Six weeks ago, I watched a documentary on YouTube about veggies grown in medieval times that, despite easily self-seeding, outgrowing weeds and having mostly better nutritional value than modern-day replacements, have fallen out of common knowledge. Supermarkets don’t stock them as veggies and mainstream seeds catalogues don’t sell them to grow. The reason they’ve fallen out of use (and it seems most memories) appears to be that they don’t fit in with modern day big farming methods. They either take a while to establish and so do not provide a quick return on investments, or cannot be easily machine harvested and so are expensive to crop, or need eating quickly once picked and so don’t have a long enough shelf life to make them financially viable in supermarkets.
I found all this out by accident, as a result of looking for veggies you can plant out later in the growing season because we’d had to take our greenhouse down. Between the start of Feb and last week the greenhouse has been out of use in order that a diseased horse chestnut tree could be felled. The tree surgeon said he couldn’t guarantee the greenhouse’s safety in the face of felling such a huge and very rotten tree directly over the top of it. So take it down my husband did. It was meant to go back up the following week but a flurry of named storms blew in making the felling too dangerous and so we had to wait a further five weeks to put it back up. Thus our seed growing window was heavily reduced which provoked my online research for veggies that can be planted and/or germinate outside spring. I’d had some success with pak choi last year which you sow straight into the ground after the last frost so I was quite confident there would be veggies out there we could look at. The greenhouse went back up last Friday and will be the starting point for this spring’s regular seedlings for tomatoes, courgettes, pumpkins and beans, but in addition to these, this year we’ve now prepped the soil and made space for a whole new selection of forgotten crops that will start to get planted in April and finish getting planted in Autumn (some of the seeds need to overwinter before germinating).
It has taken a fair bit of research accessing the seeds but hey I’m a research student now, so have been using my newly learned transferrable (it turns out) skills to get six strangely named new (to us) veggies that used to be the mainstay of potager’s gardens in the UK for hundreds of years before industrialisation. Sadly there is one I haven’t been able to source yet but I will keep on trying because I love the idea that we’re bringing something old (and to us, new) back to life (hopefully). Also, having lots of different crops that reseed and look after themselves seems like a great way forward and much more suitable to a potager’s garden like ours, so much better than growing line after line of thirsty, modified plants like commercial farmers do, that need constant watering and weeding and replacing every year. Hope this new system will mean less gluts and dearths, and that having small amounts of different veggies that come up in sequence will add interesting variation to our diets. I’ll document what all the new seeds/plants will be in my next blog, and also where I bought them from, so anyone who’s interested can try growing some too. (you can see three on the photo at the start of this blog). And here’s a couple of photos of the prepped soil ready for all the lovely seeds to take up residence.
Whilst all this seedy stuff has been underway, I’ve also been beavering away at my PhD research. I had my second supervision meeting yesterday which really cemented in my head how much I love these meetings. They’re a mixture of: touching base, getting expert perspectives and guidance, a cheerleading session for those of us (i.e. me) with persistent imposter syndrome, reporting back on stuff done since the previous session and setting a goal/target of things to do /talk about next time. Both my supervisors are truly expert in their fields, their minds brimful of knowledge. I count myself as very lucky to have them as mentors. Below is a flash fiction style narrative list of some of the things I’ve done between my first and second supervisions.
- Written a draft first flash for my PhD creative component novella-in-flash (I say first but it might not be first in the story, just the first to get written).
- Read 3 novellas-in-flash, and the novel Waterland by Graham Swift which isn’t written ‘in flash’ because the chapters are too long, but which uses many of the component, restrictions and techniques I’ve been identifying as characteristic of ‘in-flash’ writing; read A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes (I say read but I mean struggled with.
- Read everything I could find by Mark Fisher who is a postmodern genius.
- Attended researcher develop training sessions on: setting up a thesis doc in Word, Managing Perfectionism and What Should a Literary Review Do?
- Won a York St John Uni International Women’s Day Poster comp prize for ‘best feminist engagement’. My poster was displayed in the post grad centre for IWD and students voted for the winners. There’s a copy of it at the bottom of this blog entry. I got a certificate (I love a certificate) and a £15 voucher which I intend to spend on wine and tacos. Very pleased I took part in this, because flash lends itself really well to posters I reckon and I’m now properly interested in doing more so…
- Started another poster for the Humanities Post Grad Research Annual Flagship Event in May, which, this year, is going to include the launch of journal Curiositas, a new publication established and staffed by postgraduate researchers from the School of Humanities. Alongside this launch will be a celebration of postgraduate research currently taking place across the school in the form of posters done by the postgrad researchers themselves. These posters will aim to give a taste of projects underway and I’m going to enter one for my project. I’ll post it here when it’s done, but starting this poster made me realise that writing ‘in-flash’ needn’t be constrained to novella, and that, in fact, I’ve written micros ‘in-flash’ already. I’m putting a micro I wrote ‘in-flash’ on the poster. This 300 word micro is made up of three standalone drabbles which when read together imply another story. This made me question what writing ‘in-flash’ truly is.
In order to try to find out I’ve decided to take a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, which was published in my collection, Hostile Environments and rewrite it so it’s told ‘in-flash’. I chose a quite fragmentary short story of 2200 words that’s not, (I think,) written ‘in-flash’ to investigate similarities and differences. So, as an experiment, I’m going to restructure it, so it becomes what I reckon is an ‘in-flash’ story, and then, describe what I think defines the change.
It could be all or none of the following: making each fragment narratively complete and standalone; making each (now) standalone flash be 1000 words or less; giving each individual standalone flash it’s own title; making the ending of each now standalone flash ring like a bell to give readers moments of narrative pause; making the bigger picture of the combined flash fictions less narrative arc and more narrative mosaic; bringing white spaces to the page after each interior narrative ending, therefore foregrounding emptiness and silence so they become an integral part of the story-telling. Then, I’m then going to write an essay about what I find out. Should be pretty interesting.
Seems to me I’ve been having quite the accidental learning time over the last few weeks. I’d never have thought about doing this essay without having started the poster, and I’d never have known about medieval veggies without the gone-greenhouse. Really does make you think about knowledge, its acquisition and perpetuation. Hardly anyone knows about novella-in-flash let alone what ‘in-flash’ storytelling is, and though everyone used to know about medieval veggies, practically no-one does anymore. It’s like there’s a hierarchy of well-known stuff that if it becomes too generally accepted, pushes other alternatives out of existence. I’m starting to think that might be the case with creative writing too. Short stories that don’t comply with long-accepted shapes very often don’t get published. They need a narrative arc with rising action, a crisis, a climax to be thought of as any good. And you have to have a character who changes or goes on a transformational journey. Well work ‘in-flash’ very often doesn’t do these things. I wonder if that’s why writers don’t give it a go? Maybe ‘in-flash’ writing’s face don’t fit the current publishing industry, that wants cliff hangers and page turners and nothing all that new. Maybe ‘in-flash’ writing is a bit like forgotten crops – not able to thrive in the face of big business and profits. It’s defo a thought.
Jan Kaneen Creative and Other Writing 