The Greedy Gardener

I’ve just bottled the last two demijohns of last year’s home brew, one each of blackberry and apple. I didn’t make any wine this year because the poor harvest meant I didn’t really have a glut of anything suitable.  I’ve still a few bottles of some previous vintages so it’s probably just as well.

Although it’s a trifle early in the day for that sort of thing, I had to test each one, purely for quality control purposes, you understand. The blackberry is rich and smooth and fairly dry and so would make a pleasant table wine. The apple is sweeter as I had anticipated but is extremely palatable and would make a nice dessert wine or to go with a nice bit of bread and cheese. I haven’t done a gravity test but the amount of spelling mistakes I’ve had to correct as I write this suggests that they pack a bit of a punch.

As I was sterilising the bottles and corks, I was pondering about how increasingly wine producers use screw tops or plastic stoppers. I always use natural corks for my wine, putting them in the bottles with a nifty little gadget. The cork oak forests of Spain and Portugal are seriously threatened habitats, mainly managed by small family farms. The cork is harvested on a seven year cycle; the red, newly harvested trunks are a spectacular sight. Herds of black Iberian pigs are grazed underneath and it’s the diet of acorns that makes Spanish ham such as pata negra such a delicacy.

By seeking out wine with proper cork stoppers, you are helping to preserve a beautiful landscape, home to an astonishing array of wildlife, including wild orchids and narcissus, vultures, eagles, wild boar and the highly endangered pardal lynx. Harvesting cork has to be carried out in the old traditional ways because the process cannot be mechanised, so you are also helping to support small farmers and preserve a way of life that has existed for centuries. I’ll drink to that.

Last year I had a cycling accident that resulted in a spinal injury. I couldn’t walk for several weeks and my recovery has been long and slow - I am extremely grateful to the British National Health Service for my extensive treatment over many months. I’m now recovered enough to do most of the things I enjoy, such as hill walking, cycling and gardening, but as I still have some stiffness and nerve damage, I have to be careful and some things are permanently off limits. 

One thing that is strictly forbidden is chopping logs for firewood. This is a shame because I used to really enjoy it - not only is it deeply satisfying to see a nice stack of split logs, but it is an excellent way of working out all manner of frustrations and tensions.

The upside of this is that it has given Mr Greedy Gardener the perfect excuse to buy yet another power tool. This monster is a hydraulic log splitter. It makes mincemeat out of really hefty chunks of tree with almost the same amount of satisfaction as whacking them with an axe, but with none of the risk of a return trip to the MRI scanner.

This particular tree was a horse chestnut being felled in the grounds of the school over the road. I was over there before it had even hit the ground and did a deal with the tree surgeon who cut it into splittable lengths and dumped them on our drive for the price of a few pints. We should have split it as soon as we got it but it life got in the way as it does sometimes - even without splitting, it has seasoned very well over the last year and burns beautifully so will be perfect fuel for the earth oven.

Cornwall enjoys a much milder climate than the rest of the UK. The long peninsula stretches out into the Atlantic and is bathed on all sides by the Gulf Stream so the county is rarely troubled by frost or snow. As a result, Cornish gardeners can use a huge range of sub tropical plants that I can only dream of. Here in Penwith, the westernmost tip where you’re never more than a couple of miles from the sea, the Gulf Stream’s warming effect is particularly strong.

The downside of being surrounded by the Atlantic is the wind - up on the rolling farmland of Penwith there are very few trees and those that do manage to grow are twisted into incredible shapes and angles by the almost constant southwesterly winds that blow year round. This lovely garden at the Minack Theatre is looking a bit battered in places following a massive storm just a few weeks ago with winds of over 60mph. Despite this, South African plants such as agapanthus and proteas, giant echiums and others so far off my radar I can’t identify are thriving in this spectacular spot.

Before the arrival of cheap foreign imports, Cornwall was the source of early potatoes, tomatoes and flowers, grown in sheltered valleys or on south facing slopes in tiny fields with high hedges to protect the crops from wind damage. There are still a few growers hanging on, but they’re finding it increasingly difficult to compete in the mass market.

However there is a thriving local trade on a very small scale. Within a few minutes walk of the tiny village we’ve spent the last few days in, we could buy fresh flowers, vegetables, herbs, jam, bread, unpasteurised milk, honey and even wine all from roadside stalls with honesty boxes or by knocking on a cottage door.

Oven door supports removed and final shaping finished off. The sand former inside will be raked out in a few days so that it can dry out properly. Then we must try and wait patiently for about three more weeks before the first baking can take place. It’s going to be a long wait…

The finished earth oven, thanks to a fantastic team of eager participants on a weekend course run by the Loaf Cookery School and led by local artist and earth oven fan Lizzy Bean. It’s been an exhausting weekend, but really great fun and lovely to do it with such a nice bunch of people. Even a torrential thunderstorm on Saturday lunchtime didn’t damped their spirits, although two tubfuls of just mixed cob got filled with about two inches of rain water and had to be redone.

I didn’t get to do much of the actual building myself as I’ve been running up and down the garden delivering regular rounds of tea and cake and preparing lunch for the workers. Mr Greedy Gardener relieved me of kitchen duties on Sunday afternoon and did the washing up while I helped do the final layer, shaped the door and decorated the front with a fossil and some shells.

The process is essentially quite a simple one, using very basic materials and everything was done by hand, or foot in the case of the cob mixing, with no power tools involved. However, the experience of Lizzy and Tom was invaluable with regards to technique, so I’m really glad we didn’t just pitch in blindly ourselves after just reading a book. Getting the right mix of cob for the different layers is important, as is the ratio of the door to the size of oven to ensure optimum heat. The cooking area is about two feet across and the walls are a foot thick.

The costs have been kept minimal by using old tractor tyres for the base, filled with rubble from the allotment, made solid with a weak mix of aggregate and cement. A three inch slab of concrete was laid on the top to insulate the tyres from the heat of the oven. The floor of the oven that the bread etc cooks on is engineering bricks laid on a bed of sharp sand.

The oven walls are made of cob, a traditional building material made by mixing clay and sand, with straw in the outer two layers. The clay was dug up from a friend’s garden and you can incorporate horse hair, cow manure and other materials if you’re so inclined. The first layer of sand and clay was laid over a sand mould which forms the internal oven shape. Then a second layer of a different ratio mix incorporating straw to act as thermal insulation was laid over that. The door was cut and the whole thing finished with a mainly clay layer mixed with chopped straw for strength.

I need to do a bit of tidying up around the edges, not least because my cats have run up the sides of it already and have left claw and paw marks all over it. I also want to do something to cover up the grey concrete slab - the oven itself will dry to a warm brick colour. At the moment, it has a gazebo over it to keep the typically British weather off, but we’ll make a lean to roof over the next few weeks which will also act as an outdoor kitchen. The bricks supporting the door entrance will come out in a few days, then the sand mould scraped out a few days after that. It will need to dry for about a month before cooking can start.

Apparently, earth ovens can last for years and are easy enough to patch up with a bit more cob if they crack. Once they’re up to heat, they cool down slowly so pizza can be followed by bread to be followed by a roast dinner or casserole.

Thanks to everyone who came on the course - it was lovely meeting everybody. We’re planning a reunion when the first firing takes place and a friends of earth ovens group appears to growing where people are offering to help each other out building. The puddling of the clay is a hard slog and best done with willing friends and helpers!

A full photo album of the process is here.

Earth oven complete and we are shattered. Proper update tomorrow. Meanwhile, here’s a snap of the worker’s lunch - everything bar the tomatoes from the garden and allotment.

Menu:

• Frittata with courgette, basil and lemon
• Borlotti and French bean salad with red onion, parsley and marjoram
• Potato salad with capers, black olives, chives and vinaigrette
• Tomatoes with garlic and oregano
• Mixed leaves and flowers
• Granary and rye bread provided by Loaf.

First day of earth oven course is over and we are on schedule, despite a torrential thunderstorm that soaked the raw materials. I was planning on blogging the process as we went along but I’ve been belting around feeding the workers and doing a bit of building in between. Oven floor laid, sand form made and first layer of cob built. Two more layers tomorrow and making the oven door.

Arriving home late and shattered one night last week, I slumped in front of the telly in need of a glass of wine and some brain dead entertainment. The latter was duly provided by “Phil Spencer Secret Agent”. The premise of the programme seems to be that he goes round telling people they’ll sell their houses a lot quicker if they did a bit of cleaning and decorating. On this occasion, he upset a couple by telling them that their problem was their collection of revolting garden ornaments. I was with him on the ornaments, but thought he could use some people skills.

I wonder what he’d make of this? Imagine the scene…

“Hello Mr and Mrs Greedy Gardener, nice place you have here, good sized rooms, close to local amenities, somewhat idiosyncratic colour scene in places but that’s soon remedied. Shall we take a look in the garden? Hmmm, southerly aspect, nice lean to, but wait! You appear to have a massive piece of brutalist sculpture at the bottom of your garden! Well I know we’re in Birmingham, the home of several key examples of this unloved architectural style, but really, in the garden! Well, I’d give up now if I were you, knocks thousands off the value of what would otherwise be a very desirable residence etc etc”.

The deed is done now - Mr Greedy Gardener’s penchant for over engineering will probably support a whole new room, never mind an oven. At least it’s solid and we weren’t planning on moving anyway.

There was a brief moment of panic on Friday when I got home from work to the sight of the builders merchant’s lorry parked outside the wrong house. Fortunately, it transpired that the massive load of aggregate and gravel had indeed been delivered next door earlier in the day while my neighbour was also out, but she had the good sense to ring the number on the side of the bag on her return and so managed to catch them before they closed for the weekend. The lorry was in fact on its return visit to crane the load to its rightful place when I cycled onto the drive.

Panic over, Mr Greedy Gardener has performed miracles over the weekend while I was out at work. The tyres are now filled with a mixture of rubble dug up from our allotment, aggregate and cement, tamped down and every nook and cranny filled. It’s setting nicely so should make a good solid base. The surrounding area has been gravelled over and levelled with the existing paths. He’s going to cast a layer of concrete over the lot to add extra insulation before the bricks that form the base of the oven are laid next weekend.

We had originally planned to cover the tyres with bamboo screening but I think I like it as it is, integrity of materials and all that. The unfortunate pink spray paint on the tyres shouldn’t be too difficult to shift and a judicious sprinkling of a few seeds will soon soften the edges and the whole thing will weather in no time. The chickens are somewhat bemused by the operation, but have enjoyed the extra worms unearthed during excavations.

Earth oven continued. Tyres in place, gravel and aggregate being delivered this afternoon. Apologies for poor quality of photos of late but the weather is shocking.