June09

LITTLE GREEN SPACE

Originally published in the Peak Advertiser on 15 June 2009

Sunshine. It’s wonderful stuff. At last all danger of frost has passed, and we have been able to plant out all the tender crops: courgettes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, tomatoes and runner beans are now in the open ground or in pots on the patio.

The first early potatoes we planted back in early March have yielded their first harvest, and the garlic and onions seem to be growing taller by the minute.

Salad Days

One of the biggest successes we have had since we began growing our own vegetables is salad leaves. We eat a lot of salad in summer, and those plastic bags of salad leaves you buy in the supermarket can be pretty pricey.

It was the cost of supermarket salads that inspired my friend Alison to start growing her own. She’s been keeping a record of how much salad her garden has produced, and since April her family has eaten the equivalent of 21 supermarket salad bags – a saving of a whopping £31.50! For the initial outlay of a few quid for some packets of seed, that’s a pretty good return on your money.

There is such a wide variety of salad seeds available – little gem, oak leaved lettuce, lollo rossa, pak choi, swiss chard and rocket to name just a few – that boring plates of soggy old lettuce are a thing of the past. And you don’t need an allotment or a veggie patch to grow your own, either. By sowing a small handful of salad seeds every few weeks into a couple of pots, you can keep yourself in salad all summer. And there’s no plastic packaging to throw in the bin!

In the Night Garden

Anyway, back to sunshine. The late May bank holiday featured wall-to-wall sunshine rather than wall-to-wall rain, which is a fairly unusual occurrence. We decided to take advantage of the weather and indulge in a spot of camping.

The trouble with sunny weather, though, when combined with a bank holiday, is the somewhat less attractive prospect of the bank holiday traffic jam.

So, living as we do in what must be one of the most attractive parts of the UK , we decided to go local and camp in the garden. The kids were just as excited as they would have been had we spent hours in the car. And the view from our garden – across the River Derwent to the Peak District hills – is as nice as you could find anywhere in Britain .

The only trouble with our garden – as I now know – is that it is an extremely noisy place, especially at night. Consequently, although I was quite snug and comfortable in my tent, I got very little sleep.

The main problem was the owls. We hear them from the house, but they seemed much louder with only a layer of canvas between us and the night sky. I had just dropped off to sleep when I heard the most almighty shrieking sound: a tawny owl, swooping low above the tent and landing in the ash tree twenty metres away. I knew it was a tawny owl, because I then heard the familiar “too-whit-twoo” call, which only the tawny makes.

This was followed by a series of shrieks and screams of different lengths and intensity that made my blood run cold – I felt as though I had woken up on the set of a B movie horror film.

Mystery Caller

I then heard another call that was totally unfamiliar: a low, quiet whooping sound that I had never heard before. By now wide awake, I climbed out of the tent to investigate the noise. I was secretly hoping it was a barn owl. If you read this column regularly, you will know that we have been trying to attract barn owls into the meadows near our house, and have been encouraged by recent reports of sightings from local people.

We recently received an e-mail from Stephen Coates, who had read about our project in the Peak Advertiser. Stephen had seen barn owls in flight on two occasions, just across the river from us at Oker. It seems that those owls are just getting closer and closer!

So I sat out under the clear, starry sky for some time, scanning the dark trees for a glimpse of that ghostly white shape. But I had no such luck. Eventually, when all the screeching and screaming had finally died down, I wriggled back into my sleeping bag and fell into a deep sleep.

But not for long. At the break of dawn the birds started up. Robins, blackbirds, great tits and wood pigeons all added to the cacophony. It was deafening, and almost certainly quite beautiful after a good night’s sleep. But with a fuzzy head from lack of sleep, and a stiff back from sleeping on hard ground, I couldn’t appreciate the beauty of the moment. Grumbling loudly, I pulled the pillow over my head and tried to get back to sleep.

Happy campers

I emerged, bleary-eyed, from the tent in the morning to discover that, incredibly, the rest of the family had slept through all the noise. Unlike me, they were well rested and ready for action!

Later that morning I researched owl calls on the Internet. There is a good selection of calls you can listen to at www.barnowltrust.org.uk – but unfortunately the call of the barn owl sounded nothing like the noises I had heard in the night.

I am, however, fairly convinced that the mystery sound was a little owl. Little owls, like the tawny, have a shrieking call as well as the whoop-whoop-whoop, which would explain the variety of screams that kept me awake.

The kids enjoyed the camping experience so much that they have begged to do it again next time we have a spell of sunny weather. Of course I agreed – but next time we camp in the garden I will be sure to wear ear-plugs!

Penny at Little Green Space