ANOTHER LIFE: A HAIL-SQUALL lashed the polytunnel in a sudden, deafening paroxysm, clouding the plastic sky with drifts of sliding diamonds. In minutes, the Biarritzian glow that had me working in a sweatshirt was chilled by half-a-dozen degrees, writes Michael Viney.
But the squall raced on, chasing others south, and the sun revived a cosy incandescence so lacking in the world outside. Bathed in Lyric's amiable Saturday music, I returned to raking vegetable beds to a proper refinement of tilth.
The tunnel makes a small dot on the hillside. The south of Spain may have disappeared under a shimmering sea of plastic, and steel hoops are arching on like briars in much of Britain, submerging scenic valleys in intolerable glitter - all this to feed trolley-shoppers in total denial of the seasons. But on my windy acre, a solitary 7x10-metre model warrants not so much a shelter-belt as an entire flak-jacket of trees and bushes. And in this sort of spring, at my age, and in the future rainfall promised for the northwestern counties, it needs no defending as our culinary cornucopia, my abiding tunnel of love.
While lamenting the divorce of the urban masses from much idea of how or when vegetables grow, it would be hypocrisy to deny the merits of plastic in cheating the natural calendar. We are dining on fresh shoots of calabrese from plants sown last autumn, and potatoes sown early in February are already a foot high. The tunnel lets us lay down whole strata of beans in the freezer, and stockpiles of winter ratatouille from tomatoes, peppers, aubergines. The vine of white grapes in the corner, grown from a kind reader's seedling, draped its crop-bars with so many bunches last summer that we turned to freezing the juice: a superior sorbet.
When climate has been sabotaged wholesale and globally, controlling one's own seems a minor complicity. But along with all the produce, the tunnel has restored some of the early innocence of growing food, when seeds sifted into drills between thumb and forefinger were all expected to come up on cue, neither rotting from cold and wet, smothering among weeds or being mown off by overnight slugs.
Now, when I have measured the rain after breakfast, I can inspect the tunnel (bidding it a bright "Good morning!" as encouragement) and revel in the orderly peep of seedlings, the beans lifting their heads in ranks of yogurt pots. Another kind of recycling is embodied in little modular pots brought by a friend from the US: they are made from compressed cow dung, look and handle like papier-mache and rot away in the ground while feeding the seedling. They sell at somewhat "green" middle-class prices, but it's a pretty good idea.
How many of the seeds left over in last year's (increasingly expensive) packets, with their arbitrary "sow by" dates, are any good this spring? A bit late in the year, perhaps, I offer some edited, subversive but trustworthy doggerel coined by Lawrence Hills, a guru of the UK's organic movement, in his 1963 book Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables. Stick it on the lid of your seed-box and never again need to wonder: "Throw out ye parsnip, 'tis no good next year, and scorzonera if there's any there. For these all have a life that is gone with ye wynde, unlike all ye seeds of the cabbagy kind. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and kale live long like a farmer who knoweth good ale: three years for certain, maybe five or four, to sow in their seasons they stay in ye drawer.
"Kohl-rabi lasts with them and so does pei-tsai, the winter 'cos lettuce' to sow in July. But short is the life of ye turnips and swedes: sow next year only, enough for your needs.
"Last year's left lettuce sow three summers more, and beetroot and spinach-beet easily four, but ordinary spinach, both prickly and round, hath one summer left before gaps waste ye ground. Leeks sow three Aprils and one hath gone past and this is as long as ye carrot will last. Onion seed keeps till four years have flown by, but sets are so easy and dodge onion fly.
"Store marrows and cucumbers, best when they're old - full seven summers' sowing a packet can hold. Six hath ye celery that needs frost to taste, so hath celeriac before it goes to waste. Broad beans, French ones, runners sown in May each hath one sowing left before you throw away, and short peas, tall peas, fast ones and slow, parsley and salsify have one more spring to sow . . . " (That hath been quite enough, hear ye. Ed.)