Episode #26 Springing into action

19 - 27 February: Blossom, birdfeeders and a black pear.

Mar 15, 2025

I’m late with this post, which has languished in draft while my writing time has been taken up with other pressing things for the last week. So I’m feeling a bit behind, just as the plot is revving up with some warm weather. The pace of the growing year is picking up, and the To Do list is growing.

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This week’s Plot Shot

One day of sun popped the blossom on the earliest stone fruit, the cherry plums and the smaller damsons, and the trees are now fizzing and popping with buds. Spring is springing.

(Technical note: there are usually a *lot* of photos in this post, and it might not all fit on your email. Hitting the View Entire Message button at the end should sort this out, as will reading via the app or online versions of Substack.)

Plot work in progress

I’ve put it off for too long, but finally got round to sorting out the overwintered mess of twigs and sludge in the greenhouse, which now no longer looks like The Place Where Plants Go To Die. However, once I’d rolled up the horticultural fleece and pulled out the plants which didn’t make it, it wasn’t all bad news. In fact, some broad beans are still chugging away, waiting to go out on the plot, and the sweet pea seedlings are green and healthy - positively wonderful.

I gave the sweet peas a chop, taking them down a few joints to encourage side shoots. Hopefully they’ll be sturdier and have more flowers come the summer.

To add to the positives, it looks as if all 15 of my chrysanthemums have made it through the winter as well. They don’t look great in this photo, as I’d only just watered them, and hadn’t waited for them to perk up before taking the photo, but there are new green shoots in every pot. This is the first time in three years of trying I’ve managed to keep all the cuttings going, and not have to start buying new ones to replace those who didn’t make it to the following spring.

Harvesting now

Also thriving underneath all the detritus in the greenhouse were the wasabi plants, which have also made it through the winter, their new baby leaves all fresh green and springy. I took a few of the damaged leaves as a garnish for a salad1, the sort of miniscule greenery which wouldn’t be out of place on a posh Michelin-starred starter.

The plants will need a better home out on the plot, in cool damp shade, once the frosts are over, and much deeper pots for the rhizomes to grow. They’ll add to the produce tally later in the year2.

Feeding and eating

The big new thing, or rather the reinstated thing, is that the birdfeeders are back out, having langushed in a crate at the back of the greenhouse for several seasons. The plot is now a fly-by buffet for small hungry birds, all bustling to get to the seed and the fat balls. All the food prep and eating activity this week has feathers.

So far, I’ve got three feeders for fat balls and three for mixed seed. There are a couple of metal cages for suet blocks too, but I’ll have to order some of those, as we don’t have any stocks. The feeders for peanuts, made of metal mesh were all rusted, and a couple of cheap thin plastic tube ones had disintegrated, but we’re back in birdfood business. It is a start.

Somehow our bird feeding lapsed a few years ago. It must have been in those strange Covid times, when the pandemic almost stopped the world turning. We lost touch with a lot of our routine in those wierd days when we were juggling grocery deliveries to help out neighbours who didn’t already have pre-booked slots and everyone in London went bit bonkers baking banana bread and cultivating sourdough starters. Our feeding the birds was one of those things which went by the wayside, so it feels good to get this bit of routine back again.

E17 Local Hero

After a *lot* of internet-trawling and a bit of impatience waiting for the courier delivery, this year’s bare root addition to the plot’s fruit trees has arrived. (There’s always space for at least one more tree, yes?) In a way, this year’s newbie explains why I’m here writing on Substack, or at least connects to how I got here.

The new tree is a Black Worcester pear, courtesy of the lovely folks at Keeper’s Nursery , deep in Kentish orchard country. The Black Worcester pear is an old variety of warden, or cooking, pear. Wardens don’t ripen on the tree, or after picking, but they store and travel well, which made them an important crop before commercial refridgeration came along and ruined their fortunes.

I bought a Black Worcester not because of any family links to the county or the city of Worcester, which has three black pears on its coat of arms, granted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1575, but because of Thomas Cromwell, in particular the historical character of Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At the risk of this becoming the fruit tree equivalent of a shaggy dog story, I came to Substack via Wolf Hall. On New Year’s Eve in 2023 I read an article about ‘slow reading’ on a thing called Substack and enthusiatically signed myself up to read a chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace every day in 2024, led by the wonderful

Simon Haisell

of Footnotes and Tangents here. Simon was also running a second slow read, a WolfCrawl if you will, of a chunk per week of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, so I signed myself up for that as well, as I’d never read the books. Within weeks I was hooked.

My particular ‘tangent’ is that Cromwell was a great gardener and planter of orchards, and the gardens he established at his various houses form an important part of the story in Wolf Hall. The Black Worcester warden pear features, cooked in pies and tarts with saffron and other spices.

So here I am, writing about an allotment in Walthamstow, and planting trees and plants mentioned in Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Cromwell made me do it! I have my eye on a step-over version of an old Ouillins gage, mentioned as Cromwell considers how best to graft plums to get to the flavour of those he tasted in Italy. I’ll find a space for one somewhere next year. Cromwell’s Gardens, as a project, needs more research, or perhaps another Substack...

Community of Practice

With blue sky over the site, everything feels more do-able, somehow. Slogging through the cold and wet weekends this winter has been tough, but we’re here.

Plot 101’s grass paths are shaggy, but the grass is still too wet to mow. Plus there are small bulbs, late snowdrops, bluebells and fritillaria, in there somewhere. Time to concentrate on getting the couch grass out of the beds instead.

Six almost-bare rose arches, proving the impossibility of anything being straight, level or true on an allotment.

Weekly Fox News

Our guest fox this week is a newcomer, not one of the family on the site that we know. She nosed around, clearly knowing exactly where she was and her way around the plot, keeping a keen eye on whatever I was doing. I felt supervised.

Meanwhile her (most likely) mum, Nellie, has taken to burying her pieces of raw chicken in the black 40-litre horticultural pots at the back of the plot. Here she is, rearranging last year’s crocosmia bulbs in a frenzy of digging. Now I understand why I have pots with nothing coming up.