Once more we’ve arrived on the summer equinox; midsummer’s day, the longest day of the year, and where on this day last year we were experiencing just the beginning of what would turn out to be one of the best summer seasons on record, this year’s late spring/early summer weather has been a considerable challenge for every gardener especially across these isles of Ireland and the UK.
It has been wet; very wet on occasion, and it has also been extremely dull, and with the low light level and constant rain we’ve had to make late sowings of many of the monster’s staples as the original sowings and plantings were either washed completely away or withered through chill and lack of full bright light, and even though today began with such promise with clear skies and sunshine from before 5.00am, it has since become cloudy and brooding with a mid-afternoon temperature of only 14 degrees Celsius, and a forecast for heavy thundery downpours.
But! It is what it is, and it most definitely is mid-summers in Ireland. We’ve not much to tell that would be any different from a retelling of earlier posts and the whys of why we’ve had to redo a lot of things we’ve had to redo on the plot, because, as just intimated it has been all weather related, and it has been little more than a copy and paste scenario with late April into early May, and now into early June…So, we’ll just update with a few images for now.
The Monster’s new bed…Rosa Port Sunlight, a David Austin beauty cared for by Mrs. DirtdiggerA bed full of beets…Alliums & blackcurrant: photo by janpaulkelly@instagram
Nothing betrays the fickle, fleeting nature of cumulative days, weeks and months which constitute the year as clearly and evidently as the garden. 365 days, batched into weeks, bound into months and bundled into seasons with fleeting days and endless nights, one-day summers and eternal winters, constant wind and rainfall and occasionally those once in a lifetime hurricane, blizzard and heat-wave events the likes of which we’ve experienced these last 8 months, and we call it the year. Here at monsterinthecorner we contend that there is no beginning to, and neither is there an end to the gardening year. There are those who say that the gardening year begins on Brigid’s Day (February 1st) or St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th). There are those who contest that the gardening year only begins once the last frost is passed, and another train of thought has the gardening year only truly begin once the spring equinox arrives. But, as stated earlier, we here would say there is neither definitive beginning nor end to the gardening year, and if it be necessary to constrain gardening reality within manageable metric parameters then perhaps we could at least contend that the gardening year begins with first light on January 1st and ends with the onset of darkness on December 31st.
Putting on a sunny face
There is no surety in the garden, but that is not to say that there is no reasonable expectancy within the garden. Gardeners and allotmenteers fastidiously prepare their beds and borders, sowing and potting schedules can be adhered to meticulously, and husbandry practices can be accomplished and precise, but there is still no certainty with time and the gardener’s use of time in the garden. In the garden there will always be wet and miserable days to contend with, just as there will be days of bright pleasant sunshine. There will be days of drifted snow with soil frozen to a depth of inches, just as there will be days or even weeks on end of drought with clay baked to the consistency of concrete. There will be hail, rain, sleet and snow; there will be sunshine and showers in equal measure just as there can be gentle breezes and gale force winds and – as the monster’s previous experience has shown -all of this occasionally in one and the same day. We bundle days together; and days become weeks and months and morph into seasons, but the margins are always fluid. The year’s coldest days often fall beyond the start of spring (whenever that may be) just as the prolonged driest periods of any given year can occur during the darker days December and January, with the heaviest prolonged periods of rainfall sometimes occurring during the lazy, hazy, crazy days when unbroken sunshine is the expectation. There is no surety in the garden, but, there is potential, and this is what the gardener works with. Spring can be cool, cold even, with winter’s tale dragged all the way to late April. Summers can be interrupted with incessant springtime rains right through to autumnal Indian bonus days giving way to mild winters with first frost not arriving till early February, which in some circles as said earlier can be early spring. There is no surety in the garden and the garden needs no surety. Gardeners however are a different matter; they progress in hopeful certainty: the hope that spring will be kind and arrive on time; the hope that summer will be long and the autumn harvest plentiful and the hope that winter will be short-lived and not cause too much damaged to the naked bushes and bare beds. The gardening year progresses one day at a time: that is, twenty four hours a day at a rate of sixty minutes an hour. Gardeners always have a plan for the garden, whereas the garden (?), the garden just is. Where the gardener plans for tomorrow or next month or for the summer, the garden itself just is; the garden is always now. There is no yesterday or next week in the garden, and if truth be told there is no summer or winter either; there is always just now. There is constant growth just as there is constant decay. There is always life with death in the garden; there is as much death to be observed in a late spring garden as there is on a November allotment; for all of their timely narcissistic golden beauty every swath and clump of daffodils lays down and dies en masse in springtime, just as that from the vernal wasteland that is every winter’s perennial border green snouts push through the leaf-mould carpet unnoticed. In death each lifetime is expended, and no matter how long the bloom lasts or how brief the butterfly’s flight it all happens in a lifetime. Days pass, seasons are spent, years come and go. And the garden is.
A Monster Collage…
We’ve had a good year on our allotment, a year like no other to date, but good for all that. We’ve jarred our jams and made our chutneys, and Mrs Dirtdigger has made some wonderful sauces and relishes from the glut of tomatoes we’ve had so far this year. We had six months of winter followed by 3 weeks of spring, then the longest driest sunniest summer in over seventy years which ended quite suddenly and unexpectedly with the instant transition to autumn in one twenty four hour period 10 days ago. The courgettes are finished early and we’ve had to take the pumpkins in as the vines were spent. The parsnips have recovered somewhat following a Webworm infestation and the winter turnips are beginning to bulge at last. The Florence fennel sown during early July has bulbed-up nicely and at the moment the king of greens on the plot is the moss curled parsley. Summer concludes with a faultless flawless flow into autumn and winter approaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour.
Just some of the wonderful Moneymakers we’ve had this year…50lbs so far.
The garden always betrays how it deals with things and when time is up, well then, time is up. It takes a lifetime to live and thus die, and it is only in the dying that the extent of any lifetime can be truly measured; and as a garden never really dies the gardener never gets the true measure of it. It takes a lifetime to die, but it can happen in an instant. The garden lives and dies at the same time and it does this at a rate of sixty minutes an hour, day in, day out, month after month, every season of the year, and even the most accomplished gardeners forget this from time to time. So although there will always be a gardening to-do-list for any given week of the year, and though there will always be some sowing and pruning and spraying and watering to do, perhaps the most pressing task for the gardener at any given time of the gardening year is to learn to garden at the garden’s pace…!
I remember it well: it was The Year of the Cat, Silly Love Songs were Songs in the Key of Life, The Boys were Back in Town and some Dancing Queen was saving kisses for just about everyone. Rocky Balboa battered slaughterhouse daylights out of refrigerated carcasses and was doing it all for Adrienne, while, on the flip-side of things “we could have been anything that we wanted to be” with Tallulah and Blousey and Fat Sam. Yes I remember it well; the Bic white razors and Blue Stratos aftershave, the plaid patterned kick flairs, the big heels, the brass toecaps, and the migration from barbershop to hair dresser. And I remember it was warm, very warm, with water shortages and rent strikes. It was warm too in the Venetian court as one of literature’s earliest cross-dressers extolled the quality of mercy, and warm too as Kodály’s Hary János met Friel’s Potato Gatherers and all stopped by woods one snowy evening to discuss the allegorical significance of red socks sown into the futility of human greed in Sassoon’s Base Details. Yes, I remember it well; well most of it; well, some of it. It was 1976, the whole country was a ‘thundering disgrace‘ and that was the last time we experienced a spell of weather as warm and as dry as we’ve experienced thus far this year. It was the last time we experienced a bona fide prolonged heatwave.
Ireland was a different place back then; grubby and dreary, still striving to come to terms with the reality of developing its own terms, and still trying to find some direction for the head-spun inertia experienced since it had taken its place among the Nations of the earth just a few decades earlier. Dublin too was different back then; the city centre was –as it had been for over a hundred years-crumbling, and the newer suburbs both north and south which had been initiated just a decade earlier now stretched out to the green country fields with no shops, schools, churches or hospitals and whence prevailing winds veered from that certain direction memory of what had been left behind would still catch olfactory orifices off-guard on light winter mornings as plumes from the distant hop house surfed the wavelength between the lifting smog and the Liffey’s perspicuous stench. And that was then; and this is…well, forty years later… It has been a good summer, this summer of 2018. It has been a very warm and very dry couple of months. It has been a good summer, and upbeat consumer sentiment is reflected in the latest quarterly index retail figures, benefiting no doubt from the sunny feel-good bounce with sales in beverages and foods and BBQ’s and stay-cations way, way above average and expectation. It has been a very good summer and those lucky enough to have been visiting from abroad this last couple of months will have seen Éire at her bright and shiny best. The sun has been shining for weeks on end, the whole population is tanned and suddenly there is renewed talk of the necessity of increases in net inward migration as we are at full employment levels once again, something not seen since the heady days of the Celtic Tiger. It has been a very good summer, and the country is on a high: those who needed to be held to account have, (well some of them have) at last, been held to account. We are become an all inclusive and an all encompassing pluralistic society. We’ve paid our international debts in full and on time and we are now squirreling away for the other type of day, the rainy day; and boy oh boy we know the rainy days here too!
The monster’s entrance…
It has been a good summer so far, but the monster alas, is struggling. The effects of the summer’s drought-like conditions are now unmistakable. We have had some wonderfully early cucumbers and courgettes, and we’ve wiped out most of the early lettuce, salad leaves, kohl rabi and radishes but the broadbeans and potatoes are struggling big time and dare say the crop will not be so good as we hope for. The strawberries are finished, the shallots are curing and the onions have been lifted. The gooseberry crop struggled to plump so we opted for a crop in the hand sooner than the crop on the bush and managed to get a dozen jars of jam. We’ll be doing likewise with the blackcurrants this weekend. The pumpkins are swelling and the Florence fennel has germinated. We tasted some of the beetroot and it is fabulous, and once the Red Barons are cured we’ll chutney about 10 lbs. We’ve summer pruned the plum and dwarf heritage apple trees, and we’ve put the french beans and swede seed to bed and in so doing we have set the monster up for autumn and winter. Today being the 19th July means it’s Tipping Day on monsterinthecorner, the 200th day of the year, the day by which high summer almost always recognizably wains. The young finches, sparrows and linnets are fledged, robin chicks have been rescued, fox cubs and leverets are making their own way and the early summer lush greens are beginning to look just a tad jaded. Some of the monster’s beds and drills are emptying fast, and at last there is a forecast of a substantial rainfall over the next 24 hours. And slowly, but surely, it all turns. And sooner than expected we’ll be saying “we saw both days”… and we’ll remember them and hopefully recall these days with fondness. It has been a truly good summer thus far, so good so that in the last number of days we’ve found ourselves wondering what (?) if anything, the abiding memory of this great summer would or should be, should we be fortunate enough to live to reflect upon it forty years hence. But, this is where we’ll leave it, for now.
firewheels and poppies and peas and robins… monster images from the summer that is 2018 images compliments @janpaulkelly (aka Mrs. Dirtdigger)
House windows and doors have been flung open for weeks on end. Long hot evenings parade the Gran via Clontarf and Calle Portmarnock in flip flops and shorts, faded and frayed, scant enough to be eye-catching, skimpy enough to barely cover deeply tanned social sensibilities. Char-grilled meats and fish waft on dense humid air and easy evening salads with vermouth cocktails are de force. The beach-fronts are thronged during daylight hours, and new generations are being acquainted with the 99 and the Bucket & Spade. With night-time temperatures well into the high teens late al fresco parlays are par for the course, and soaked sheets and pillowcases an every morning reality. Every brow is glistening and beaded, necks are damp, chins are dripping, and every shirt (even a plain white t) betrays its proximity to hyperactive axillary pits. After a four decades hiatus summer finally arrived in Ireland. Grasslands are parched and livestock is struggling; secondary roads are literally melting away, and now, the wettest country in Europe, having experienced a dry four week period the first time in 42 years (4 weeks!) has introduced water usage restrictions and a national domestic hosepipe ban. It had rained incessantly for months; it had rained incessantly for decades; it has rained persistently for hundreds of years on our little island, and due to a complete lack of planning and foresight by our public representatives for years on end, it seems one of the wettest countries in the northern hemisphere has found –that after only four weeks of good, summer sunshine– it has a water shortage problem. Yes, summer has arrived; and where just a few short weeks ago we had firmly believed our little country inadvertently skewed 150 degrees eastwards in mid March, we must now be forgiven for thinking the same little country has slipped 30 degrees southward since mid May, and all ellipsoidal and rectifying calculations aside, it would be nice if it could hang-out at this latitude for just a few short weeks longer: just a little longer. The monster is also enjoying its once in a lifetime summer experience. We’ve had courgettes and cucumbers in the month of June for the first time, ever. We’ve had strawberries, and beetroot, and lettuces and radishes aplenty. An abundance of basil and garlic has us making pesto, and the onions and shallots which fell foul of the appalling winter and late spring weather have more than made up ground and are bulbing up nicely at last. We’ve begun to harvest the broadbeans and have been eating the Kale Negro for weeks now. The run of very good weather has opened all flowers and this year we have a wonderful show of roses, zinnias and marigolds; and for the first time we can recall the sunflowers had opened and showed face by mid summers day, a good 3 -4 weeks earlier than usual. We have an abundance of tomato trusses, still ripening, and we have Californian Wonder and Cayenne peppers and Rosa Bianca aubergines also ripening nicely. Of course, the prolonged spell of good weather has had its draw backs too, especially as we are restricted with water usage, and even those well prepared plot-holders who resourcefully harvest rain water from sheds and tunnels have found their barrels and butts run completely dry. Potato drills are in needs of a drink and rhubarb stools are drastically wilted. Summer has arrived, and our lush green isle is turned gold: the hay is in and the shorn meadows resemble a scene more evocative perhaps of the Andalucían plains. Summer arrived and India came to play international cricket in Malahide, and the World Cup has come ‘round again with Brazil, and Argentina and Uruguay, and evenings resound to childrens play till dark; summer arrived, and we are treated to a feast of red faces crimson thighs and peeling shoulders, and long days turning a blind eye to the short nights as they meld and morph into one super sunny circumferential experience that will last long in the memory, and we call it summer.
Summer has arrived and the Wild Atlantic Way is tamed awhile, and we’ll remember this summer in Dublin, the summer of 2018.
Monster In The Corner... 