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| Veg is the spice of life on
Mick’s allotment |
A witty guide to growing vegetables has
the perfect balance between information and humour, writes Dan Carrier
Close to the Veg: A book of Allotment Tales by Michael Rand
Marlin Press, £10.99
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Michael
Rand at the allotments. Above: Illustrations from the book
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MICK Rand likes to eat dead Victorians – and has even rustled
up a mushroom stew that has traces of Karl Marx in it.
The author of The Communist Manifesto inadvertently helped Mick
grow a bed of oyster mushrooms. Such a tale is one of the many amusing
stories Mick has chronicled in an autobiographical gardening book
that reveals how a man who couldn’t tell his cabbage from his
kale has turned green fingered.
“I volunteered to help clear some of the vegetation in Highgate
Cemetery,” he recalls.
This involved taking down a number of hazel trees growing around
Marx’s tomb. Mick could not resist recycling the wood on his
allotment – and stacking up some of the coppiced hazel branches
to make a bed on which to grow oyster mushrooms.
“I got a great crop,” he said. “Inadvertently it
means I have eaten mushrooms that have been grown off the nutrients
provided by dead people.”
But Close To The Veg is more than a light-hearted, gentle tale of
creating a rural paradise in our urban sprawl. Through his allotment,
Mick has not only nurtured vegetables, he has grown a philosophical
approach to life.
Mick’s main concern is how to improve the soil to yield better
crops. So he became fascinated in what to do with the soil. He becomes
a player in the composting league: what will decompose nicely into
the Fitzroy Park soil? And it has given him a grander vision of
his place in the universe. He was inspired by his time on the plot
to do a environmental science degree at the Met University on the
Holloway Road, and through the knowledge gleaned, improve his crops.
He sums it up by telling the reader how all the bits and bobs that
make up our bodies – the nutrients, the matter etc – have
come from somewhere. “Our bones are made up of calcium that
once formed the bones of dinosaurs,” he states. It is a Jurassic
fact that can explain the creaks in my knees.
His story starts when a letter from Camden Council telling him he
was near the top of the waiting list for an allotment at Fitzroy
Park, Highgate.
“I read it with bewilderment,” he recalls.
“My mind jumped back to a small bar off Oxford Street where
an evening of hilarity had ended with the disappearance of my bag.
“This contained my passport. My first thought was that this
surely must be one of those cases of ‘identity theft’.
Some desperado was pretending to be me in order to swindle the council
out of one of its allotments.”
However, he remembered he had put his name on a waiting list around
five years ago.
From this starting point, Mick’s book becomes a curious hybrid:
it tells the story of how one novice has turned into an expert through
trial and error.
But it also reads like a gardening fact book. You could follow his
instructions to create a vegetable patch.
“I wanted to show the reader how straight forward growing your
food can be,” he says. “There are no secrets, just using
science in a way that makes it work for you.”
And a brief tour of the plot show how successful he has been.
It is neatly laid out, with brick paths snaking through terraced
beds, and a shed built out of scraps of wood Mick has taken off
skips. This is a recurrent theme of Mick’s book: he loves to
find something others have thrown out and turn it to good use.
He has turned old windows into cold frames, estate agents’
hoarding poles into fruit frames and the hazel sapling mushroom
beds from Karl Marx’s tomb.
“We live in a wasteful society,” he says.
“This is a new phenomenon, something that would have been impossible
in our past. Our ancestors could have lived as wealthily as their
kings on the contents of our modern dustbins.”
He suggests pillaging skips, because “it is not only saving
the Earth, even better, it is saving yourself the Earth.”
This makes his allotment unique – there have been no trips
to garden centres for Brookside Close-style sheds.
His shed is made up of a number of odd off cuts: it’s the type
of work space W Heath Robinson would be proud of. Other contraptions
include home-built chairs – a bench at the north end of the
plot includes two carved bottom imprints for added comfort –
and a no sweat soil granulator. This contraption consists of two
A-frames with a sieve hung by rope in the middle.
Mick simply fills it up with soil and then gives it
a push – and out comes
fine top soil. Running an allotment has had a knock-on effect; the
physical work has helped keep Mick fit, and his diet has improved.
“I am interested in what food I eat now, whereas I wasn’t
before,” he says.
The final chapter underlines the joy of growing food. Mick’s
Six of the Best looks at the vegetables that have been the most
successful on his plot; sweetcorn, asparagus, broad beans, tomatoes,
wheat – which he uses to bake his own bread – and finally
the necrophiliac mushrooms.
And his tale of heating up some coals on a barbecue ready to receive
a freshly-picked corn is mouth-watering and sums up the book’s
philosophy.
“In terms of getting the sweetest sweetcorn, timing is the
key,” explains Mick. “Our record, with a chucker at the
corn patch, a catcher over at the coals and a time keeper standing
by, is two and half seconds from off the plant to on the barbecue.
A speed and economy of moment beyond the maddest dreams of the most
efficient commercial distributor.” |
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Angelino's finest are put to the test
WE came across Angelino Wines, sandwiched between two colourful and
aggressively self-promoting Australian wine sellers, at Islington’s
London Wine Event at the end of October.
Its owner is Farrell Anglin, whose imagination was caught by a lecture
on the history of wine making at Southgate College.
FULL STORY
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