Bog Myrtle & Peat

What a child I was to stand off this crop and imagine that I was in control. I worried that my hoeing would destroy all the weeds, and I prepared to cordon off certain corners and protect them from the ruthlessness of my own efficiency. I had no idea what I was talking about.

That field is a ravenous tyrant and I am wholly in its grasp. I scratch out the weeds as briskly as I can, then turn round to find them thick and bristling up behind me as if I had never passed by. It’s a jungle; there’s fumitory and runches in such bundles that I can hardly walk through them. Thistles pile upon fat hen and creeping buttercup like vines in a jungle, and the turnips swell in their purple tops all the while. I fight a rearguard action, and I’m tempted to trail a line of wool behind me when I go out to work in case I can’t find my way home again; turn left at the bank of oxeye daisies; scramble through the clambering spurge.

I wondered if the turnips could ever do so much for wildlife as the oats did last year. In truth I think they do more; we are infested with oystercatchers and hares; there are leverets crouching in the drills, and every step I take drives up a fog of insects. Moths lurk under the leaves, and the way the weeds layer up on each other, there’s a dank little world of beetles and bellywalkers in the basement. Broods of wild pheasants stride down the rows, and the chicks nurse their swollen crops and belch. I see flycatchers and linnets; yellowhammers and larks, all of whom are finding something to love in this crop. Bats clatter above the shaws in the darkness, and swallows race through it when the baton is exchanged and daylight returns.

I fight to keep the turnips clean and growing steadily, but the field has turned and risen twice in the time it has taken me to write these words. I’ll soon have to abandon my hoe and pick up a machete.