Beneath our feet the life going on is every bit as complex and interdependent as on the African veldt. We're all just too snooty to realise that our own backyards hold such riches. We find flowers: the yellow bird's foot trefoil so beloved of bumblebees, the purple sweet scabious which is also known as the Mournful Widow, yellow rock roses, wild geraniums, wild parsnips, clovers, thyme, the delicate mauve and white flowers of eye bright, yellow spotted eat's ear, the pinky red pyramidal orchid, yellow melilot, silver weed with its delicate leaves beneath its strongly coloured yellow flowers, spiky agrimony and salad burnet, which we grow in our herb garden and sell on our herb stalls. There are chiffchaffs singing in the branches of a field maple, swallows on the wing, a pair of magpies pecking the ground for grubs. We crouch to look into the tunnel of a funnel spider's web, its tightly woven coneshaped web opening out to create a landing place for unsuspecting insects. Martin gently touches the outer edges with a piece of grass, sending vibrations back to the waiting spider. The small black insect quickly comes out, looking around for the prey which he believes has landed in his lair. There are Brown Argus butterflies feeding on the rock roses, a Six Spot Burnet Moth hovering near the brambles, an Emperor Dragonfly pulsing through the air. And then Jeremy points to a small blue butterfly, fluttering slowly across the hillside, maybe a foot above the ground. It keeps changing directions, hovering for a moment, then moving on, as though searching for something.
It is an astonishing colour. When at rest, with its wings folded up, it looks brown, with black spots and a blueish tinge near its abdomen. But in flight it is a beautiful blue, shimmering in the sunlight, changing colour as it dips and flutters through the sky. Jeremy follows the Large Blue as she drops down towards a low-growing bushy thyme plant and, closing her wings, lands on one of the deep purple flowers. 'She'll lay an egg,' Martin says as he crosses the hillside to another mound of thyme and points out a single tiny, white egg held between the rich purple flower heads. 'Look, here's one.'
The life cycle of the Large Blue is both bizarre and complex. Before laying her eggs, the female Large Blue will have mated. She will have found her mate earlier in the day and, following a brief aerial courtship, they will settle on the ground to pair for about an hour. When they part, she hides until her eggs are ripe. Then she sets off to look for a thyme plant on which to lay an egg. This is what we are seeing now: the delicate blue insect twitching and rotating on the flower. She curves her plump stomach almost double, pushing the tip into a young bud. This process ejects a single egg and she will lay, on average, sixty eggs in a day.
Jeremy takes up the story: 'The eggs will hatch after five or ten days and the tiny caterpillars will burrow into the flower to feed on the pollen and seed. Even though each egg is laid singly, many Large Blues may choose the same plant. It's not uncommon to find four or five eggs, and I once found a hundred!'
But, he explains, most will die as the caterpillars are cannibalistic in their first life stage, and only one will ever survive on each flower head. After two or three weeks, each surviving caterpillar will complete the skin changes and develop the organs needed for the next phase of its life. The most important of these is a tiny honey gland which secretes minute drops of sweetness to attract red ants.
Once its final skin moult is complete, and always in the evening, the caterpillar flicks itself off the thyme flower and drops to the ground, where it hides beneath a leaf or in a crevice. 'By doing this,' Jeremy says, 'it greatly improves its chances of being found by the red ants, who forage in the early evening.' When the ant does find the caterpillar, it taps its body, causing the honey gland to produce more secretions, which excite the ant. It recruits others and they crawl all over the caterpillar, milking the gland and licking up the juices. Eventually they wander off, leaving the original ant with its find. That ant is possessive, and Jeremy says he has seen fights to the death when ants from different colonies try to milk the caterpillar as well.
Eventually, the ant decides to adopt the caterpillar, tricked into believing that it is an ant grub by its touch, scent, hairiness and size. Seizing the caterpillar in its jaws, he takes it down into the nest with the ant brood. Once safely inside, the caterpillar quickly transforms into the parasitic monster he or she really is. Puncturing the skin of an ant grub, he starts feeding on the fluid tissues. Between feeds, like an Eastern potentate, he reclines on a pad of spun silk. Soon the caterpillar has become a bloated white maggot that dwarfs both the ants and the grubs. In the winter he crawls deep into the nest to hibernate; in the spring he resumes feeding. Bylate May, when it is time to pupate, the Large Blue chrysalis is about one hundred times heavier than when he first conned the hapless ant. He will have eaten about twelve hundred ant grubs, a greed which kills off many who have landed in nests simply not big enough to support their appetite. In the last week of June or in early July, the adult Large Blue emerges between eight and nine-thirty in the morning, when the ants are sluggish, to begin his five-day life on earth. As the hatching adult struggles to split open its pupal case, it gives off rasping bursts of song, which whip up the ants into a frenzy of activity. Despite the Large Blue's murderous assault on their nest, they accompany the insect along the narrow passages towards the light, milling around excitedly while the butterfly makes its way up a shrub to inflate its wings. After a forty-five-minute rest, the wings have set hard and it is ready to fly.
While Martin and Jeremy alternately tell us the story of this strange, convoluted life-cycle, I watch the Large Blues fluttering above the thyme plants, occasionally dipping downwards, apparently checking whether this plant or that would make a good home for their eggs. After they were officially declared extinct in 1979, Jeremy led a team to Sweden in the early 1980s to regions where Large Blues were living in habitats almost identical to southern England. He brought back the grubs, placed them in the nests of the red ants on these banks and brought the Large Blue back to life in the British Isles.
The proceeds from the fete and the pig roast have meant a good month's cash flow. The plant stall at the Dairy House took £195, Dennis and I made £125 at Montacute and the honesty table earned £75. If it hadn't been for the problems with the pig, the hog roast would have earned the nursery about £150. In the event, on that bit of the proceedings we have barely broken even.
By the beginning of July the garden is an anarchy of rampant growth. The once neat rows of small seedlings have grown into dense jungles of leaves, spilling over each other, fighting for their share of light and soil. In the polytunnels the fat ripe tomatoes hang like scarlet jewels from the vines. The squashes, their leaves as big as pizzas, sprawl across their beds, an exotic tangle worthy of a Rousseau painting. The rows of pepper plants in the tunnels are heavy with huge green, orange, red and purple fruit. On some plants there are as many as ten large peppers, barely visible under the lush, luxuriant foliage. The slugs are eating the lettuce leaves, but the lettuce leaves are winning. Up on their straw bales, the strawberries flourish. High on their trellis network, the runner bean plants make shiny little red flowers and fat juicy beans hang from the stalks in bundles of three or four. The plants are going about their business, doing what they know how to do and doing it well, reaching for the sun, fighting for space in the soil, ripening their fruit so that the seeds will guarantee them life in the future. The order of the garden and the choice of what we grow may be David's doing but at the same time it is not; another force has taken over here, something that springs eternal, that carries on through wind and rain, roots questing down into the earth to find the right combination of nutrients to create the beans, the carrots, the onions, the garlic - a lush, fecund world. We might not think that plants move, but they do; they're as alive as the pigs, just growing at a different pace.
Our potatoes, in rows along the west wall of the nursery, bear their white, star-shaped flowers with the purple and yellow flecks in the centre. When you reach down into the earth and run your fingers round the cold moist spuds, or accidentally slice throug
h one and let the smell of all that richness, that earthiness, float upwards, there is something primitive in the moment. We plant them, but they do the awesome business of growing; they're domesticated but they're wild as well. That's what the smell says.
Out in the fields around the nursery, it's a different story. Ewen Cameron grows industrial quantities of potatoes, and their process from seed potatoes to supermarket shelf is a tale of high-tech automation worthy of a factory manufacturing ball-bearings. I ask Chris Wilson who runs the farm to take me through the annual cycle. He gives me a print-out entitled 'Field Applications from 04/0412006 to 14/0912006' which sets out exactly what is applied to his crop of Main Field Estima potatoes throughout their growing season. Spraying begins before the potatoes are planted, on 4 April, with an overall dose of Nitram Fertiliser. Six days later, two more fertilisers - 2.8.28 + 30s03 and Amm N 34.5 - are sprayed on to the earth. On the day of planting, 18 April, the first fungicide of the season, Amistar, is deployed. Amistar protects against black dot, a disease that causes black splodges on the spud. Its damage is purely cosmetic. Amistar goes into the ground along with the seed, Estima Se2, and on top they spray Mocap, the only chemical Chris describes as nasty. It is an organophosphate and it kills the wire worms which might eat holes in the potatoes which supermarkets would immediately reject, again on cosmetic grounds.
Then there's a breathing space until 16 May, when the first of the weedkillers are applied after the potatoes have germinated but before their leaves have emerged above ground. Linuron inhibits germination of any invading plant life and Pdq, a contact killer, makes sure that anything that has germinated and started to grow is stopped in its tracks.
On 3 June, just before the rows close - when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next - Chris begins spraying for blight. Blight is the disease which wiped out the Irish potato crop, turning the plants and spuds into black sticky goo. It is a fungus and its spores travel so quickly that a ten-acre field can be completely destroyed inside of five days. Blight germinates only when the weather is sufficiently humid and warm, and on a small hill outside Chris's office there's a weather station which records temperature, humidity, wind speed and the dew point. The device is paid for by Branston, the UK's largest potato packer and one of Tesco's biggest suppliers. The information from the station is relayed to climatologists in Holland who in turn feed it back to Chris via a forecasting software system he subscribes to for £600 a year. He shows me how it works. On his computer screen a series of brightly coloured graphs with red jagged blocks indicate the potential for high humidity and a purple and yellow series of graphs monitor how much of the leaf area has been successfully sprayed with an anti-fungal agent and when it will need spraying again.
Thus, in the year 2006, anti-blight sprays were applied to the crops eight times between 3 June and 18 August. The fungicides used were Shirlan, Fubol Gold, Option, Rhapsody and Ranman Twinpack. Farmers without this sophisticated forecasting system tend to spray every week. With the monitoring device, Chris not only cuts down the number of times he has to spray; it also allows him to use the most appropriate spray for the current conditions. The crops get some more positive help too: on 9 June they apply a trace element called Maghos, which Chris describes as a tonic for the soil, and on 28 June and again on 7 July they apply a trace element called Root 66. Root 66 consists of magnesium, phosphorus and nitrogen, which the overworked soil runs out of - an appropriate name for the one relatively healthy part of the process.
On 8 July, a slug-killer called Omex Sluggo is applied to the crop. It is mixed with Adjuvant Oil, which makes the slug-killer easier to adminster. Then, when Chris judges that the potatoes are the right size, the crop is 'finished'. On 18 August a herbicide called Spotlight is sprayed over the plants. Finishing is farming speak for killing, stopping the natural growth of the potatoes when they are at the optimum size for sale to the supermarkets and thus to our plates. Neat, round, not too big, not too small, smooth, blemish-free, very much like the factory product they almost are. A mechanical strimmer takes off the leaves while Spotlight knocks off the stalks.
Two or three weeks later the skins on the dormant potatoes will have hardened to a point where they can be harvested by a huge machine which can collect up to twenty-five tonnes in an hour. Then they're transported on to a conveyor belt, which sorts out the sizes and shakes off the mud. The majority of the potatoes are then stored in one of three huge barns, lined with a dull yellow insulation material. Over roughly three weeks the temperature is reduced to less than 2°C, the point at which the potatoes become virtually dormant. Left at room temperature, they would continue to grow, sprouting leaves and smaller tubers.
But those spuds destined to become crisps - which we prefer to be a cheery golden colour - cannot be allowed to chill. Chilling changes the chemical structure of the vegetable, and the resultant crisps would fry into a dull brown colour. So, to stop them sprouting, crisp potatoes are stored in an insulated barn and sprayed with CIPC, a sprout suppressant. CIPC mimics a hormone that makes the potatoes dormant. It's never used on potatoes destined for baby foods because it might have adverse side effects, but, as yet, no one really knows for sure just what its possible side effects might be.
All this doesn't come cheap. The chemicals cost £600 an acre, irrigation £100, planting £45 and harvesting £70. Add to that each acre's share of machinery which, bought new, comes to over £300,000. One-third of Chris's crop will be chucked away, deemed too bumpy, blotchy, small, big or generally misshapen to grace a Tesco shelf. Some of that will go to animal feed, but some of it will be literally left to rot. In Germany, he tells me, big potato growers now have plants on site which turn the rejected spuds into bio-fuel. Every acre yields about seventeen tonnes and for every tonne of potatoes they actually sell they receive £103. It sounds good; it's not. If a third of the spuds are rejects, that means each acre yields twelve tonnes. At £103 per tonne, each acre earns £1,236. Direct costs add up to £815 per acre, without factoring in the capital costs of the machinery, the storage sheds, fencing and so on. As ex-banker Andrew Moore, proprietor of the Somerset Wild Meat Company and purveyor of salt marsh lamb in country markets said, 'When your margins are low, you have to sell one hell of a lot of whatever it is to make any profit.' In 2006, Chris harvested 4,500 tonnes of potatoes, which made it a good year. Chris loves to farm because, like any good farmer, he wants to grow good food. Although the list of chemicals is long, it is less than many of his competitors, who add chemical fertilisers to the mix and spray for aphids every two weeks. Chris leaves nature to take its course with aphids, relying on natural predators to deal with the insects.
At the door to the barn there's a big box of spuds which are there for anyone who works on the farm to help themselves. Even though they all know that there is no difference, as far as taste is concerned, between smooth or lumpy potatoes, ones that are blemish free or ones that have black splodges on them, Chris says that the misshapen ones are always left behind.
Bramble's piglets have discovered that, after they've squeezed out of their pens through the squares in the pig wire, they can then squeeze themselves under the main wooden gate leading into the nursery. I find them there early one morning, their tails wagging with pleasure as they hoover their way along a line of green French beans, emitting little grunts of pure delight and pleasure. A game of chase ensues: through the celery, across the carrots, down to the bottom of the garden, round the raspberry cage, until finally they are cornered in between the polytunnels where the strawberries stand in boxes on top of bales of straw. They admit defeat without much of a fight, blinking in the morning sunshine, like a team of delinquent schoolboys who've been caught smoking behind the potting shed. They are in varying degrees of dishevelment: a muddy nose here, a bent ear there, an uneaten bean still protruding from the corner of one mouth. I walk towards them. They stand their ground for a moment, then turn and scamper off towards the gate and back to the safety of Bramble's accommodating and amp
le stomach.
The following day, Bramble is moved back into the girls' run. Her piglets are almost ten weeks old and it's time for her to have a break from motherhood before she goes back for another amorous encounter with Boris and his brothers. No one really knows how old pigs get to be, as even breeding sows are generally slaughtered once their fertility wanes. The exception was the pig of my friend Francis Wheen, the writer and broadcaster and one of the funniest men I know. In 1993, Francis and his wife Julia acquired a pig. They received a call from Julia's ex-husband, a farmer who lives a few miles away from their Essex home. He'd found a piglet running loose in the lane and no one knew anything about it. Would Francis and Julia like to give it a home?
She was the size of a puppy and, despite her squealing and wriggling, the family took the piglet to their hearts. They bought her a collar and lead and took her for walks down the lanes. But every few days, Francis recalls, he had to buy a new collar as Perdita, as they'd called her, from the Latin for 'Lost Girl', grew and grew until, within weeks, she was the size of a sofa. 'That's when we had to fence off much of the garden and designate it pig paradise. We built her a hut out of corrugated iron and concreted over a patio for her.'
For the next nine years she lived a pretty idyllic existence, befriending the dogs and ponies and chickens, and lying under the apple trees in the late summer waiting for windfalls to land in her mouth. She was fed a diet of pig nuts and boiled scraps: potatoes, carrots, cabbages. But her favourite meal was leftover pasta, particularly spaghetti. Francis and Julia had frequent discussions about whether they should look for a husband for Perdita, but they didn't know what they would do with the piglets. Their sow lived the life of a maiden, adored by the children and admired by their friends. Perdita's special friend was Julia. One freezing morning in the last winter of the sow's life, Francis woke up to find Julia gone. She'd got up early, found the pig shivering and snuggled up beside her on the straw to warm her up.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 28