I’ve only been gardening properly since I sowed my first seeds in February 2021. I definitely gravitated towards to the dream of self-sufficiency that’s made manifest in growing vegetables, but as I’ve commented on before, it’s neither practical from a view of self-supporting, or financially efficient to grow one’s own vegetables on a tiny urban roof. The value of that is more along the lines of the fun of growing and picking food you can actually eat, and the cosmological orientation that brings.
I will continue to do grow veg, hopefully one day on a larger plot, but I’ve come round to the idea that growing flowers, especially ones that the bees like, is a totally righteous activity. Part of the fun, the ritual if you like, with flowers is saving their seed and sowing them oneself. Detailed below is this year’s adventures.
The ICA are holding a wonderful exhibition of the work of Moki Cherry which closes on Sunday 3rd September 2023. This has been co-curated by her granddaughter Naima Karlsson. The exhibition especially benefits from being seen in the flesh. I went along with my old pal Sacha.
The mood of these works is playfully organic. Although Moki was a skilled pattern cutter, free reign is given to her enchanting child-like style. In that sense the work is of a kin with her husband the musician Don Cherry’s own naturally unfettered improvisation, itself rarely abrasive or ugly, often straying back and forth between comforting jazz tropes and extemporised flights into freedom. I swear I hear a lot of Vince Guaraldi (via the Snoopy soundtracks) in Don’s piano work.
Don.
I couldn’t resist posing under this tapestry which was used on the actually not-so-great “Hear & Now” LP. Funnily enough this LP also cropped up in the relatively recent Tantra exhibition at the British Museum.
Me.You.Hear & Now LP cover.Relativity Suite.Organic MusicEternal NowBrown RiceLive in Ankara
Moki’s beautiful tapestries were, for a number of years, fixtures on Don’s albums covers. We wondered, rather sadly, what happened to the relationship between Don and Moki in the end.
If you have time please watch this vintage documentary to get the feeling of their life together in Sweden. I used a small excerpt from it, of the team all reciting the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra, in one of my Retreat videos.
An exquisite drawing. There’s much evidence of both their fascination with Indian music. He wasn’t one of the main disciples, but Don was a student of Pandit Pran Nath’s at one point. Moki herself played Tambura pictured here.
Again with the Tibetan Buddhism. Tara, or Green Tara, is alongside Chenrezig the key Tibetan deity. Tibetan men identify with Chenrezig, the women with Tara.
Moki is a perfect figure for today’s revision of female artists. Equality here means just that; equality between different races, genders, even generations.
Some of Moki’s videos were playing on a loop. Here’s a fleeting shot of her Chenrezig tapestry.
Later the same evening that I visited there was a concert by the improvisor and percussionist Kahil El’Zabar. El’Zabar’s background was with the Chicago organisation AACM. The hall was decked with Moki’s tapestries.
Neneh Cherry stage left.The awning.
This was an excellent concert. Kahil El’Zabar conducted the “orchestra” – by sonic queues and gestures, guiding what was more a free-ranging groove than the skronk traditionally associated with improvisation. In some sections it reminded me of CAN at their quietest and most rapturous. It was a thrill to see Neneh Cherry providing background vocals, the whole exhibition and concert somehow having a family feel. It was as though the whole diverse audience were being welcomed into their Cherry family. Thank you, Naima. Thank you, Moki.
My son Sam’s biology teacher gave him some Nigella seeds. I sowed them in October 2022 over where I had previously grown Buckwheat. The Buckwheat, which is leguminous and puts nitrogen back into the soil, was with a view to restoring the container to use. Before the Buckwheat I had grown Broad Beans, itself also leguminous.
Over the past three years I haven’t dug up any containers or pots. This has been to see whether the no dig principles work in this context. I have never pulled old plants out by the roots (unless they have been Beetroot or Carrots!), only cut them off at the base of the stem, and have just dressed over the previous patch with some compost.
Over the course of a season the soil level subsides. This is partly owing to compaction through gravity but is also because the plants’ growth is the soil’s output of matter, of carbon. So it does make some room for compost to be layered on top. So far this has worked fine for me.
In January 2023 I could see some slight signs of growth, but really I thought these were weeds, or possibly the Buckwheat growing back. I’m not expert enough to identify plants at this size.
These were taken in March and April. I was excited about the growth, but was still pretty sure that this was a weed or the Buckwheat growing back (itself sometimes viewed as a weed!).
By mid May the growth was looking luscious and I was beginning to be hopeful that I’d had some success with the Nigella seeds.
Then it became clear from their alien bulbous heads and magnificent flowers that this was Nigella and that the experiment had worked.
These two images below taken on my phone through a magnifying glass I got for my birthday. There’s a pretty chromatic aberration and a lovely background blur from the shallow focus. The architecture of these flowers is just exquisite.
In the first week of June things really took off. There is some kind of ecstacy at this time of year. Indeed in the period leading up to the summer solstice on June 21st one’s garden is truly magnificent. Thereafter the promise of the summer feels like it is ebbing away quite dramatically.
Before I gardened I definitely got the feeling of summer as being a longer phenomenon. It’s interesting how the practice connects you to the seasons. In London it might still be hot, giving the sense of a perpetuating season, but the reality is different.
I’m still planting new seeds though now directly outdoors: Rudbeckia, Hyssop, Buckwheat, Lady Di Beans, Courgette, Lettuce, Leeks. But this maybe with a view to hopefully squeezing a crop in before the end of the year, and expecting less growth.
This was taken on the 8th June – not a great shot but shows the full flowering.
And this on 21st June at the solstice. As you can see all the petals have fallen away.
With the flowers giving up the ghost I got a bit more relaxed about the cats wanting to wander in the bed. Here’s the Grey Cat enjoying herself. I love her expression in the second photo: “I am not here. You can not see me!”
At the start of July I cut the flowers and hung them to dry in my study window. The day before yesterday I noticed that the seeds had started to drop from the heads onto the window-ledge.
This morning I put the whole bouquet in a large, clear, plastic bin bag and shook it gently. Then I decanted the seeds into a jam jar.
Nigella Sativa, to give it its fancy name, is an ornamental flower but its seed is also used a spice (sometimes called Black Caraway or Black Cumin) and is also implemented in traditional medicine systems, Unani and Tibb, Ayurveda and Siddha. In this sense it’s also a crop. I will probably try eating some, maybe as a spice on some of carrots, and then sow the rest in the autumn.
Wormy Truth of Gardens drawing for us by Ben Watson.
At Luke Davis’ poetry book launch last June I met the writer/musician/activist Ben Watson. He is chiefly famous for his artist-endorsed writings on Frank Zappa. Ben has been a friend of Luke’s for a long time. I knew beforehand that Luke and his fellow poet Jim Clarke had participated in Ben’s improvised music events on Friday at lunchtime at the Betsey Trotwood on the Farringdon Road.
AMMAS March 31st at The Betsey Trotwood.
Ben is a force of nature. He’s one of those rare people you encounter in life who is truly an individual. Very friendly, he’s not shy of taking a controversial position. I really enjoy his company even though I don’t feel I bring a tremendous amount to the table having given up being “an expert” on music, being too uptight to drink, and preferring at the times I’ve been along to the Betsey Trotwood to sit in the audience and enjoy the experience rather than participate. They make a tremendous sound at the BT and the collectivity of the action is truly thrilling.
As far as I’m concerned the best thing about improvised music is that it entirely eliminates the need for technical abilities. To talk about famous improvisers is to some extent miss the point. When you do so you are entering the domain of the appreciation of musical virtuosity. That’s ok but maybe it’s not its real value? To some extent that explains the DIY punk edge to AMMAS, Watson’s improvising group.
Since childhood, out of total incompetence, I’ve improvised on a range of instruments: hours tiny at the piano at my grandparents’ house, for many years alone in rooms doing so when I should have been practicing violin (or even in the middle of the second orchestra’s performances at school when I was entirely lost from the score), and on the flute. Then later, more recently, on electronic keyboards, electric guitar, bass guitar, drums. All the while making a horrible racket mainly for my own appreciation. And that’s the way it will stay with me, as a private negotiation. Right now I’m quietly mucking around with a recorder. That seemed like a sufficiently disparaged instrument to want to play. Though, as I now appreciate, there’s a lot to be said for it as an activity you can practice in a group.
Ben is in fact a pretty serious musician, with I believe, some degree of actual musical talent. If you’re curious check out this recent piano improvisation which has garnered well-deserved recognition.
I’m deadly serious about making home for insects in my roof garden. All of the flowers I’ve planted I have chosen because bugs love them. Over the past couple of months I have been taking (bad) photos of these, my tiny friends, with my cellphone.
Baby spiders.Mating fruit flies.Dragonfly.A bee.A Bumblebee.A blue moth.Another Bumblebee.Moth unknown to me.Another bee.I am the Fly.
This morning I was repotting oak seedlings. These were grown from acorns I picked up on Hampstead Heath. Cosmos, and in the foreground courgette, also felt the love.
My own compost is fine for established plants and, well, filler – but you need something proper if you’re cherishing something.
So few of these courgette seedlings survived. I’m not taking any chances with them.
I don’t like to get into the whole G.A.S. thing with growing like I did around music. Of buying stuff. I have enough. Too much in fact.
Horticulture and agriculture are the same as the music business to some extent. Make no mistake, there’s no end of accessories and toys that are marketed to growers and farmers. To say nothing of the cost of land itself. But nowadays I’m a bit weary of being a consumer, and wary of being targeted as one.
Some products, however, are justifiable purchases. I couldn’t simply heap a load of rotting mulch into a corner of my roof garden. It would be exposed to the elements, stink, and be a magnet for pests. So in October 2022 I bought a Hotbin Mini so as to start my own composting. Here is the inside of the pristine bin which is starting to see a lot of wear and tear now.
It’s an ingenious system which drains leachate to a tank beneath it, is insulated by design (accentuating the thermal generation of the composting process), and it doesn’t require turning. The first thing you do is layer a bunch of sticks into the bottom.
Then you load, in layers, green and brown waste.
As I understand it green waste is: food scraps (uncooked vegetables, no meat) and garden waste (weeds are fine). Brown waste is: cardboard, paper and woodchip. This layering of the two kinds of material means that you preserve aeration. If you are just using green waste it tends to coalesce into a sludge. The technical term for this latter effect is anaerobic composting and it generates a lot of foul-smelling methane.
Your aim is to establish aerobic composting which is seen as being the way to get a superior compost. It evidently wasn’t always so, however, as I have recently been reading some sixties’ gardening books which, suggest t’other over the one.
Here’s a rather fetching full bin at the end of last year. [I don’t think those are flowers I grew actually.]
At the top of the bin there is a thermometer. I have never managed to get my heap to the heady heights of 50 degrees centigrade, but when everything is steaming away I have reached 40 degrees. A compost heap is, essentially, a bonfire…
After a straight sixty days last year, just as we were heading into winter, I pulled the plug on the process so as to download my black gold. [A note in passing: you can see the blue leachate cap here at the bottom. I emptied this liquid out and used it as a plant feed a lot last year – but I wasn’t convinced of its efficacy so this year I haven’t bothered.]
I believe that 2022’s compost broke down anaerobically a lot. Looking at it, it does appear a bit putrid. I had a few bad smells out in the garden which this year I have totally avoided.
However, I still got three large pots of excellent compost out of it. I dressed the surface with a good commercial compost to create a tilth and planted in them. Today these pots have an Ash Tree, a Dahlia, and Amaranth growing in them.
To solve the issue of the anaerobic effect I was having, I reasoned that I needed to get more aeration through the Hotbin. This March I went to a hardware store and bought a measure of plumber’s copper pipe.
This I drilled regularly-spaced holes in.
And sunk it down the middle of my new burgeoning heap.
This must have made a difference to the aeration. There are many accounts of people creating this style of chimney in compost heaps. However, the ones I have read of are created by building heaps around pipes (without holes in them) and then removing the pipe once the heap has reached its summit so as to create a natural cavity. Of course, it is highly unlikely I have pioneered a new technique.
Here is the pipe in situ. Towards the end of March I needed some more compost so I opened the bin up to see what was cooking.
To me this looked like a less noxious concoction than my previous batch. No, it doesn’t have that fine, chocolatey, crumbly, look of professional compost. However, mine is not ground up in any way or dried.
I have looked at grinders but reason that’s just another gadget that would sit on a shelf and only be used twice a year. What counts is its richness and biological liveliness – of which I have no way of measuring.
This time I needed to fill two pots to plant on Calendula seedlings that I had started indoors at the end of winter.
Again, the surface is dressed with commercial compost. Here are the Calendula seedlings, or Marigold as they are sometime called, moved onto my own compost.
This time I only emptied half the Hotbin with a view to keeping it running like a perpetual stew.
Here it is again, more recently, running at full capacity.
Peter Saville, the legendary designer best known for his work for Factory records, is our most-esteemed EC1 local luminary. In the past I had the opportunity to briefly meet and work with Peter at his studio on this Colorcalm DVD in 2005. He’s extremely charming and has a particularly inspired working method. At the time I took the opportunity to get a copy of “Closer” signed for my friend Mark Fisher which present I gave to Mark. I think in due course Mark went on to interview him. I see Peter around our neighborhood or down the shops from time to time, sometimes stopping to say hi to him. I don’t think he really knows who I am, which is no problem really. I hardly know who I am myself.
In 2006 it happened that our local St Luke’s Gardens were renovated. Seeing as how he was a local resident, the planners asked Saville to design something for the space. Inspired by the area’s traditional role as a centre of printmaking the idea was for beds with Cyan/Yellow/Magenta/Key (Black) plantings of flowers. Nice concept.
Fast forward eighteen years. As with these things so often the execution hasn’t kept up with the vision.
The first thing is that a slightly unsightly bird feeder has been installed in the middle of the centre “puck”.
I don’t really mind this so much, because I happen to like birds, but it’s a bit of a car crash.
(Not) Cyan (at all).Magenta kinda visible.Yellow in full effect.Key or black vaguely approximated.
Easier to address is that the planting has gone awry. I can see Magenta, Yellow, and Black here – but the Cyan definitely needed a hand. This would be so simple for Islington council to rectify but quicker to fix myself.
I ordered a small pack of Blue Cornflower seeds from the reliable Tamar Organics (Centauria cyanus should anyone accuse me of messing with the concept). This is a flower that bugs love.
These are the most remarkable seeds I have ever seen, like miniature shaving brushes.
I put a little seed compost down, because these guys wouldn’t survive just dumped into the parched flowerbed, and gave them a generous watering.
My Guinness traps have been very effective at snaring them but I still have to destroy slugs and snails every night. I’m out late with the torch on my phone and some repurposed kitchen tongs. Often I find these slimy critters clustered around these home-made devices where I intercept them. It’s one of the downsides of having to do this before bedtime that the activity has been threatening to permeate my dreams.
Apart from this, although I have lots of insect activity I’m really happy about, bees, wasps, hover flies, butterflies and now worms, I have had precious few pests. That’s a benefit one reaps from looking after the soil and keeping it healthy (organic compost, no pesticides, no dig) and also having a diversity of planting (which includes some weeds that I have encouraged). The less diversity the weaker the ecosystem and the greater the need for pesticides.
One of the weeds I have let grow in pots is Dock. I never gave this much thought. Although I uprooted it from some pots, for instance I ripped out a massive Dock which had sprung up where I am growing an Apple tree, in a few spots I have left it. What I could not have foreseen was how this would benefit me so dramatically.
For some reason a swarm of Aphids chose one Dock over and above any other plant in the garden to settle on. Even better, there they are being farmed by some Ants.
Farmers sometimes use what is called a Trap Crop to draw pests away from valuable ones. A classic example is how Alfalfa is planted to draw the Lygus bug away from Cotton plantations. Weeds can apparently function in the same way.
