20 years of Daughter of the Soil

 

Well, here we are. As astonishing as it seems, I started my Daughter of the Soil blog 20 years ago today.

It hasn’t been a continuous twenty year endeavour – there have been several lengthy gaps. But it served a valuable purpose back then and it still does now, with a fine collection of notes, photos and observations from my plant breeding and heritage vegetable experiments. The internet has changed a lot in 20 years, and I’m conscious that nobody really reads blogs any more – but that’s OK. If I wanted lots of exposure, I could move over to social media and post bite-size bits of gardening fluff for people to doomscroll through. But I find the likes of Farcebook very stressful to engage with, in ways which make it anathema to what I’m trying to achieve; and anyway, my preference has always been for long-form posts where I can go into a lot more detail. Again, the done thing nowadays for such detailed content would be to monetise it by moving it over to Substack or Patreon and putting all the best stuff behind a paywall. But that would go completely against the spirit in which this blog was founded, and I do still live by those values. It was always my intent to create a freely available resource that other gardeners could learn from and take inspiration from. And so I will keep adding stuff here, where it will remain free and open. I’m not selling anything, I’m not sponsored by anyone, and my opinions and experiences are my own.

There has been a long gap since I made my last post, and that’s because the last few years have been grim. From 2019-2022 our family suffered seven major bereavements over four years, including both my parents, to whom I was very close. Then in 2023 it was the turn of the animals: I lost my horse and two of our three cats. I have been absolutely walloped by all of this grief, and have really just been in survival mode. I did very little gardening during this time other than a few chillies and tomatoes. My breeding projects all went on hold, and brambles encroached on the garden. I’ve only just started to come back to it so there is a lot of work to do and it will be done slowly. We have another cat now and another horse. As a consequence of getting into horse ownership I now have an even earthier life as I do farm work every day (seven days a week, in all weathers) which is an absolute joy.

My original spark for starting this blog was a passion and excitement at discovering heritage vegetables, and how they can be so superior to modern commercial varieties. Looking back over the last 20 years at what has changed in the heritage vegetable scene, it has to be admitted that many things have got worse. Heritage varieties were always a niche interest, but back in 2006 you could at least get them if you bothered to search them out. Now, a lot of stuff is no longer availble to buy anywhere. Most of the damage comes from the shoddy Brexit deal which put prohibitively expensive conditions on trade, making seed imports an impossibility for smaller businesses. Most UK seed companies no longer sell seeds to European customers, and European seed companies can’t send seeds to us any more. So everybody’s choices shrink. The problem seems to be most extreme with potatoes, where apparently the majority of heritage varieties were coming to us from the EU, and now they have gone. Shetland Black, Salad Blue, Highland Burgundy Red – even the popular Pink Fir Apple – none of them were available for me to grow this year. I’m having to grow modern varieties, though I did get hold of a red-fleshed one, a German variety called Heiderot, which will be interesting to try. I’ve also been unable to source any seed of Cheltenham Green Top beetroot, an old favourite which I like to grow because I live in Cheltenham, but I don’t have any fresh seed and this variety is another one which seems to have very rapidly vanished.

Another thing which has got manifestly worse in the last 20 years is the climate. I’d been noticing subtle changes in the garden for years, but the weather is now getting very weird, and consistently so. I notice it even more now that I’m doing farm work, as I see the interconnectedness of the plants, land and wildlife and how it has to adjust every day as things go out of kilter. Right at this time of greatest climate peril, we have at least two mainstream political parties pledging to scrap what little climate action we already have, because they’ve realised there are votes to be won in telling people it’s OK to do what they like and not feel guilty about it. There are few morals left in politics nor any sense of anything having value beyond money. It’s all pretty depressing.

However, me and my fertiliser-supplier would like to send a message that no matter what, it’s essential to keep smiling.

There have been many good developments in the last 20 years, it’s not all doom and gloom. Seed saving collectives and forward-thinking gardeners are still doing the good work. New seed companies have come up to replace those that have closed. There is a much stronger awareness among gardeners generally about the benefits of working in harmony with nature rather than trying to subjugate it. This is a major cultural shift which has a vital impact. Like-minded souls such as Charles Dowding are doing an amazing job of bringing holistic gardening ideas to a wider audience.

There is always hope. Things can and will get better. We all have opportunities to make positive things happen, including in very small ways which actually really matter. As individual gardeners we don’t have the means to fix the climate crisis, but the love we put into soil has its way of radiating out. 

As I said in a post way back when, there is a reason I called myself Daughter of the Soil. I went by a principle that if you look after the soil, the plants will take care of themselves. The last 20 years have reinforced that view for me in every way, not least with my accidental discovery that tomatoes yield better and resist disease better if you don’t fertilise them, and all the implications which rippled out from that. There is far more widespread awareness of the soil’s microbiology these days, and the idea of feeding the soil rather than the plants is no longer the niche minority view it used to be. I still believe passionately in the garden as a living ecosystem.

Seed sowing has begun. Chillies and tomatoes are in. Spuds are sitting in egg-boxes making colourful sprouts. The garden is waiting to wake up.