The Glidd of Glood Blog

Rise of the Ransomes Part 3 – the homecoming

For this to make any sense, you will want to read parts one and two of this story of a mechanical Lazarus.

So, there was my restored Ransomes, all ready to cut grass once again but sadly, in the wrong country. It was sitting in Buckinghamshire in England whereas the grass I wanted to cut is in Switzerland. Thus, the next task was to work out how to get the thing sent over to me. You evidently can’t just post it.

John Gregory told me that in the past, they have used a company called Palletways to move lawnmowers around. This is a company that specialises in transporting pallets of pretty much anything. You get yourself a pallet, put whatever you want on it, give them a ring and they will come and pick it up and take it to where you want it. I had a look at their website and the prices seemed perfectly reasonable. There were just two small problems. The first was that they said they wouldn’t transport engines. I suspected that we’d be able to get over that problem as The Old Lawnmower Company had used them in the past, so they must be amenable to having their arms twisted. The second problem was potentially more of a deal-breaker: they don’t deliver to Switzerland.

There are a lot of companies that are happy to send you stuff anywhere in the EU that won’t deliver to Switzerland. I can only assume that this is because Switzerland is not in the EU, although it has bilateral treaties coming out of its ears. So there are probably bits of paperwork required and administrative hassle that means that although, perhaps, companies are happy to transport goods through Switzerland – to Italy, say – they aren’t prepared to drop goods off in Switzerland.  A few years ago, I wanted to buy some Timberland shoes on the Timberland Europe website. Ironically, although Timberland Europe is based in Zug, Switzerland (for tax reasons, obviously), they refused to send me any shoes as they won’t ship to Switzerland. You couldn’t make it up.

It was clear that I was going to have to do some creative thinking. It seemed to me that the best option was to get the lawnmower to within spitting distance of the Swiss border but still just in France. That way, Palletways would have no qualms about doing the job. The only question was, who could I have the Ransomes delivered to? I do know a couple of people who live on the other side of the border, but one is somewhere near Geneva – not really that handy, but workable – and the other has a holiday home even further away and they probably wouldn’t be in it when the lawnmower was going to show up. Not ideal. But then I had a cunning plan. Why couldn’t I have it delivered to a supermarket just over the border 30 minutes away where I go for a major shop several times a year (mainly for the cheap fish)? A supermarket is constantly receiving pallets of stuff and presumably has somewhere to put them. All I needed to do now was to convince the ATAC supermarket in Jougne, not far from the border at Vallorbe, to sign my pallet into its warehouse.

I did have one advantage in this quest. I have always found the staff in this smallish supermarket to be extremely helpful and polite. In fact, so pleasant are they to deal with that a few years ago I sent an email to the manager to congratulate him on his staff and to ask him to thank them on my behalf for providing such top-notch customer service. This is a place where the fresh fish counter will gut and clean your fish for you if you ask them, relieving you of the most unpleasant task associated with cooking fish. The staff are always smiling and cheerful and seem happy to see you – remarkable for a supermarket chain. So, in making my request, I did have a name, an email address and an email chain which might suggest that I wasn’t in fact a drugs smuggler who had hidden several kilos of cocaine in a lawnmower’s petrol tank.

To cut a long story shorter, it turned out that my email never made it to the manager, as he had moved on, and it remained unanswered. So, a week later (I didn’t want to hassle the guy), I rang up and was put through to the new manager, a Monsieur Tournissa. You couldn’t say he was brimming over with enthusiasm at the idea when I had explained what I wanted. But somewhat grudgingly, he said that yes, he would make an exception in this case and do a good customer this favour. I did some bowing and scraping over the phone – after all, this was well worth a bit of bowing and scraping – and hung up having solved my immediate problem.

I agreed with John the date for the Ransomes to be picked up on its pallet, and booked the pallet with Palletways. This process was simple except for the fact that I couldn’t see anywhere on their site where I could specify the collection date. Once the order had gone through, I was breezily told that the pallet would be collected the next day. Disaster! It wouldn’t be ready! There then ensued various emails and phone calls to get the date changed to the date I wanted, for which I was charged the sum of £20. It seemed a bit rich that I should have to pay extra because their website is badly designed, but it was no time to argue. In the scheme of this project, twenty quid is really neither here nor there.

A week later I was just beginning to wonder if someone hadn’t snaffled my lawnmower en route or if the supermarket was going to deny all knowledge of ever having received it – in which case, there wouldn’t be a whole lot I could do about it – when I received an email from the assistant manager telling me that the Ransomes had arrived. I agreed to pick it up a week later when my friend Yves and his Subaru estate would be available. I wasn’t sure it would fit in the back of my Alfa which, although an estate, is only on nodding terms with practicality.

So, a couple of weeks ago, Yves and I drove over the border to Jougne. We had gone by way of a local chocolate shop as I wanted to get some handmade chocolates to thank the people in the supermarket. After all, there was nothing much in the deal for them and there was a lot in it for me so it seemed only reasonable to make some gesture of appreciation. Then the plan was to do some (fish) shopping. There are a couple of local borders near me. The main one is at Vallorbe and this is the one that sees most freight and is by far the busiest. Whilst the French quite often don’t bother to man their side, or if they do, may be eating garlic sausage in their hut for all you see of them, the Swiss are almost always in evidence and do a lot of checking of cars in addition to their systematic lorry checks. Thus the chances that they were going to ask me about the Ransomes when we came back over the border with it were high. And there wasn’t much I could tell them about it apart from the truth, and then they might say, where is the proof of what you say? Did you not just buy this? Or alternatively, VAT needs to be paid on the restoration job, even if you did inherit the mower. Put it this way, there are no conversations with customs officials that you can have that beat no conversation. Your best result is no additional costs, paperwork or fines. A far better idea, it seemed to me, would be to avoid the customs officials altogether and come back over the border at L’Auberson, a tiny village on a backroad where there is almost never anyone to be seen at the customs post. It’s a longer trip home, but it’s very scenic and neither Yves nor I are bothered about making longer trips.

So, we rocked up to ATAC, armed with chocolates, and went to customer service and asked to speak to the assistant manager who, to my amazement, was at work on a Saturday. Some telephoning ensued and we hung around. Then, instead of the assistant manager, a guy showed up with a pallet truck with my lawnmower on it, snuggled up in bubble-wrap and cardboard. We took it out to the Subaru and loaded it in. I proffered the choccies. As I was getting a trolley for the (fish) shop, a smallish, dark-haired man in his 40s appeared, evidently looking for us and clutching the chocolate bag. This turned out to be M. Tournissa himself who was determined to thank me personally for the chocolates. “Fallait pas!” he said. I assured him that it was the least I could do. Having stocked up with fish and wine and butter (surprisingly, better than in Switzerland; not surprisingly, cheaper) we headed off to L’Auberson, winding down through the fir forest on an immaculately surfaced road that is just perfect for biking, or at least it was until they put speed traps on it.

The customs post, such as it is, is on a less-travelled road a mile from the village, round a bend as you emerge from the forest. And there, would you believe it, was a customs official. What?? That must be one of the first times I have ever seen anyone there in years of crossing the border – not through trafficking goods, you understand, but because that road is such a good ride. The good news, though, was that the official in question was busy asking questions of another hapless motorist and he waved us through. Phew! We could now settle down secure in the knowledge that no one was going to start asking us weird lawnmower-based questions and demanding bits of paper that we didn’t have.

We drove peacefully though L’Auberson and were just heading on up to St.-Croix, the barely-a-town at the top of the pass before the col drops down into the valley where I live, when… we were waved over to a layby. What?? This was La Volante, or Douane Volante – the flying customs officers. These are extra customs officers who leap upon smugglers when they least expect it, a mile or two over the border. This was more customs activity than I have ever seen on that road, ever. Did they know we were coming?

What, they wanted to know, were we transporting? I told them about the lawnmower which was apparently of no interest. But we had been shopping, had we not? Oh yes, I said, but I frequently did and I knew all about the quotas and had no more than 2 kg of meat and twelve bottles of wine. And what about the butter, they wanted to know. Did I have more than 2 kg of butter?

Butter? Is butter rationed? Apparently, yes. Before I could answer, the cheery young customs guy said “I’m not going to hassle you for a pat of butter. Off you go.” And that was that. I had exactly 2 kg of butter in any case…

The rest of the journey was uneventful and the Ransomes arrived safely home. We unloaded it and bolted its handle back together. It had been dismantled for shipping. I then went to print out the detailed instructions that John had sent me for starting and running it, as well as the period instruction manual. It’s amazing; even instruction manuals have dated considerably since it was first printed. Something to do with the typeface, the drawings and the fact that it is only in English and not Japanese and Swedish. It doesn’t look as if the Ransomes was greatly exported. We also found, just bolting the handle together, that the bolts are all imperial and not metric. Who in Switzerland has got an imperial socket set or spanners? The whole thing feels completely… Brexit.

Ransomes Marquis operating instructions

We added the petrol as instructed, bled the fuel system, fettled the choke and pulled energetically on the starter cord and the Ransomes roared into life.

You can instantly see that it is a machine from a bygone, non-health-and-safety age as its spinning blades are beautifully exposed and threaten to maim you if you go near the grassbox. Of course, by throttling down as you should, the motor will still run and the blades stop whirring when you bend to uncouple the grassbox for emptying. But you can just tell that these days there would have to be some failsafe switch or safety mechanism that prevented you from unhitching the grassbox if the blades were still turning. They didn’t worry about that sort of thing in the 70s. I never used to give it a moment’s thought back in the day when I used this very machine, or the Atco, its predecessor. I mowed a few strips of grass tentatively, but memories soon came flooding back – the way you need to be nifty with the clutch and how you spin the machine around on the back roller at the end of the strip. What also became apparent was that even on its highest setting, this is a machine for a decent lawn and it cuts very closely for early spring when you need to just take off the top inch or so of grass. Later on, in a few weeks, it will be ideal but at the moment, the grass just isn’t ready for the close attention of the Ransomes.

And so there we have it – a project has come to fruition. The Ransomes sits purposefully in my garage next to the Chinese, constructed-from-cheese, little petrol mower that I have been using for nadgery bits, and the chunky ride-on that deals with most of my grass. When spring gets properly underway I shall be employing it and thinking of my old man as I do so. I know that he, as a man who never threw anything away, would approve of my giving it a second lease of life.

Restoring the Ransomes Lawnmower – Part 2

Well, what can I say? If you’re looking at the photo above, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was taken from a Ransomes lawnmower catalogue some time in the 70s. But no. It was taken just a few weeks ago and is a photo of my restored lawnmower. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this little saga, it would probably be a good idea to do that before reading any further. Just click on this link.

We left my father’s old lawnmower in the more than capable, elven hands of John Gregory of The Old Lawnmower Company who promised that he would restore it to its former glory. This seemed like something of a tall order. Although the Ransomes had not spent a few months at the bottom of a canal, it looked as if it might have done. Where would you dare to begin on all the rust that covered the thing like a fungus? The motor was going to be the least of John’s worries – if it had any oil in it, it probably wasn’t rusted. Being a motorcycle enthusiast myself, old motors are not as frightening as they might be, but cosmetic stuff? That’s a nightmare.

I’d told John that I wasn’t in a hurry to have the mower back. Some time in the spring would do, as I’m not about to start cutting my grass in the snow. My garden is on hold over the winter months. I don’t spend much time in it although no doubt there are all sorts of pruning jobs I could be doing, or, indeed, looking after my tools, sharpening and oiling them.

But I did ask him to take some photos as he went along so that I could understand the rebuild and share it with anyone interested, which is what I am doing now. So what follows are his photos and explanations of what they all mean. I don't know that I necessarily have the exact order that John did the work in, but these are all the things that needed to be done to restore the mower.

The first thing to do is take it all to bits and create your own Ransomes lawnmower puzzle. You'll end up with something that looks like this:

Anything that was to be painted needed to be stripped down to the bare metal and in some cases filled to remove the dents that had accumulated over many years of banging into things as my father was mowing. It pains me to think that I will undoubtedly be putting the dents back in over the years to come.

Then everything needs to be primed prior to painting and in some cases the elements are treated with Kurust Rust Inhibitor:

Then you can finally paint some things:

The cutting assembly requires a lot of attention. After all, it's sort of the whole point of a mower, isn't it? If it's not going to cut the grass properly, there really isn't much point in restoring a mower, except as a sort of museum piece and I'm not too keen on them. First off, you've got to get the thing apart. Out with the blowtorch and the impact driver:

Once you've got it to pieces, you can start repainting it, putting it back together and sharpening it. The cutting cylinder and new bottom blade are sharpened together, using backlapping paste, with a strip of paper used (like a guillotine) to check its effectiveness.

 

 

One of the secrets to the amazing results you get on your lawn from using a proper cylinder mower is the heavy rollers that it contains hidden at the back. These iron out the bumps that accumulate in a lawn over time, due to the soil shifting, wheelbarrows and in my case at least, moles or other creatures burrowing about underneath it. In order to have some manoeuvrability, the rollers come in two sections with a differential allowing them to be driven independently of each other. Very cunning. You want to keep this properly greased because otherwise it can seize up making the mower extremely difficult to operate. Here the differential is lubricated and the bearings refitted. The bearings secure the rear-roller assembly to the mower chassis.

 

The engine also inevitably needs some work after all these years. The good news is that it was built in a time when you could still understand your engine. It reminds me somewhat of taking motorcycle engines apart in university bedrooms. Not great for the carpet, but there wasn't really anywhere else you could do it. I am surprised, though, by the amount of gunk and crap that was coking up the cylinder head. After all, lawnmowers aren't run that much in the scheme of things, if you compare them to a bike or a car. Perhaps it had been running rich? Talking of which, I am going to have to ask John what sort of petrol to put in it now, as it dates from the time of leaded petrol. Do you just put in some unleaded, or does it need magic additives to keep it running sweetly? Here is John working on the carbon deposits in the head:

There's none of your new-fangled electronic ignition with a motor like this. It's all about points and probably setting them with a cigarette paper. Isn't that how it used to be done? Not so convenient now in the non-smoking age. First you clean them:

Then you set them:

The Ransomes is also treated to a new condenser and coil for the ignition:

Not forgetting to deal with the starter mechanism, the part of the mower that can potentially instil more rage in the owner than any other. You'll want to make sure that this is perfectly restored if it's going to start reliably. The recoil start assembly gets its spring lubricated...

... a nice new piece of string...

... and is lovingly put back together:

And now we move into the final stage of the restoration in which all the restored assemblies are bolted back together again to recreate the mower of my dreams. 

First off, the reassembled engine showing the flywheel and centrifugal clutch.  The flywheel holds the centrifugal clutch shoes, which are spring-loaded.  The centrifugal clutch automatically engages when the revs of the engine are raised, which revolves the cutting cylinder. Look at that paint !

The fuel tank, engine cowling and carburettor are fitted:

The rear roller and cutting cylinder assemblies are then fitted to the deck:

The cylinder's sprocket is secured with a left-hand thread (ie. it does up anti-clockwise).  The sprocket is done up using a stilson spanner gripping an old chain, which protects the sprocket's teeth:

Fitting the engine to the deck -  the engine is aligned with the mower's drive-shaft and positioned on the deck (the cardboard protects the deck's paint, during this procedure).

Then it's securing the rear roller sprocket.  The sprocket is again on a left-hand thread and is tightened, in this case, using a fabricated bar with two lugs protruding- these lugs slot into two holes drilled into the sprocket:

And you thought a lawnmower was a simple device?

The rear-roller clutch is the next to go on. The clutch plate is shown being fitted to the backplate:

The positioning of the rear-roller clutch determines the tension of the two drive chains, so it is tightened with them both fitted to the sprockets using a pin spanner.

Grease those chains!

Now the handlebars can go back on. The handle bars are in four tubular sections which slot together and are held in a central clamp. If you look back at Part 1 of this story, you will see the lamentable condition of this clamp which now looks like new. Maybe it is new, although it doesn't appear in my new parts list so I assume it has just been restored to look like new. Astonishing.

And here is the mower is fully assembled and running (the cutting cylinder is revolving, hence, its blurry effect).

All that is required now is the grassbox which has not been forgotten. Go back to the first instalment to see its initial sorry state, covered in dings. We did talk initially about just junking it and replacing it with another one and this is what John has done. A second hand replacement has cost all of 40 quid. All that is required for the finishing touch is for the original decal to be recreated, which John is having done by a local firm.

So there will be another instalment of this in which you'll be able to see the final mower with the decal and the grassbox fitted, and I'll tell you about how I got the thing to Switzerland. At the moment, I have no idea how I am going to do this cost effectively. John's bill has come in at well under £1'000 which is astonishing value for money, and even more so when you consider than almost half of this amount is for new parts and materials. I don't know how he does it. So it would seem ridiculous to pay some company now a similar amount just to get the mower to me. I'll have to do some research. I can't think that Brexit is going to make things any easier.

A huge thank you to John for what looks to be an incredible job. I can't recommend him enough to anyone who is serious about lawnmowers. Why would you want some Chinese junk when you can have something that has been through his hands? You can find out all about The Old Lawnmower Company here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resurrecting the Ransomes

Back in the 80s, the Thatcher government was accused of “selling the family silver” in order to make the budget look good. What this entailed was the selling-off (privatisation) of some actual money-making public companies such as British gas and British Telecom. Whatever. The purpose of this post is not to revisit the machinations and figure-massages of the Thatcher government but rather to look at the phrase “selling the family silver”.

When my grandmother died I was offered a few bits of the family silver to remember her by. I ended up with a silver ladle, which is pleasingly large and almost useless for my purposes as I don’t have a tureen to go with it (a very long story – I should have had) and in any case, I rarely, if ever, make soup for about a dozen people. If you don’t have a massive amount of soup, it’s a pretty large ladle. I also got a pickle spoon, which is useful for fishing pickled onions out of very tall jars, i.e. almost never. The pickle spoon I actually wanted had a little lever-operated device that snapped the spoon over the onion. It wasn’t really any more useful, but the mechanism fascinated me when I was small. A cousin got that. I also got a silver teapot with matching sugar bowl (I don’t add sugar to my tea) and milk jug. I don’t remember my grandmother using any of this, if indeed she did. And I don’t have many bourgeois tea ceremony-like occasions where I’d be tempted to use it. The various items sit, as probably in many homes, behind the glass doors of a pine dresser (also a family “heirloom”), where they tarnish. Now and again, perhaps annually, they are cleaned and shined and put back.

Following the recent demise of my father, my mother tells me that I must choose some more pieces of family silver. I can’t say that I am in any hurry to do this, as the process will simply be duplicated. I will end up with more stuff that I won’t use and that I can’t put in the dishwasher if I did. I don’t associate my father with any bits of silver per se. I find it interesting that a family’s sense of itself is, or probably more likely was, bound up in a few metal objects that today must have almost no value at all, unless it is sentimental. People are increasingly less interested in stuff and more interested in experiences. The stuff they do buy (plenty of it) is used fleetingly and then chucked out or taken to the charity shop. People have less and less space to accumulate unnecessary stuff. I know how they feel. I have a house and I still don’t really have any room for superfluous pieces of silver.

That’s not to say that I don’t want any objects to remember my old man by. I’m quite keen on his war-time stapler which is surely of very limited use. And I associate him strongly with a very small chopping board that he used to trim stamps, or postmarks or for some arcane philatelic purpose. I can’t think I’d have any use for these either, but at least they won’t take up much room. But one day, I woke up knowing precisely what I wanted – his lawnmower. Or more precisely, one of his lawnmowers.

He appeared to have a few lawnmowers at any given time and as I seem to recall, they often didn’t work. There was the unpowered pull-along or push-along mower for the postage stamp of lawn that we had in the early 60s when we lived in Roehampton. It was sky blue with orange hubcaps and I think it’s still around. Hmmm. I could have a project for that. He had a Flymo at some stage for dealing with scrubby bits of grass in hard to get to places, and he ended up with a few other machines. But the one he used the most in the 70s was a large Atco with a cylinder blade of the sort that rolls the lawn flat and produces the classic stripes that any self-respecting lawn should boast. I think these have gone right out of fashion. Maybe lawns are going out of fashion; they have probably been paved over so that you can park three cars on where they used to be.

The Atco was one of those petrol mowers that was a bastard to start and then, when it was going, had a mind of its own, careering off at the slightest opportunity into the flowerbeds. You had to keep the thing on a tight rein, with much use of the clutch. But it did make a great job of the croquet lawn. My father had always wanted a croquet lawn, and after about half-a-dozen years of flattening a very undulating piece of ground, he finally had one. I thought that the Atco had a kickstart, but I’m probably wrong. But one day, it appeared that my father got bored of its unreliability or capriciousness and bought a Ransomes Marquis, which was a similar sort of affair. It is also a large, heavy, petrol-driven cylinder mower, but it was seemingly more docile, or reliable or more trustworthy. And of course, it was green, as all the best lawnmowers are.

I wasn’t around the house that much when my father was using it, as by the 80s (and he must have acquired it in the mid to late 70s), I’d pretty much left home. But I think that the cylinder lawnmower in some way encapsulates my father. He was a great gardener. I don’t know that I’d say a “keen gardener”, as the hackneyed phrase has it, because I’m not sure how much he really liked gardening. What he wanted was a garden, not to garden for its own sake. If you want a garden, you have to get into gardening, so he did. But he was probably happy enough doing it. And I doubt he liked cutting the grass, but he did a lot of it.

And now, there was the Ransomes, sitting rusting in the garage, unwanted and unloved. My father hadn’t used it for years. In his 90s, he wasn’t going to, but in truth, he’d sort of given up on it in his later years and was no longer really very interested in having a croquet lawn. Perhaps it was because with his kids having left home, there was no one to have a game of croquet with. So he used lighter lawnmowers that don’t roll anything flat and don’t produce stripes and he got a ride-on mower, a completely useless machine that constantly clogs up with cuttings.

Thus I woke up that day with the idea to resurrect the Ransomes. I would have it restored to its former shiny glory, have it shipped over to Switzerland where I would use it on my own lawns, or rather the patches of grass that might become lawns once they got the regular Ransomes’ stripy, rolling treatment. I consulted the internet and found The Old Lawnmower Company, a firm that was seemingly invented for people with wishes like mine. They specialise in resurrecting the classic lawnmowers of the 60s and 70s, and they’ll sell you one for a very reasonable price if you haven’t got your own rusting hulk in a garage or shed.

They operate out of premises hidden up a lane to a field behind a huge farm gate, somewhere near Aylesbury. Your satnav will come in very handy if you try to meet them. If you do, you will find John and his father Ivor to be charming people and passionate about lawnmowers. These are the skilled artisans of grass-cutting machinery who will make your mower rise Lazarus-like from the rusting flakes of its once vibrant green paint.

I have now delivered the Ransomes into their tender care and over the winter they are going to turn this potential scrapyard item into the envy of all my neighbours. The latter already harbour thoughts about me spending more time than is reasonable on my grass, but then “c’est un anglais, n’est-ce pas?”. But when the stripes appear, some time next spring, well, they’ll just have to bow to my superior English lawn knowhow and commitment. The Old Lawnmower company tells me that although the mower is about 40 years old, after their refurbishment of it, it will happily chug along for another 30 or more. I hate to say that this is because it was built to last by an English workshop, rather than being made of cheese in some factory in the muddy and smoky heart of China, but well… there’s got to be some element of truth in that. It was made in a period where people who bought lawnmowers were not “lawnmower consumers” but “lawnmower owners”.

I will doubtless take more pictures and add smug remarks to them when I finally get my hands on the Ransomes again, some time next year.

 

Out with the seed trays

So, what do you do on a cold, wet, blustery Sunday at the beginning of March? You wash up your seed trays, get out the potting compost and all the different packets of seeds and start planting. And I have, in the warmth of the kitchen.

Foxgloves, delphiniums, snapdragons, lupines, dill, parsley, coriander, basil, sweetcorn, aubergines, tomatoes, squashes. We’ll see what comes up. Some of the packets were a bit close to, or a couple of months after, their sell-by date, but what the hell. If nothing shows in a couple of weeks or so, I’ll just buy some fresh seeds, I imagine. That’s the advantage of starting early. Plenty of time.

The tricky bit begins when you are drowning in new plants and they all need potting on and you don’t have a greenhouse. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the meantime, there is plenty of fun and excitement in store and all I had to buy was a bag of seed compost. Cheap thrills.

I still can’t quite get over seeds. They are at best very small, at worst totally insignificant. While you can pretty much understand that something as substantial as a pumpkin seed could grow into something useful, foxglove seeds are just russet-coloured dust, looking like the sort of thing you might find your car covered in were you to park it in the Australian outback. Sowing the foxglove seeds is something of a challenge. You just sprinkle as little as possible in your growing cell, poke the growing medium about a bit in the hope that some of them are covered and trust in luck. It must work, as I have a few foxgloves in the garden that started this way.

Coriander seeds and lupine seeds are tiny cannonballs, quite easy to manipulate. Tomato seeds are like miniscule bivalve shellfish. Delphinium seeds, on the other hand, are wee little granules that don’t look like seeds at all. How could they possibly turn into beautiful blue flowers? Maybe they won’t.

Seeds for most of us are utterly banal. They are probably sitting on the top of your hamburger as sesame seeds, or on your bap as poppy seeds. It seems a waste, somehow. All that potential never realised. And how many countless millions of the things are in a combined harvester destined to become your breakfast? It’s only when you start to deal with them in ones and twos and spend time carefully poking them into the soil that their true awesomeness hits home.

Weed of the Year Award 2016

Every year, it seems, there is a predominant weed that is absolutely rampant. I am thinking of starting a Weed of the Year award. It’s a stupid idea, as the weed won’t know it has won it, but still, as I spend hour after hour pulling out weeds, I start thinking of some fairly idiotic things.

It’s early days obviously, but it is looking as if Speedwell will be hard to beat this year. It has got off to a flyer, putting in a stellar early performance and is absolutely everywhere. Why not last year? Don’t ask me. Probably something to do with the mild winter. I am suspecting that with the head start it has had, speedwell will be getting the Weed of the Year award. It was inconspicuous this time last year, but this year, it has taken over bits of the lawn, is trying to colonise my gravel and is stifling the flowerbeds. Still, I prefer this to some of the previous years’ winners as it’s quite easy to remove.

Speedwell

Last year’s winner was Creeping Charlie. Not particularly noxious in beds and soil as reasonably easy to pull out, but in a lawn, it’s a bastard. We had a real drought last year and that weakens the lawn. Despite watering it, when it doesn’t rain for over a month and the temperature is in the mid to high thirties, the grass really suffers. Enter the Creeping Charlie which just made the most of the situation and spread everywhere. It remains to be seen whether the grass will get the upper hand this year and smother it. It doesn’t seem to be quite as bad at the moment, so I live in hope.

Creeping Charlie

Weed of the Year 2014 was undoubtedly Wood Avens. In fact, Wood Avens or Herb Bennet as it is also known, is still a top three contender for the title. It is like a Premier League football team that has just been bought by billionaires. Inexistent a couple of years ago, It’s now absolutely bloody everywhere. It has a vicious rooting system so that you have to get your hand right in the soil and grab hold of it and then pull with all your might to wrench the thing out. Spend an afternoon doing that and your fingers are screaming for mercy. If you don’t get your hand right in the soil, it just snaps off leaving the root in the ground where, I imagine, it just carries on growing. This stuff will seed in any available crack or space. It forms a rosette on the ground to begin with, but then the next year stalks appear which grow to about 60 cms high and bear noddy little yellow flowers. Big deal.

Wood Avens

I am ruthless in my quest to eradicate it. I hate the stuff. I will not tolerate any root beating me. Eventually, I will win, but the battle has been going on for the past two years and I have a large bed to weed now. The Wood Avens has a particularly annoying habit of growing on top of stuff you really don’t want to damage, like primroses, or strawberries. As it can’t easily be pulled out, you have to risk savaging the useful plant to get at it. But this is just collateral damage. The Wood Avens cannot be allowed to exist. I have pulled out literally thousands over the past few years and the war of contrition continues. It is still possible that Wood Avens will manage to win Weed of the Year 2016 as well. Never write it off.

Growing pumpkins on a compost heap

So the wisdom has it that you should put your pumpkin plants on the compost heap as that is what they prefer. This is all very well if you have a noddy compost heap in wooden frame or something – where are you supposed to put the compost while the pumpkin grows on the heap? Good question, which is why I’ve never done it. Last year, though, I planted the pumpkin in the veggie garden and it straggled over just about everything. Not only that, but the weather was dire and at the end of the season, there were only a few pumpkins about the size of a croquet ball – no use for anything except a return to the compost heap…

This year though, as you may discover if you read this post, my rubbish heap at the bottom of the garden has become an enormous and rather useful compost heap, so I thought I’d test out the theory. There wasn’t any room in the veggie garden in any case, as it was completely planted with all sorts of other useful things. So I bought a butternut squash plant – seeing as god knows how many recipes, especially soup recipes, seem to specify a butternut squash and they are quite expensive. I also got a more normal pumpkin plant to grow ridiculously big and unnecessary pumpkins. Then I planted both on the rubbish heap and left them to get on with it.

Unexpectedly though, my brother-in-law then gave us three other unspecified pumpkin plants, so I added them to the heap too, in places where I thought they wouldn’t get in the way too much.

Ha! That didn’t last long. The pumpkin plants grew (and are still growing) all over the large heap, and carried on going over the bank, into the cows’ field I rent out, and now encroach on the neighbours’ horse paddock. Surprisingly, none of these animals, which are happy to eat any tree they can get their teeth into, are interested in eating either the pumpkins or the pumpkin plants. They are quite bristly, it is true. There is barely any part of the compost heap I can reach and adding anything to it requires a lot of ducking under electric fences.

The upside has been a monstrous pumpkin harvest which has only required the plants to be watered occasionally during the July heatwave where we had about 10 minutes of rain in the entire month.

So the old adage of pumpkins liking compost heaps seems to be completely true and I’ll probably repeat the exercise next year. What is also neat is that as the plants are already on the compost heap, they aren’t going to need taking very far when they finally die.

 The problem to be solved this year is what to do with about 50kg or more of pumpkin… and I haven't even finished harvesting them. Still, there are worse problems you can have.

The tale of the baby peach

No, that yellow thing isn’t a melon. It’s a lemon, and I only included it in the photo so that you can see the miniscule size of the peach next to it. I think it’s the smallest peach I have ever seen, but that is hardly surprising as my experience of peaches has only ever been of those I have bought in a shop, and shops don’t sell baby peaches.

About three years ago, both my neighbour and the butcher in the local shop gave me some peach saplings for my garden, although I hadn’t asked either for them. The saplings were spindly twigs about a foot high and I put them in pots. Finally, I could see that they needed planting out, but I had no idea were to put a peach tree, assuming that any of them didn’t die. I chose a few random places, one of which was a spot hidden behind some redcurrant bushes which I never visited and suspected that I could forget about. At least I was unlikely to tread on the tree or mistake it for a weed.

The saplings seemed to disappear and one that I put in the front garden pretty much died, so I removed it. It was difficult to mow around in any case. But last year, I embarked on a bit of a tidy-up of the veggie patch and removed a rampant dog rose from the border which was annoying me. It was then that I discovered the forgotten peach which was doing its best to grow into a tree, so I moved it to the spot now vacated by the dog rose. I put compost in the hole and mulch around the tree and left it alone.

This spring, it produced, to my surprise, a solitary flower which I thought was a good effort for such a young tree. Even more surprising was that the flower was evidently pollinated and turned into a peach. This was months ago and I never expected it to ripen. Every now and again I’d have a look at it, just for my amusement. It didn’t seem to get any bigger or change colour much. But over the last week or so it did finally redden and then a couple of days ago it had actually left the tree and dropped onto the ground so I picked it up, photographed it (my very first peach!) and ate it.

It was excellent. A white peach – the best sort in my view.

The tree is now really looking like a peach tree and seems to be very happy, so there is every chance that I shall be getting free white peaches for years to come. Well, let’s hope so. Of course, I shall be telling my 90 year-old, next-door neighbour (affectionately known as The Hobbit, owing to her diminutive size and penchant for walking around in bare feet in all weathers) that the tree is one that she gave me, and I will be telling my butcher the same thing. I really have no idea which of them I have to thank for it.

In praise of the garden shredder

There’s another superb product that I have purchased which is proving to be a massive boon, although it can’t yet claim anything like the longevity of the Kenwood Cuisine food processor. That product is a garden shredder.

Any garden produces a lot of stuff that you don’t want. In fact gardening is at least as much about getting rid of things as growing other things. You spend you life pulling out weeds, pruning, cutting grass and picking up leaves, twigs and dead branches. Every year during the winter, there are all sorts of dried stalks to be removed, such as old nettles, or you may find yourself attacked in all corners of the garden by unwanted, vicious brambles.

There seems to me to be about four things you can do with this garden rubbish. You can take it to the tip, burn it on a bonfire, compost it, or just chuck it on a heap somewhere out of sight and forget about it. There are merits and drawbacks to all these options.

If you take it to the tip, you have to bag it up somehow and fit it into your car, which will inevitably dirty it, forcing you to clean the inside later. It’s really a complete pain and is the worst of your options, but maybe if you only have a very small garden, it’s still a viable one. Many people seem to choose it. At least it gets rid of the rubbish definitively.

Bonfires are traditional, but I get the impression they are going out of fashion. They produce smoke and smell, need looking after, annoy your neighbours and in some places they are simply banned. You also need enough space for an unsightly bonfire somewhere.

In both these options, you aren’t deriving any benefit from your garden waste, just getting rid of a problem.

If you’ve got enough space, the out-of-sight heap isn’t such a bad plan. It’s quick and easy and if you leave the heap long enough, it will turn into compost eventually, but it might take years. It is also not going to rot down very evenly if you have largish branches on it and old roots are very rot resistant, as you’d expect, seeing as they have to live in the ground where most other things will start rotting straight away. The other main problem is that you will add to it faster than it rots and the heap will inevitably become increasingly enormous, requiring more and more space and eventually no longer being “out of sight”.

So by far the best plan is a compost heap, or rather better, a compost bin. This has all sorts of magical advantages. If you can reduce your garden waste to compost, you can use it on your plants to get them to grow better. It can reduce weeds – quite ironic when you consider that most of the compost was weeds. A really good compost bin system will rot your waste down much faster than leaving it hanging around in the open air. But this still requires you to have somewhere to put the compost bin, and it still doesn’t solve your problem of having large things to put in it that are all going to take a long time to rot down, such as branches. It is also important to know that for good compost, you need woody material. You can’t make good compost out of only grass clippings, you need a mixture of stuff.

My garden is quite large and produces a lot of vegetable matter that I don’t want – barrowloads of the stuff, in fact. There is no way I can take all that to the tip, even if it is just down the road. Bonfires have also been banned, so I have a space below a bank where I can just offload the rubbish and forget about it. The difficulty is that the heap has spiralled out of control and is taking up more and more room. Also, things like brambles and Virginia creeper just plant themselves on the heap and you end up with a secondary jungle. Branches are still intact years after I put them on the heap. Something had to be done, so I got a farmer to take the top of the heap which hadn’t yet rotted to the tip, but I told him not to take the rest of the heap as I suspected that by now, it was excellent compost. I was right. It is.

Enter the garden shredder. I had resisted buying one of these as I suspected that if it was big enough to be useful, it would be expensive. I imagined that anything I could afford for the job would be completely useless. This was a mistaken impression.

The Atika BioQuick 2300 is a quite superb machine and is in the process of revolutionising my garden. You feed your unwanted twigs, cuttings, brambles and small branches into the hole on the top, and out comes a superb grated mulch at the bottom. You can use this mulch as is to mulch young plants and trees (you’re always being told to do this, but not many people have handy mulch lying around). Alternatively, you can take the product of the shredder to your heap where it will rapidly rot down into compost. It rots down much faster because the sizes of the pieces are so small, and because they are now all mixed together in the sort of mix that makes good compost. Large barrowloads of rubbish are reduced to a mere crate of shredded mulch and as this rots so much faster, your rubbish heap will no longer get out of control. Nor will it have plants growing on it, once you have reduced the brambles to shredded chippings.

What I particularly like about the Akito, apart from its very affordable price, is that a lot of thought has been put into it. It’s massively simple, as it only has an on/off switch, but where it is totally brilliant is in the amount it pulls on the things you feed into it. You have to add a little pressure to them for them to go through the shredder, but not very much. There are rubber flaps which stop bits of wood leaping out of it and hitting you in the eye, and the friction they provide on material you are feeding in is just enough to prevent the machine dragging it out of your hand. This, it seems to me, must have required much experimentation. It makes the machine pretty safe to use (you couldn’t get your whole hand through the slot, and the cutting blade is too far down the machine for your fingers to reach it) but also comfortable as you don’t have to force things into it. It will chop up branches that are up to about 4cms thick, which is quite reasonable. It will gnash up a thick bramble in seconds. It is electric, so just needs an extension cable from a power point. It inevitably gets clogged from time to time, but that’s a simple fix with just one big screw to undo with your fingers to open up the entire machine for removing any obstruction.

For some odd reason, I quite enjoy using it. I love feeding a barrowload of rubbish into it and getting an extremely useful product out the other end. I now no longer need to purchase compost, or mulch; I have as much of it as I want. All the crap from the garden that was just a headache is now extremely beneficial. This year I have added barrowloads of compost to my veggie garden for the first time ever (up until now, I’ve just emptied the odd bag of powdered fertiliser on it) and this summer I am expecting great things. My compost is also growing my tomato seeds and I shall be using it to start a cut-flower garden for the first time ever too.

Handy for mulching trees and shrubs

I should have bought one of these things years ago. I reckon it’s almost as essential for a healthy garden as a lawnmower. Not many people seem to have a garden shredder. They really have no idea what they’re missing.

The Grim Reaper is a peasant

The other thing I have been doing to enhance my peasant credentials is learning to use a scythe.

I have this sort of bank outside the back of the house which I let grow wild in the summer. I can get the ride-on mower down it and sometimes even up it, but it always looks naff when I do, like a shorn patch of weeds. It’s dangerous for the mower too, as the bank is basically a large pile of rocks and stones – probably the fruit of some sort of excavation back in the day.

By letting it grow wild, it makes quite a nice contrast to the rest of the lawn, and even produces some wild flowers. Insects seem to like it that way, as does the cat who enjoys hiding in the long grasses and plants (to leap out and kill some unsuspecting creature no doubt).

But at the end of the season, the grasses and flowers start to die away and the whole thing looks very ragged. It is at this point that you need to cut it.  However, with the plants a couple of feet high, you can forget getting the mower on it. A neighbour once used a scythe on it which was very professional and only took him a few minutes. When I suggested another year that he might like to do the same thing, he came round with a strimmer. This was less satisfactory. I’ve got a small strimmer myself, so I could just as well have used that.

I also have a couple of scythes, which, like assorted rakes, ladders, and garden implements, were left by the previous occupants of the house. So I thought it was about time I started to use one.

A lot of scything still goes on in Switzerland, especially, from what I can see, the German speaking part. Quite often when taking my bike over some mountain pass, you will come across peasants in the fields cutting hay with scythes on some ridiculously steep slope. They give you a look as if to say “another cretin on  motorcycle up to no good”, although if they are younger they might be thinking “that looks like good fun – a lot more fun than doing all this scything”.

I figured that the scythe would need sharpening, seeing how it has been hanging up in the woodshed for at least the last 8 years and probably longer, so I looked up how to sharpen the thing on YouTube. This video also showed me the rudiments of using it and it didn’t look as though I would be that likely to scythe my foot off, so away I went.

 

Result: one scythed bank. Yes, it does look as if it has been given a haircut by some species of apprentice barber who should probably be trying to forge a career in some other field, but that’s good enough. It looks a damned site better now.

My next door neighbour, who is a bona fide peasant, seemed impressed with my efforts. That’s efforts, rather than results. Being a peasant is all a question of attitude. Peasants use scythes. Non-peasants and bourgeois interlopers use strimmers.

Making schnapps - a step towards peasantdom

I’m turning into a peasant.

I’ve always thought that this was a much funnier, if less likely, translation of “je deviens paysan” than “I’m becoming a farmer”. You always get taught in school that a farmer is “un fermier” in French. Well it may be, but no one around here says it much. It’s always “paysan”. I’m not really becoming a farmer, but I have been doing a couple of peasantish things recently which are doing my peasant credentials no harm at all.

Firstly, I have been “doing a barrel” (“faire un tonneau”). Not meaning, as you might have thought, that I have been rolling down Swiss mountainsides, or testing out waterfalls, but rather that I have been making schnapps. There are a lot of fruit trees in Switzerland and they seem to produce more fruit than the Swiss are inclined to eat, so they have a habit of turning it into fruit schnapps. It is the biggest spirit segment in the country. The colourless schnapps comes in a huge variety of flavours, but your local café can be expected to stock many of the following: pommes, prunes, williamine, abricotine, kirsch, coings, framboise. Apple, plum, pear, apricot, cherry, quince and raspberry if you prefer. Visitors to Switzerland should be encouraged to try these. There are others.

I have got quite a few fruit trees too: cherry, marello cherry, apple, pear, plum, quince and there comes a time when you just can’t make any more fruit tarts. Up until now I have always frozen what I can, but the freezer is full, so egged on by the local butcher who lent me a barrel, I set out to fill it with cherries.

It’s a long and time-consuming business. I don’t know how many cherries you can get in a 60 litre barrel, but I know it’s thousands, because I idly counted a thousand of them when I was picking. It turns out that even if your cherry tree is festooned with cherries, only some are right for putting in the barrel at any one time. The others are either not ripe enough, or overripe or bad. In fact, not being a professional cherry picker, it took me days to fill the barrel – days of concerted effort. I suspect I was a bit anal about it, and only put in cherries that I would happily have put on a tart. I don’t think you have to attain this level of fruit quality to produce decent kirsch. What you don’t want though, are the stalks. This is just as well, as generally, it’s not that easy to keep the stalk attached to the cherry.

Once your barrel is full, you leave it a couple of days or so, then add a bag of sugar mixed in with a litre of water. This is to kick start the fermentation. You should cover the barrel with its plastic lid and put a heavy stone on it. As any fule no, the fermentation process breaks the sugars in the fruit down into alcohol and carbon dioxide and if you don’t let the carbon dioxide escape from the barrel, the latter will explode eventually – which will give you a lot to clean up, never mind about the wasted days fruit picking. On the other hand, you desperately want to avoid air getting in. The heavy stone will ensure that the carbon dioxide, under massive pressure, will lift the stone enough to seep out of the barrel, whereas the air, under atmospheric pressure, is not strong enough to lift the stone to get in. This also means that you aren’t allowed to happily remove the lid on occasion to see how it is all coming along and to admire the bubbling cherries, or show your barrel off to visitors. Naturally, I found out all this rather late. The peasants seem to keep it all a little secret and are very vague about exactly what you are meant to be doing.

After a couple of weeks, the fermentation process should have stopped and you can seal up the barrel and take it to the local distillery. Because making schnapps is so traditional throughout Switzerland, there is bound to be a small distillery not far away which makes its business from distilling the barrels of fermented fruit provided by the local farmers. Here the distiller will write your name in chalk on the barrel lid and promise to ring you in a few days when he has distilled your barrel. It sits about outside in a courtyard containing the fruit of all the other local farmers. You are well on your way to becoming a peasant.

Full peasant status is achieved when you go to pick up your schnapps, or in my case, my kirsch. This is because quite apart from paying the distiller for his work, you also have to pay a tax to Bern on the quantity of alcohol produced. But…. If the schnapps comes from your own fruit trees instead of just from fruit you have bought for the purpose, you pay a lower rate of tax. You are officially recognised as being a peasant.

The distiller fills in a couple of forms for you and you pay him and take away your flagons of booze. But you still aren’t really allowed to drink it. You are then told that your schnapps will in fact improve over the next few months, if left somewhere in contact with the air. The more interaction there is with the air, the better, as this will smooth it out. Hence, you don’t want to seal up the flagons but put some cloth over them and store in a place where there is the most temperature variation, preferably an attic. I don’t have an attic, so my flagons are sitting in the woodshed. Best I can do.

So what’s the verdict? Well, I have ended up with about 12 litres of two different sorts of kirsch at 43% alcohol, since once I had filled up a barrel of cherries, I then went and bought another barrel and filled it with marello cherries. I didn’t know anything about the stone, the air, or the length of time necessary for fermentation. I did know that if I sealed the barrel it would blow up, so at least avoided that mistake. Consequently, the cherries had actually been left in the barrel a little too long, but more importantly, air had got in. This all means that the finished product was lower in alcohol than it would have been and doesn’t taste as good as it should. I have got 5 litres of kirsch.

The griottes on the other hand, hadn’t really finished fermentation when I took them to the distillery, so they had been pretty much surrounded by carbon dioxide and not air, even if I did keep lifting off the lid to have a look. They have turned out better and I have 7 litres of this sort of kirsch. So now I’m just waiting for Christmas when I can drink some of the stuff, but what I am going to do with 12 litres of kirsch I have no idea. Makes a lot of plum puddings, or fondues and will get you very drunk. More presents, I suppose. At the end of the day you spend your life around here making jams and such like for the pleasure of giving them away to all and sundry.

I’ll tell you about my other peasantish behaviour tomorrow. This post has gone on quite long enough.