure and remnants of the autumn’s kitchen and garden waste. Plus dosings of my self-generated liquid nitrogen [that's urine] collected over the weeks to act as an accelerator.

So when it came time to undo the mesh and turn it over, I was sorely disappointed to find that little decomposition had occurred. It should have felt like a squeezed-out sponge – instead some layers were too wet, others too dry. And my precious piss had not been able to ignite the process, during the close-to-zero mid-winter months. I had to think again – and start over with a better system if there was to be enough ready for the new beds this spring.

I have reverted to a previous design that worked well enough in the past, but is not quite so neat-looking as the plastic bins [fecked into the background there] and the mesh cages. The pallets came from a building site in the village. The hose is ready to wet the dry leaves.

I reasoned that the pallet-construction gave the heap the greater volume needed to ensure sufficient insulation and combustion. In this last compartment I cut up the lino into 1 metre squares and nailed them to each inside face, to conserve heat and moisture. Each of the four compartments has a front door, hinged with a twist of wire. If compost is to be turned once a month – as recommended for a faster production – then this should make it much easier. As does the four-tined hay-fork I found in a friend’s barn: it’s light and the stuff slips easily off the prongs, where it would tend to stick on the heavier thicker gardening fork. If you’re making lots of compost then even at  40 euros[!] it’s still a good investment. You’re the head chef and alchemist of the garden – and you’re worth it.

There seems to be two schools of thought about whether to put your material directly in contact with the soil – it allows worms access to the heap – or to make a thick latticed bed of sticks beneath the material – to gain aeration. I have alternated with mine – and will report the results. Aeration is vital: an anaerobic compost heap will take 2 or 3 times as long to work -and you can end up with a smelly sludge which has simply rotted – without achieving the temperature needed to kill weeds and seeds, or producing the ‘brown gold’ of crumbly loam.

The other ingredients in the photo above are the milk-bottle of my ‘humanitrogen’ and a 20 kg. bag of sulfate de fer – ferrous sulphate – costing 10 euros from the farmers’ co-op in the village. It was recommended by a village horticulturalist – two handsfull to a bushel of material, particularly if there’s more brown-matter than fresh wet green plant stuff. It releases nitrogen [and promotes lawn growth etc.]I sprinkled it over every barrow-load of mixed-up material that I forked in, giving it all a spray from the hose [the water here is very hard/alkaline] to both dissolve the crystals and get the sponge-consistency.

Finally, I stuck a sharp rod down vertically through the heap to the base, and wiggled it about, and then drove a stake into these holes to make a wider vent-shaft. The compartments were then covered with plastic sacks with the last of the lino over everything to shed rain. Air must be allowed in but not water.

The whole enterprise took up some time – but I hope that I have set up a structure and a system that can run for some years with only the occasional replacement of rotting pallets. The aim is to have one whole year’s compost in hand. Because compost is where a garden begins.

What we are making is additional humus. In soil science, humus means any organic matter which has reached a point of stability, where it will break down no further and might, if conditions do not change, remain essentially as it is for centuries, if not millennia. The process of “humification” can occur naturally in soil, or in the production of compost. Chemically stable humus is thought to be important to the fertility of soils in both a physical and chemical sense. Physically, it helps the soil retain moisture, and encourages the formation of good soil structure. Chemically, it has many active sites which bind to ions of plant nutrients, making them more available. Humus can be described as the ‘life-force’ of the soil though it is difficult to define it in precise terms; it is a highly complex substance, the full nature of which is still not fully understood. Physically, humus can be differentiated from organic matter in that the latter is rough looking material, with coarse plant remains still visible, while once fully humified it becomes more uniform in appearance (a dark, spongy, jelly-like substance) and amorphous in structure. That is, it has no determinate shape, structure or character.

I think it’s time now to hear from a world-famous horticultural expert :-

“My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.” Bette Midler [no kidding] New York. 2006

The man with the hoe

It’s a comfortable 68F./20C. here, at 8 pm, with the doors and windows open on a still evening. Tomorrow we’ll go walking the hills, it’ll be 70+, the warm low 20’s of an early summer’s day. But there’s a chill wind forecast for monday – and it won’t be just a leaf-storm blowing:

” . . . we are witnessing the two stages of a tsunami. The current disappearance of wealth in the form of debts repudiated, bets welshed on, contracts cancelled, and Lehman Brothers-style sob stories played out is like the withdrawal of the sea. The poor curious little monkey-humans stand on the beach transfixed by the strangeness of the event as the water recedes and the sea floor is exposed and all kinds of exotic creatures are seen thrashing in the mud, while the skeletons of historic wrecks are exposed to view, and a great stench of organic decay wafts toward the strand. Then comes the second stage, the tidal wave itself — which in this case will be horrific monetary inflation — roaring back over the mud flats toward the land mass, crashing over the beach, and ripping apart all the hotels and houses and infrastructure there while it drowns the poor curious monkey-humans who were too enthralled by the weird spectacle to make for higher ground. The killer tidal wave washes away all the things they have labored to build for decades, all their poignant little effects and chattels, and the survivors are left keening amidst the wreckage as the sea once again returns to normal in its eternal cradle.
So, that’s what I think we will get: an interval of deflationary depression followed by a destructive wave of inflation that will wipe out both constructed debt and constructed savings, scraping the financial landscape clean. There’s no question that stage one is underway. But we can be sure the giant wave of money recklessly loaned into existence, in just a few weeks time will wash back through the global economy leaving a swath of destruction.”

That’s my favorite doomer, James Kunstler, writing the other day. Ilargi on  TheAutomaticEarth is no less worried. And then this is from the Mainstream Media:

The financial crisis gripping world markets is “the worst in human history” and we are only just beginning to feel the fallout, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England has warned.

Do our rulers know enough to avoid a 1930s replay?
Events are moving with lightning speed as the global credit freeze evolves into something awfully like a classic trade-depression.
The commodity and emerging market booms are breaking in unison, leaving no more bubbles left to burst. Almost every corner of the world is now being drawn into the vortex of debt deflation.

Shipping is slowing as fast as it did in the grim months of late 1931. “The crisis is now in full swing across the entire world,” said Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s finance minister. “It is hitting the real economy, the productive forces of industry. It’s global, it’s total, and it’s everywhere.”
The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Daily Telegraph Oct 20 2008

I feel profoundly shaken by all this, transfixed and aghast – and simultaneously stirred into action. These momentous upheavals are being played out far from here : meetings in Washington, London, Paris, and the People’s Great Hall in Pekin. Millions are being spent on the American election – and thousands on wardrobes and makeup. Drama and melodrama, tragedy and farce, anger and pathos – all on an epic, on a global scale.

But I certainly don’t feel helplessly apart from it all. I have not been standing by in dumb incomprehension these last few months, waiting like cannon-cattle for my call-up papers. I signed up some time back – possibly 30-odd years ago when I dropped out and ‘Went Back to the Land’ leaving my teaching job in London to join a small commune in south-west Ireland.

The Phoney War is over – billions of dollars have been thrown onto the wrong fire -and soon the real damage will become apparent. What does the ordinary foot-soldier do? Well last weekend I armed myself with a mighty weapon – the heaviest forged-steel hoe I’ve seen around.

heavy hoe and new acacia-wood shaft

I bought it from my antique tool-seller friend, Monsieur Sargatt, at another vide-grenier. It weighs in at a whopping 4 lbs./< 2kg. and has a thickened cutting section. Paired with the extra-long shaft I trimmed from a local Robinia tree, it is a murderous weapon – capable of separating the head of any Wall Street pirate from his well-tailored torso.

old tools at a vide grenier

But as is usually the case, when Great Events of History become just too much to digest – the simple action of shaving the wood to fit, and hefting the tool to do its job was enough to dispel my maddened frustration with the folly of our Leaders.

new hoe and new bed

This hoe is just the job for breaking new ground – look right to the Hoe Page for more examples of this versatile tool at work in the world – and in history and art.

Gathering winter fuel

We had our first cool evening of autumn this week, and I had to scramble around to find enough wood for the evening. Which spurred me into action on the Winter Fuel Hunt. This year I had to make enquiries about these heaps of uprooted old vines. Sadly there are all too many vignerons going bust and there’s no shortage of excellent fuel – if you can handle the dusty work of shifting a ton or so.

Past, Present and Future: Daniel, the '87 'van de pays', and the wind farm.

uprooted vines, Alaric in background

Back in 2000 we didn’t have a stove and relied on a mix of portable LP gas heaters, paraffin heaters and the judicious use of portable electric panel heaters which thanks to the special tarrif scheme we signed up for, means we get 300 days at Euro 0.05 (five centîmes ) per KWh, 43 days at E 0.10, and 22 days at 18 or 49 centîmes depending on offpeak/peak times. Our bill comes to about E 900 p.a. for the Big House (used for only 5 months a year) and the Cook’s House (where we live the year round) combined. That’s two houses – one being 20 m. by 22 m. by two floors, plus the smaller at 7m. by 7m. by two floors.

A pre-electric cutter and the last pruning for these 100-year-old vines.

Have I lost your interest yet? Oh? Ok then, let’s press on with the maths! So each floor in the Big House is 440 sq. m. – 880 sq.m. in all ( we won’t bother with the cellar or the attic which would only double this figure to 1760 sq.m. – since few people go there anymore, now that the cellar staff have left and the servants died fifty years ago . . . And then our little zone is a simple 50 sq.m. times two. Yes? At the back there? Good! 100 sq.m.!

So I make it about 1000 square yards (going off-metric for the benefit of our numerically isolationist friends across the Atlantic) of dwellings (9 bedrooms,4 bathrooms, two kitchens) – that get served with electricity every year in one form or another: hot water, ovens, cookers, hi-fi, lights, computers, TV, fans and heaters – plus the running of a 12m. by 8m. swimming pool almost all year round. That’s 9000 sq.ft. of house for 90 euros a month. Which somewhat suspiciously works out at a rather neat One Square Yard costing One Centîme (or a cent if you’d feel more comfortable – or a penny, if you’re feeling nostagic or a bit vague and alzheimerish).

three months supply of old vines in the barn

For the last few years we’ve had the Eiffel Tower in our midst. It is small and dirty and inefficient. It might serve better at smoking a row of kippers than a room of people, and demands more feeding and cleaning than a two-year-old.

Nanquette stove, and the log-box my grandfather made while the bombs fell on London c.1943