Pottering about in the potagers
November dawns in Charente might not break until 8am, but that still gives John Lewis-stempel plenty of time to rotovate– as well as plant four crates of garlic–in the farmhouse potager
John Lewis-stempel plants garlic
IWAS woken yesterday at 7.04am by the blackbird chup-chupp-ing at the end of the garden, where it roosts in the lilac. A blackbird in blackness still; in CET (Central European Time), November dawn does not occur till nearly 8am.
When I threw open the shutters, the bedroom light caught two green eyes picking their way along the lane, so the cause of the blackbird’s alarm was the usual suspect, a cat returning from night-hunting. It’s an old disturbance in the French countryside, chat et merle.
The Protestant work ethic sits ill with waiting for an 8am start and sufficient light to see your way. So, for 45 useless minutes, I twiddled my fingers, made ‘noisettes’ (espressos with a ‘nut’ of milk) and studied the to-do list stuck on the office wall. November in French farming is odd-job month; all the big tasks, the reapings and sowings, of crop and livestock, are done. Yesterday, the top of my bitty A4-long to-do list was ‘rotovate potager and plant garlic’.
Eventually, there was light. The sun birthed out of mist and the Charente did its thing. By 8.30am, the sky was as blue as our shutters, the collared doves on the kitchen roof were cooing gently and I was wheeling the Jardimeca T180 tiller by its cow-horn handlebars to the potager.
To describe a potager as simply a kitchen garden is to lose sophistication in translation. The potager is, indeed, intended to supply the soup pot, but, since its origins in the
Renaissance, it’s been ornamental, too. Function and style in one entity, which, if you think about it, is very French indeed.
I think every house in the village down the hill has a potager, even the two new bungalows. Self-sufficiency is alive and well in deepest France. Our local Intermarché, about the type and size of a Sainsbury’s Local, stocks a full range of chicken, pigeon and rabbit food, plus drinkers and feeders. (The rabbit fodder, I hasten to add, is not for childrens’ pet bunnies.)
Most of the local potagers tend to floral formalism, with soigné lines of marigolds and tulips adorning the veg. The Lewis-stempel potager, a third of an acre won from a pony paddock behind the house, has something of the English horticultural un-officialism Rupert Brooke celebrated in The Old Vicar
age, Grantchester. So its square limits, although indicated by precisely placed limestone boulders, are rambled by wild chicory, scabious and cornflower; over the summer, these wildflowers gave the plot a startling edge of electric blue. The border, I must say, made a rather fetching frame for our gargantuan crop of cerise tomatoes on spiral steel poles, which was wholly matched by a green glut of courgettes. By August, I realised why the French invented ratatouille.
Function and style in one entity, which, if you think about it, is very French indeed
After three pulls on the cord, the Jardimeca coughed into life, in much the way that fag smokers do. The fire engine-red machine is made by Pubert, a French company that claims to be the current ‘worldwide leader in tiller manufacture’. Be that as it may, the Jardimeca’s 16 blades are borrowed from Boudicca’s chariot. The Jardimeca is insatiable, uncompromising even, on our stony land; its rotating blades immediately sent can-can swirls of dirt into the air.
I had earmarked a flat 20-yard by 10-yard stretch for the garlic. It was virgin land and the noise of stones hitting the metal guards was a pandemonium. Like a Black Country foundry at full speed. Like hail on a cold tin roof. About 20 times the Jardimeca hit a clanking boulder and I needed to stop to prise the offending geology out with a chisel bar. The disinterred boulders were added to the edge of the potager. Soon, they’ll make a white wall.
Even with the Jardimeca turned off for these interludes of excavation, there was din. A flock of 100 starlings was doing its own digging work among the knee-high stalks of the post-harvest sunflower field next door. The starlings whistled and wrrrd; the same sounds as dial-up internet. Eventually, digging around the pockets of my boiler suit, I found an unused paper handkerchief, tore it in half and stuck a portion in each ear.
Autumn is a time of closing down, of hibernation. (I have not seen a whip snake or a wall lizard in the garden for a week.) Autumn, however, is also a time of opening up. The leaves of the trees, the limes and the oaks and the planes were ripped down by a storm rolling in from the Atlantic last week, so, as I fought the tiller, I possessed long views on the turns. On a low far hill to the west, across big country, the blades of the wind turbines turned as rhythmically as those of the Jardimeca itself.
As I trudged behind the tiller, I became absorbed by smells: the hot liquorice noisesomeness of the Jardimeca’s working engine; the mustiness of the churned ochre, whiteflecked earth (with an after-aroma of bleachy cleanliness). There was something in the air, too, something dramatic, although its identity eluded me for a while.
J’avoue. Before I began farming in France I thought the concept of terroir was a nifty marketing trick by the Gallic Department for the Advancement of Agriculture and Viticulture. Now, I’m convinced by terroir, the notion that a site’s geology, latitude, elevation, exposure to sun—nature’s grants and constants—express themselves in the crop grown there. Each terroir imparts individual, distinct character. I believe I can taste ours in everything from our eggs to our grapes.
Anyway, after about two hours of tillering and an hour of raking, I was ready to plant the four crates of garlic (a violet, soft-neck variety, Germidour). In ancient cultures, garlic was administered to provide health and strength for toilers. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, inscriptions on the side of the pyramids recorded that ‘1,600 talents of silver were spent’ on garlic for the slaves, about £20 million at current exchange rates.
It did occur to me, as I took out the first bulb from the crate, that I could do with a taste of my own medicine. And it was as I planted that first bulb I realised what the elusive smell in the air was: the metallic tang of winter. Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John Lewisstempel was the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year