The marrow, in the walled kitchen garden at Tresillion House and the hands of head gardener R J Harris. Like the cabbage, a grossly nitrogen-hungry, above-
ground developer.
Click on this Olive Harris picture for a larger image
January 2003
Sheep manure seldom arises as a topic for discussion. It does now because of the cabbages' questions raised in December in the questions and answers section of this web site. New manual user and cabbage quizzer GC, declaring herself to be a gardening novice, comments in an e-mail: "Some of my ideas came from my grandad a very long time ago. He used to use sheep manure in net like a tea bag and feed the veg with this. I do the same. It worked for him and seems to work for me."
R J Harris, reading her message in the potting shed of the walled kitchen garden of Tresillian House in Cornwall, commented: "To be doing what she is doing, this is a lady who has been brought up, educated and taught the rural ways of country life.
"Sheep manure," he said, "is one of the oldest forms of liquid feeding in the UK. It was used by a lot of country folk, right up to World War II and just after, when there were a lot of people working on the land -- which is not the case today.
"They would put a two-gallon bucketful of sheep droppings into a hessian sack. Then they would weigh that down with a stone in a forty-gallon barrel filled with water. Two or three weeks later, they would have concentrated sheep-manure stock.
"This they would dilute at the rate of a quarter of a pint of stock to two gallons of water for the young plants, increasing to twice that strength in step with the maturing of the plants.
"These, of course, would be the heavily nitrogen-loving plants. They would be fed at least twice per week in the full growing season.
"I have spent hours myself, doing it years and years ago. I do not do it now because comfrey is so much less trouble and is equally effective."
The sections COMFREY/1 to -/3 in 'R J Harris's Moon Gardening' give full treatment to Mr Harris's ways with comfrey propagation, stock and solution. Their presence in the manual underlines the importance that the head gardening attaches to this natural way of augmenting plants' intake of trace elements. It also underlines his insistence that moon gardening -- vitally important though it is -- is no more than a part of the total horticultural story as he tells it (and with which the manual deals comprehensively).
p Talking about sheep-manure took the head gardener back to rural times and customs now almost disappeared from Britain. "This form of manure was a great help to the farm workers of those long-ago days," he said. "Then, part of their wages was not only a ration of milk and anything else that the farm produced, such as cider, but also permission to grow their own cabbages and potatoes and roots, etc, in the fields alongside those of the farmer. They found the sheep 'tea' just the thing for turning their plantings into worthwhile harvests. It is very high in nitrogen, and, as every gardener knows, the green-leaf vegetables such as the cabbages are highly nitrogen-hungry. That goes for the marrows, as well, of course, and the corgettes, and the pumpkins and the grass of the lawn." The working of the allotted ground was a combined operation. "On most farms there would be several employed men, and there'd be a general mucking in together -- plus the members of their families -- when it came to planting out or lifting the potatoes and the roots. This was so that everybody could be sure of being fed for the coming twelve months." The whole of the harvest was affected in this way, noted the head gardener: "Even to the point where the village schools closed for the summer holiday so that the children could be released for field work. If they were big enough to lift and to carry and to ride on the horse and wagon to bring in the corn, they were involved. And the farmer's wife would come out to the fields with a big basket of buns and cakes and a great big jug of tea for everyone to share. They were all in it together, because a successful harvest meant survival in just about every way you can think of. The whole thing was such a wonderful, involving ritual, but, sadly, it has gone for ever. However, the point is," said Mr Harris, "sheep manure is higher in nitrogen than either farmyard or horse manure. The farm workers of old knew that, and used it in preference whenever they could." The other reason for its use was that it was the easiest to collect from the fields. It was in small, hard, pellet form, unlike the product of the cow. "And, of course," said Mr Harris, "in most farm situations it was more prolific, more available and more quickly gathered than my favourite, the comfrey plant. Comfrey in the wild can be choosy about where it grows. Plus the fact that with his very long employed day and week, the farm worker had little time -- or energy, come to that -- to cultivate, maintain, harvest and process a herb of that kind. Not only that, his cottage garden probably would not have provided him with the space, either."
p "There is no such thing as a perfectly square farm field," enlarged R J Harris, "so, in those bygone times, when the farmer started to plant his crop -- potatoes, say -- for his own use and to sell, he would first of all mark out religiously a straight row right across the centre of the field, from the hedge on one side to the hedge on the other. Because of its position, it was the longest row that could be achieved. Then he would mark out rows on both sides of the central one, doing so until he had used up all of what he would have called the straight ground. After that, on what was known as the short ground, formed by the unique shape of the field, he would mark out shorter rows. Usually, it was in these shorter, less economical rows that the employees were allowed to plant their own crops." The practice, the head gardener commented, was 'set aside' in its original form. The ground was set aside for the use of the farm's workers. "Now, 'set aside' is the ground that the farmer is paid not to use in the interests of the environment or to help to reduce food production."
p Confirmation of the use through the ages of liquid manure comes from an unexpected quarter. Virago Modern Classics has revived one of the less turgid works of fiction of the early 1900s, 'O Pioneers!', by Willa (a woman) Cather (1873-1947). Published to no little acclaim in America in 1913, the book tells a tale of Scandinavian settlers trying to farm inhospitable Nebraska in the days of the pioneering West. It contains a single-paragraph reference to the farmer's wife who went into the fields at 5.30 a.m each morning to water her cabbages with manure liquid. The match between what she did and what R J Harris advocates -- as reported in 'R J Harris's Moon Gardening' -- is almost perfect. The cool of the early morning or the cool of the end of the day is the very time to apply moisture to the earth in which plants are rooted, says the head gardener. Of the two, the former is the better time. And the case for using liquid manure (in the case of the Nebraska farmer's wife almost certainly non-sheep manure, for sheep did not feature on the farms of that place and age) is proven. Reading 'O Pioneers!' (the 'O' says everything about the novelist's view of farm life and farm people in her day, and about the manner in which she presents it), one longs for more and more detailed description of farm practices in America very early in the century now closed. Certainly, Cather could well have been that kind of recordist: she was born into a family that had farmed for generations, and grew up on a new farm in the raw frontier teritories of the Old West. It could never have happened, of course. The times were not yet right for that kind of literary effort and production.
p R J Harris vented his feelings on the implications of the use in the passage above of the words 'farm workers'. "I don't like them," he said. "They belittle a very educated, skilled race of men or women. These are people who have to adapt themselves to machinery of all kinds and to the task of maintaining the countryside. All of that calls for a great range of knowledge and abilities, which take time, training and experience to acquire."
p Ask most gardeners today what flat pole is and you are guaranteed a blank stare in response. Had you asked the question a century ago anyone would have returned the answer, without hesitation: "Cabbage." "A great, big, old-fashioned cattle cabbage, that's what it was," explained Mr Harris. "A single one of them would have filled a wheelbarrow." In his forefathers' days it was common practice for one or two rows of this very hardy plant to be sown in the Autumn, and then, in the following Spring, for the resultant plantlets to be moved to what was to be their permanent home. Due to its very large size, this was a cabbage that achieved maturity at metre intervals in rows positioned one metre apart. The distances were paced out by a farmer who had never heard of a metre, but knew that a single full stride equalled the planting distance. Come Autumn, the sheep and the cattle fed on the fully-grown flat pole and grazed the field bare. Their highly nitrogen-charged droppings were then ploughed in, and the field was re-sown with the particular nitrogen-hungry plant -- grass, in all probability -- that was dictated by the farmer's rotation programme. In addition, the well-fed animals entered Winter well ready to withstand the worst of the year's worst season. "Or," added Mr Harris, "if Winter set in early and was very wet, the cabbage would be cut and stored for many weeks in an outbuilding as animal feed. Its huge leaves were stacked one on top of the other."
p The flat pole was also for human consumption: "Not eaten young, as you might imagine," pointed out Mr Harris, "but when the heart was solid and large. Then, the flavour was at its best." This was at the end of Summer or at early Autumn, when the individual plant could weigh 50lbs, 60lbs or 70lbs. "And what was so useful," added the head gardener, "this was a cabbage that held right through Winter's months, still growing in its field location as the weather conditions got worse and worse." This brought an extra bonus. "If, at the end of the crop, the farmer spotted a specimen or two that he thought were winners, he would transplant them to a convenient corner where they did not hinder future development. They would then grow on and, the following Spring, provide the farmer with the seed he needed for the next sowing."
p Tuckers Seeds, of Newton Abbott, are one of today's very few suppliers in Britain of old-fashioned flat pole cabbage seeds. "Another firm may be W J Boyce, of Cambridge," added Mr Harris. "Certainly, they used to stock it." He warned: "To get a full-grown flat pole cabbage weighing 60lbs to 70lbs, one of my deep-trench beds is a 'must' -- or, at very least, a single 'spit' trench formed like my single-dug bed. Sow in Autumn and then station the plantlets permanently in February or March." The construction of both types of bed is detailed in 'R J Harris's Moon Gardening' at BED/1 and BED/3.
Use the computer's back button to return to this page from the following link
mooo
