The folklore of allotments
LISA GLEDHILL digs into the world of allotment folklore, from top-secret super-spuds and lunar planting cycles to butterfly whispering and the terrifying leek-slasher…
My Grandad was a proper gardener. He didn’t waste time growing things you can’t eat, his greenhouse was made from old window frames nailed together, and there was no horticultural problem that couldn’t be solved by the application of Jeyes Fluid or Epsom salts. His large garden was filled with terrible hazards for a small child – razor-edged tin cans on strings to scare birds, cloches made from sheets of cracked glass and God-knowswhat sinister substances in unlabelled bottles. I adored it.
We lived in a northern coal town and just down the road was a sprawl of allotments where miners spent their precious above-ground hours ruminating in their pigeon crees, growing colossal leeks and avoiding their families. Grandad went there to buy seeds, swap stories and share knowledge. I never realised how much of it I’d absorbed until, 40 years later and 300 miles further south, I took on my own allotment.
My plot is on a new site where the sheds are purpose-built, not made from old doors, and growing vegetables is a choice not a survival strategy, but the culture is comfortably familiar. It seems all vegetablegrowing communities share a collective unconscious of folklore, magical thinking and (sub)urban myths to sustain them in their endless wars against slugs, blight and the British weather. There are plenty of good books and websites listing the curious beliefs of farmers and gardeners in olden times, but I’m interested in the folklore of today. The little rituals that modern gardeners still cling to – and the lengths we’ll go to in insisting that our personal beliefs really do have a proper, practical, scientific basis because we’re no longer officially allowed to believe that evil spirits can harm our turnip crops.
THE LORE OF PLANTING
One of the most important things a vegetable grower must decide is when to start planting. One popular bit of folklore advises testing the soil temperature with your bare buttocks. If it’s warm enough to sit on comfortably it’s time to sow your seeds.
The trouble is, I don’t know anyone who’s ever done this or even claimed to know someone who’s done it. Was it ever genuinely practised? I can think of easier ways to judge when it’s time to sow. In my case it’s generally when the weeds start threatening to take over. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bare buttock test started out as a gardener’s joke or possibly an apprenticeship prank to see which novice gardeners were gullible enough to try it.
Potatoes are vegetables of particularly great medical and magical potency if you
1 believe the old herbals, so it makes sense that we’re often advised to plant them on sacred days. I’ve heard St Patrick’s Day, St George’s Day, Palm Sunday and Good Friday all recommended. This could be a faint relic of memory from the time when this new-fangled vegetable, a relative of deadly nightshade, was treated with great suspicion. At first, strict Protestants in England and Scotland refused to eat it on the grounds that it isn’t mentioned in the
Bible. The more pragmatic Irish Catholics decided that it would probably be OK as long as you said a prayer, sprinkled your seed crop with Holy Water and stuck them in the ground on a day when God or one of his deputies
2 is on the alert. Modern gardeners who recommend planting your spuds on a holy day usually say it’s to avoid frost, but that doesn’t always work – especially in a year when Easter comes early. My favourite bit of planting advice comes from one of the blokes at the allotments near my Grandad’s old house. He says: “Don’t plant your potatoes until the dandelions are in flower on the Boiler Road.” It’s a cast-iron guarantee, but not much use if you don’t live within visiting distance of the Boiler Road. Maybe they should set up a web-cam.
Other crops have their auspicious times for planting too – broad beans on St Valentines Day, French beans when the first cuckoo calls and onions on the shortest day, for harvesting on the longest day. Most of these tips are just handy aids to memory but the biodynamic movement believes the precise timing of planting is critical to a crop’s success. The system is guided by the phases of the Moon and, broadly speaking, it recommends planting leafy crops, which grow upwards, when the Moon is waxing and root crops, which grow downwards, when the Moon is waning. Within that overarching system are many variations and refinements influenced by astrology and the farming theories of Rudolph Steiner.3 Does this count as folklore? Followers of biodynamics say the system is based on subtle but very real phenomena such as gravity, light levels and the transmission of water and nutrients through plant tissues. Others say it’s just another example of the magical principle ‘as above, so below’ – as the Moon grows, so will your crop. I’ve heard people with no knowledge of Steiner say that it’s best to mow your lawn when the Moon is waning so it doesn’t grow back too quickly. I think that kind of acceptance without understanding counts as a folkloric belief. I’ve dabbled with planting in accordance with the Moon’s
Potatoes are vegetables of great medical and magical potency
cycles and I didn’t notice much difference in the result, but perhaps I wasn’t doing it right.
PEST WARS
Once you’ve got your stuff in the ground, the next challenge is keeping it going – and this is really where garden legends are made. I’ve never yet met a serious vegetable grower who didn’t have his or her own special ways of making things grow. The trouble is, most of the buggers won’t share their secrets with me! Grandad’s favourite trick was covering the ground with chimney soot. Not only did this add valuable carbon and nitrogen to the soil, he said the dark colour helped the soil warm up quicker in the spring. The trouble was, he had a coal fire, so he was probably also dosing the soil with traces of uranium, lead, antimony and a range of other heavy metals. Still, it never did me any harm.
There’s no end to the number of things that want to eat your plants before you do, so gardeners have devised a range of imaginative ways to kill them. My Grandad waged constant war against cabbage white butterflies, but they’re fast moving critters so he’d try to charm them into staying still long enough to be killed by repeatedly chanting: “Let, let, let, my bonny pet.” I’m not sure it worked, but he believed it did. Mind you, he also believed you should never step on a slug because it would turn into lots more slugs.
Copper rings or tape are often placed around plants to keep off slugs and snails because it’s believed that slug-slime reacts
with the metal to create an electrical tingle that the creatures find unpleasant. I’ve tried this and I think I noticed a benefit, but it’s hard to be certain. Recently, copper tools have become popular on the basis that they also deter slugs and kill soil-born bacteria due to a sort of homeopathic effect from leaving tiny particles of copper in the soil. I’m much more dubious about this, especially as copper tools can cost 10 times as much as their stainless-steel equivalents – but they photograph so prettily in the pages of lifestyle magazines.
Nicotine spray used to be popular for destroying bugs but is now banned; I’ve often met growers who believe that if you save up enough dog-ends and soak them in water you can make your own. In the carefree
4 days of the 20th century, gardeners tackled pests and diseases with a whole arsenal of toxic substances, such as cyanide “bombs” to destroy aphids and lead-based treatments to kill cabbage root fly. These days, gardeners tend to use more benign (and legal) substances for pest control, but the way they apply them often mirrors the old techniques and sometimes feels closer to folk magic than science. Garlic candles have replaced cyanide vapour, and I’ve been told that burying rhubarb leaves beneath cabbage
5 seedlings will prevent club root, but this resembles cargo-cult thinking more than evidence-based prevention. I admit I haven’t run strictly controlled comparison trials, but I did once try a concentrated garlic candle to get rid of blackfly in my conservatory-porch.
I was expecting a pleasant pizzeria-kitcheny sort of smell but what I got was an eyeballblistering thick yellow vapour, probably not much less noxious than the cyanide. I also failed to thoroughly seal all the airways between the porch and the main house. The effect on the blackfly was inconclusive but the effect on my marital harmony was for a while quite devastating.
Another more gruesome kind of magical thinking sometimes occurs when dealing with larger pests. It used to be fairly common to hang the corpses of moles from fences and this was explained to me as a way of warning other vermin to keep away from your garden. I haven’t seen this myself since the 1980s, but I have heard that it still goes on. Could this work? It’s just possible that the smell of rotting mole might discourage other moles. An alternative explanation for hanging vermin from fences is that it’s a way for pest controllers to show the landowner that they are doing a good job – but that would only apply to farms or large gardens, not to small gardens where the owner does his own molekilling. This is one trick I haven’t tried.
TERROR IN THE LEEK TRENCHES
I am lucky enough to have grown up in the town which was for decades the home of the World Leek Championship. Every September the cream of the leek-growing community from across the globe (though mainly from the north east of England) would gather at the working men’s club just a couple of minutes from my home
to compare the fruits of a year’s labour. Fertiliser recipes and growing regimes were closely guarded secrets, but occasional hints would leak out. Manure, beer and seaweed are all good, but apparently a pregnant woman’s urine beats all of these for making the leeks swell. Some growers believe that only flesh and blood are good enough to satisfy the leek god. Rotting fish, roadkill, dead dogs and possibly missing hitch-hikers are rumoured to have been dug into the allotments of Northumberland by those obsessed with growing the ultimate leek. At the elite level of competition, the leeks are never eaten. Instead, they’re carefully replanted and allowed to produce seed for next year’s crop – the allium equivalent of being put out to stud. Successful seed strains were often handed down from father to son.
Then there were the stories of the dreaded leek-slasher. Every year there were reports of potential prize-winners being knifed, dosed with weed-killer, or peppered with gun-shot. Sneakier assailants would allegedly spike the ground with excess fertiliser so the leeks would peak too soon and split before show day. From August onwards, grown men – sometimes armed – would spend all night in their leek trenches guarding their precious charges. Undoubtedly there were some
6 genuine attacks among rival growers but as with Spring-heeled Jack and other nebulous night-time assailants, fear, paranoia (and probably sleep deprivation) turned the leekslasher into an allotment bogeyman, a semimythological demon stalking the trenches of the imagination.
Leek enthusiasm was an almost exclusively male passion and I can remember the days when allotments – at least in north east England – were pretty much men-only territory. A wife might just about be allowed to water her husband’s tomatoes if he was poorly but the idea of her
having her own plot was unthinkable. I’m pleased to say this has changed, but I still hear some odd gender-taboos about herb and vegetable growing. The most common one seems to be that rosemary will only grow in a household where the woman is the dominant partner. Visitors to my garden sometimes smirk knowingly at the huge, thriving rosemary bush; but the same bit of folk wisdom is also applied to sage, and my sage is quite small and puny. Mint and cucumbers are said only to grow in a household where the man is in charge and parsley will only
7 grow when planted by a man – preferably a bachelor; but he must be a decent sort of chap because parsley won’t grow for the wicked. 8All these caveats must have been invented as a jokey way to explain why parsley is notoriously slow and difficult to
germinate. Mint on the other hand will grow through concrete.
MAGICAL THINKING
What about a bit of magic? Do gardeners still believe in the healing ability of certain plants or the power of ritual to make the crops grow? Well, yes and no. Modern pagans certainly do, and plenty of them are gardeners. Herbalists also use many traditionally ‘magical’ plants in their work, although they usually ascribe the results to the biochemical properties of the plants rather than to supernatural powers. But what about your average vegetable grower who just wants a few beans for the Sunday dinner? They often dismiss the idea of magical plants as a lot of old nonsense, but dig a bit deeper and quite a few of them will admit to using one or two old remedies ‘just for fun’. Alternatively, they’ll try to give a ‘scientific’ explanation for why a magic idea – say the idea that garlic soaks up diseases – is really true.
The concept of sacrifice is a fundamental and universal magical principle. In agricultural societies this can involve offering the first fruits – either an entire first crop or the earliest ripening part of a crop – to the presiding deity, or to the fairies. Similarly, gardeners often leave the first crop from a new perennial plant for the birds or for the compost heap. Usually they say it’s to let the plant get established, but in practical terms that’s not much different from a magical offering – it’s still giving up a benefit in the hope of greater benefits in future. I know of one allotment holder in Lincolnshire who cultivates a very large plot every year. He eats just a little of the produce and every autumn he digs everything else back into the soil, ready to start again next year. For him the process of gardening has moved beyond the practical to become a self-sustaining ritual.
For some reason, a lot of folk magic seems to involve potatoes, from using them
9 to charm away warts to carrying one in
10 your pocket as a cure for rheumatism to using them as a handy medium for carving
11 poppets. It’shardtoseewhysucha mundane food should have so many magical associations, but perhaps there’s more to the potato than meets the eye. At Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire, The Agriculture and Horticultural Development Board’s Crop Storage Research facility is at the forefront of UK potato science. Alongside their public research into crop quality and storage, they undertake “confidential contract research”.12 What kind of secretive investigations are going on in this Area 51 of the fens? Are they trying to breed some kind of super-spud and harness its mystic powers for anti-gravity engines and faster than light travel? I like to hope so.
There’s one bit of garden magic that I can say, on the basis of personal experience, is 100 per cent true. Mother-stones really do exist. I’ve been hauling bucket-loads of rocks out of my small allotment patch for seven years now and there don’t seem to be any fewer. I’ve used them to lay more than 30 metres of rubble path and still the little buggers keep coming. The only possible explanation is that they’re breeding and if only I could find the mother-stone I could put a stop to it.
The myths we believe and the myths we scoff at, the folklore that’s so embedded we don’t even notice it, the little rituals we weave into our everyday lives, are all highly subjective and personal things. This dip into the culture of gardening and growing is my personal experience, not a thorough or academic study. It’s based on the things people have told me over the years and the things I’ve seen or done. Others will have different experiences and there’s certainly more for me to discover; but that is one of the joys I’ve found in gardening – there’s always something new to learn, and always someone ready to share their own tales.
✒ LISA GLEDHILL is a film maker and writer and amateur vegetable-grower with a long-standing interest in forteana
NOTES
1 Potatoes have been said to cure bites, bruises, burns, chilblains, corns, freckles, frostbite, headaches, rashes, rheumatism, sprains, stings and swellings, warts and are also an aphrodisiac, but 16th century herbalist John Gerard warned that over-indulgence can cause leprosy.
2 The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson. 3 Biodynamics is a complex area and a thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this article. For more info start with www.biodynamic.org.uk
4 For lots of reasons, I don’t recommend trying this.
5 See FT380:53 for more on the supposed toxicity of rhubarb leaves.
6 For sample reports of leek-slashing, see Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 21 Aug 1993, p3; Newcastle Journal, 9 June 1969, p4; and indeed most north-east England newspapers in most summers between 1960 and 2000.
7 There are a surprisingly large number of folk beliefs associated with parsley, many of them connected to gender, sexuality and reproduction and many of them completely contradictory. See Herbs and Herb Gardening by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde and other herbals and collections of garden folklore.
8 My parsley and mint grow very nicely, thank you. 9 I’ve tried this one and the wart did disappear but I was using a pharmacy remedy at the same time so I don’t know whether or not the potato was responsible.
10 See A Modern Herbal by Mrs M Grieve and references throughout Ulysses by James Joyce
11 http://www.witchipedia.com/herb:potato
12 https://potatoes.ahdb.org.uk/storage/aboutsutton-bridge-csr