A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  The authorities also stressed the importance of storing fruit correctly, because of the pressing need for fresh fruit in winter and the prevention of waste. In the most precise terms, the Wiltshire Federation of the Women’s Institute advised its members what to do when preparing fruit for sale on a market stall. This was necessary because, if wrapped correctly, apples could be put in boxes that could be piled on top of each other. Fruit was to be wrapped inside a square of oiled paper, between eight and eleven inches in size, with possible alternatives being newspaper or tissue paper.

  1. Pick up square of paper with the left hand so that the paper is flat against palm. 2. Take the apple in right hand and throw it against left hand with sufficient force to make the paper form a holder . . . the cheek of the apple should be against the paper. 3. Partially close the left hand, turning the corners of the paper upwards. 4. Gather the corners together with the right hand and turn neatly under, forming a pad (not a twist). Apples should be packed in [the] box with the pad downwards for protection.7

  It can only be a matter of conjecture as to whether zealous WI members went through the same process for their home-stored fruit.

  Choosing the right seeds and storing produce correctly exercised novice gardeners, but so did the practicalities of vegetable gardening, and none more so than digging. Of all the well-known garden tasks that Michael Foot might have emphasised in his Evening Standard leaders, surely digging was the most unfortunate. It is the one aspect of gardening of which everybody has heard, but it is also a job that can be thoroughly overdone. Certainly, digging the ground and burying the turf was necessary when turning a lawn into a vegetable garden – since the soil would be low in organic matter and probably compacted as well – or when renovating a thoroughly neglected allotment. However, digging was unnecessary in an already established and fertile kitchen garden where there was organic matter, such as garden compost, available to spread on the soil or just fork in lightly in autumn. In these circumstances, more harm than good is achieved by digging since it disrupts beneficial mycorrhizal relationships in the soil. Double-digging risks burying nutriments too deeply in the soil to be useful for shallow-rooted vegetables.

  For women and older children especially, deep digging and turning over of soil – particularly a heavy clay one – every winter would have been a soul-destroying task, causing soft hands to blister like old paintwork. It is painful to reflect on the many hours of hard, unpleasant grind these tired and harassed civilians endured which they could have partly avoided had ‘no-dig’ techniques been accepted before the war. ‘No-dig’ cultivation methods consist of covering a patch of soil in a thick blanket of compost or manure, which is then left for the worms to pull down into the soil over winter. Seeds can then be sown into what remains of the compost in the spring. Of course, in many wartime gardens it was not possible to acquire sufficient organic matter to make the soil humus-rich, so digging was the only way to ensure that the soil was properly aerated each year. Nevertheless, where gardeners were assiduous compost makers or had access to straw or hay, much of the really heavy work might have been avoided. Even now, seventy years later, British gardeners are still suffering from the backwash of this almost obsessive interest in digging, and we have those wartime horticultural experts and Ministry copywriters at least partly to blame for it.

  That said, one cannot help admiring the toughness and commitment of ‘Victory Diggers’, if sixty-year-old Marjorie Williams of Lamledra in Cornwall was at all representative. She wrote in her diary in February 1940: ‘Ray [the gardener] and I dig steadily on the new 3⁄4 of an acre, trenching [triple-digging] day after day, often in fog and wind so cold that my hands can hardly hold the fork tight enough. The ground is breaking up well and it’s good exercise . . . We have only been held up for three days by ground frozen too hard to work.’8

  For most amateur gardeners, the prospect of digging up their lawns the hard way was understandably daunting. In March 1940, Mr Frederick Poke of Parkside, Wimbledon, south London made the newspapers by cultivating his lawn for vegetables using a Swiss machine called a Rototiller. This machine did the work in two hours rather than the fortnight it would have taken to dig by hand. The mayor of Wimbledon and his councillors came along to see the demonstration, with a view to buying one and hiring it out to private gardeners, and they ‘watched girls using the Rototiller without difficulty’.9 This was a nice idea but will have almost certainly foundered later in the war when the basic ration of petrol for ordinary citizens was abolished.

  The emphasis on vigorous and deep digging highlighted one of the major limiting factors in wartime kitchen gardening, namely the shortage of suitable soil conditioners and fertilisers. Rotted farmyard manure, which was such a staple of pre-war gardening, especially in the countryside, rapidly dwindled in quantity; this was not just because farmers needed it for fertilising their fields but also because so much grazing pasture had been ploughed up for arable crops and there were far fewer cows as a consequence.

  Much thought was expended, by both experts and amateurs, in finding ways round these shortages. Recommended alternative soil conditioners and fertilisers included seaweed in coastal areas, bone manures, feathers, hair, ‘shoddy’ – a by-product of the wool textile industry obtainable in towns in the north – ‘spent’ hops, available from breweries, and ‘night soil’, available anywhere in the country where there was no indoor sanitation. This commodity came highly recommended by E. Graham in his Gardening in War-time:

  One of the richest of all natural substitutes is night soil. It is excellent for practically all garden purposes and is suitable to all soils. As the night soil is removed it should be mixed with an equal quantity of earth and sprinkled with gypsum. Gypsum prevents the ammonia evaporating and it acts as a complete deodoriser. The heap should be covered to prevent the rain washing any of the nutriment away. It should be used sparingly – about a spadeful to each square yard.10

  It was a good thing that gypsum was quarried in Britain.

  Some local authorities sold treated sewage sludge. Plymouth Corporation, for example, offered it at 1s. 6d a ton. It was said that tomato seedlings would germinate in it in the spring. Coir or coconut waste is mentioned in gardening books as an alternative, although it must be assumed that, as this came all the way from India and Ceylon, its import would have been highly restricted once Japan entered the war.

  Some of the soil conditioners available were decidedly makeshift. Mrs Bridget Andrew, a student at Swanley College, remembered that they dug ‘London dung’ into the soil, which arrived by lorry, ‘had a peculiar smell and included old pieces of corset, and a lot of paper’.11

  Wood ash from domestic fireplaces was a soil conditioner but was also surprisingly high in potash: a bushel – that is four pecks or eight gallons – contained between four and five pounds. It was therefore carefully hoarded, covered if stored outside so that rain did not wash the nutrients away, and often mixed with soot – quite rich in nitrogen – that was begged from the sweep when the house chimneys were swept in the summer. Wood ash also came from garden bonfires, although gardeners had to tend these very carefully because of the blackout regulations; bonfires had to be either covered with sheets of corrugated iron before dark, or raked out in the afternoon while there was still light.

  The authorities were quick to see that, with the increasing scarcity of farmyard manures, they must vigorously promote the composting of garden and kitchen waste as the most efficient substitute for manure to be used in vegetable gardens. So gardeners were taught how to make compost pits or heaps for creating ‘manure from garden rubbish’, a skill they have never since forgotten. It was dinned into them by posters, wireless talks and cinema films, and there was even a ‘Dig for Victory’ leaflet on the subject.

  The great expert on composting was Sir Albert Howard, an agricultural chemist and botanist, who had spent much time working in India and had perfected a method based on Far Eastern agricultural practices. He called it ‘the Indore pro
cess’, after the city where he carried out the research between 1924 and 1931. His influential book, An Agricultural Testament, was published in 1940. Howard’s central idea was that soil fertility was the key both to yield and to minimising attacks from pests and diseases, anticipating the philosophy of the post-war ‘organic’ movement. The Indore composting process used both vegetable rubbish and animal wastes, which were put in either a pit or a large heap, kept moist but not saturated, and protected from wind. He was most insistent on the necessity in the process for urine – what he rather charmingly called ‘bedroom slops’, well-known to a substantial minority of the population who still used outdoor privies – but reassured his readers that the smell disappeared immediately on contact with soil, which was also a necessary ingredient for a successful compost heap. Generally speaking, a simplified version of his methods was adopted by gardening writers and Ministry officials and formed the basis of the advice they passed on to amateurs – although they were less adventurous in the list of suitable ingredients and in particular there was no mention of ‘bedroom slops’.

  Howard’s ideas also had a profound effect on the young ‘organic’ movement, especially its leading light, Lady Eve Balfour, who owned an experimental farm in Suffolk, where she pursued Howard’s methods and published a popular book, The Living Soil, in 1943. The concept of organic, sustainable agriculture and horticulture, as we know them today, was considered eccentric by most farmers and gardeners in the 1930s. But during the war years there were sufficient stirrings of interest to lead to the founding of the Soil Association in May 1946.

  The year that An Agricultural Testament was published, Howard moved to Milnthorpe in Westmorland, and came into contact with F. C. King, the head gardener at nearby Levens Hall.12 King was a well-known local figure who worked hard lecturing and advising on gardening to local groups. He had become so enamoured of the Indore process that he even published a practical and thoughtful book in 1943, entitled A Compost Gardener, which included an Afterword by Sir Albert. King showed the same wariness about the value of chemical fertilisers that Howard exhibited; he considered that they often promoted the wrong kind of growth and also put nothing of value in the way of humus into the soil. King was also an early advocate of the ‘no-digging’ method, publishing a book in 1946 entitled Is Digging Necessary?.

  On the whole, gardening commentators thought of organic manures more as soil improvers than as plant feeders, and were keen on the use of chemical fertilisers for the latter purpose.13 This was to prove difficult since conventional potash fertilisers, such as sulphate of potash, were almost all imported – from France, Germany and Poland – and supplies dried up rapidly after war broke out. Although the stocks were reasonably high in 1939, they had fallen to 50 per cent of their pre-war level by the summer of 1940. The dearth of potash fertilisers became a major headache for gardeners, since potash was a necessary nutrient for promoting good fruiting and flowering, especially of fruit-type vegetables like tomatoes. A certain amount of potash had also been imported from the USSR, Palestine and Spain before the war and a limited quantity continued to arrive. Allotmenteers were allowed to buy a maximum of 3.5 lb of muriate of potash (potassium chloride) a year, which was scarcely sufficient. In any event, the chloride ion made this fertiliser toxic to some plants, including potatoes and fruit.

  Nitrogenous fertilisers such as nitrate of soda were easier to come by, and seed merchants like Suttons sold a range of such well-known pre-war fertilisers as well as bizarre-sounding substitutes, including Ichthemic Guano, Poultmure (which was treated chicken manure), and Garotta, which was essentially sulphate of ammonia and was used to accelerate decomposition in compost heaps. Even these chemical fertilisers were in such limited supply that the customer had to promise faithfully to use them only in the vegetable garden. If a gardener could get a small quantity of manure – perhaps the droppings from the milk-float horse in the road outside – he could make a nitrogenous liquid fertiliser by putting it in a hessian sack and suspending it in a large container of water.

  So concerned were the authorities with maximising home-based food production and allotment gardening, and so dubious were they about the amateur gardener’s scientific knowledge of soil nutrients that they launched, in a blaze of publicity in 1942, a standard ‘compound’ granular fertiliser called National Growmore. The chemical constituents of this feed were in the ratio 7:7:7 NPK, in other words, 7 per cent nitrogen, 7 per cent potassium and 7 per cent phosphorus. National Growmore proved popular because of its general applicability and the ease with which it could be used, and that is why it still sells well today. For many gardeners and allotmenteers it finally took the guesswork out of feeding their plots; provided that the soil was already reasonably fertile, National Growmore would help produce satisfactory crops.

  Horticultural experts put great emphasis on the importance of the right pH for the soil, in order to ensure that clubroot of brassicas was kept at bay, as well as to maximise the effectiveness of other nutrient elements. However, assessing whether your soil needed lime to raise the pH, and if so, how much, was hardly straightforward, since testing the pH had to be done with hydrochloric acid (‘spirits of salt’) bought from the chemist. Alternatively, if the soil tasted ‘sweet’ it was alkaline, if ‘sour’ it was acid. Most people probably asked their neighbours whether they had trouble from clubroot, and acted accordingly, or made a rough guess.

  There were many sources of lime that could be used to raise a soil’s pH: gypsum, basic slag, slaked lime, quicklime, spent carbide and ground limestone – the latter still popular today. A substantial 30 lb per rod was recommended triennially. Whether those gardeners working chalk soils fruitlessly obeyed these recommendations is a matter for conjecture, but unless gardeners badgered their local expert advisers, no one seems to have bothered to tell them that alkaline soils do not need liming.

  Of course chemical fertilisers were only one element in the struggle to achieve high productivity; gardeners also needed a range of equipment, some of it just as difficult to come by. If, for example, they were moved to propagate their own tomato or other vegetable plants – or garden flowers come to that – they would need to make some wooden boxes, traditionally fifteen inches long, ten inches wide and, variously, three, four or five inches deep, depending on the size of seed to be sown. If a propagating case – a mini cold frame – was not available in which to put these boxes, gardeners put a sheet of glass over the box, and a sheet of newspaper over that.

  Once germinated in these boxes, seedlings then had to be potted on into pots, which were made of clay, terracotta in colour, and hand-thrown. These came in a variety of sizes between ‘thimbles’ or ‘thumbs’, which were 2˝ in diameter, right up to ‘ones’, which were 20˝ across. In between were ‘twos’, ‘fours’, ‘sixes’, ‘eights’, ‘twelves’ ‘sixteens’, ‘twenty-fours’, ‘thirty-twos’, ‘forty-eights’, ‘fifty-fours’ and ‘sixties’. Alternatively, they were classified by diameter: 2½˝, 3˝, 3½˝, 4˝, 5˝ and so on.14 Before clay pots could be used for the first time, they had to be ‘steeped’ in a tank of water for several hours; this was to ensure that the porous clay took up sufficient moisture so that it did not steal it from the compost into which the plant had been potted.

  Also important for the wartime garden was the glass cloche or dome. Their greatest value resided in their capacity to protect against the cold and damp, rather than actively ‘forcing’ plants into precocious growth. They could also be used to warm up the soil in late winter or spring, prior to seed sowing. Cloches were particularly useful in extending the growing season at both ends of the year. In fact, with careful planning, it was possible to grow three vegetable crops on the same bit of ground in the course of the year using cloches: say, early lettuce, then peas, then quick-maturing carrots.

  There were ‘bell’ or ‘lantern’ cloches, which protected individual plants, or ‘barn’ cloches, which could be butted up against each other to cover a whole row of winter lettuce, for exa
mple. These came in a variety of shapes and sizes: long tent, small tent, medium tent, long barn, small barn, low barn, large barn and tomato ‘T’. The ‘T’ cloche had one side that was removable, so that the gardener could pinch out the tomato plant sideshoots easily.

  There was a definite knack to assembling barn cloches, but once this was achieved, they proved very useful; their major disadvantage was that the glass broke all too easily when they were being stacked away for the summer or were accidentally kicked by a clumsy gardener wearing big boots. And horticultural glass became very scarce as the war wore on.

  A permanent fixture in many gardens was the cold frame, which was really a cloche writ large. Ideally, it had a brick base, was taller at the back than the front, and was covered by a ‘Dutch light’ placed on the slope. The ‘Dutch light’ was a large glass panel in a wooden frame with a metal handle, with which it could be moved or lifted. If fresh manure was put in a cold frame in late winter or early spring and covered with a thin layer of soil and then the Dutch light was closed, the activity of microbes would ensure that the soil warmed up sufficiently for seed to germinate in it. This was called a ‘hot bed’. Lettuce and other low-growing hardy vegetables were good candidates for hot beds early in the season. Cloches, hot beds and cold frames went at least some way towards making up for the fact that most amateur greenhouses were unheated during the war, because fuel for greenhouse boilers was at first rationed and then unobtainable. As the war went on, timber also became hard to find, so asbestos was used for making frames instead.

  Those bits of equipment were for the experienced gardener, who had gained some confidence over the years. For the complete novice, sowing seed under cover was far less a preoccupation than how to identify annual weeds in the vegetable patch, particularly when small. Beginners also needed to learn how to recognise and get rid of deep-rooted perennial weeds, usually the biggest problem when first taking over a neglected garden or allotment. Gardeners had only the border fork, small hand fork and hoe in their armoury, since chemical weedkillers were either unavailable or else lamentably indiscriminate. Sodium chlorate, for instance, killed everything it touched, was highly flammable, and was demonstrably less effective on alkaline soils than acid ones.