Fields of Linseed

A few of the fields around the village are looking very pretty at the moment.  This is linseed and the flowers are a very pale blue. They don't seem to photograph very well and taking pictures in the sun makes them appear white.

The flowers open fully only when the sun is out, at the end of the day the fields turn green again.  The flowers face the sun and follow it through the day.

They look pretty from underneath as the sun shines through the petals

but the blue colour and veining on the petals is seen when they are viewed face on.

Linseed is also known as flax but the varieties grown here are grown for the oil in the seeds and so are more commonly called linseed. Older varieties which were taller (1 - 1.2 metres) and known as flax were grown for their fibre which was processed to produce linen. Flax is no longer grown for fibre in the UK on a commercial scale.

I found a little history of flax growing here and a timeline of flax through history here.

The amount of flax grown for fibre in the UK increased during both World Wars when Britain needed to be more self sufficient, I wonder if as the price of oil rises and transport costs increase, flax will be grown again in Britain for fibre as well as growing linseed for oil.

A Farm for the Future

I watched A Farm for the Future last night (part of the BBC Natural World series) which looked at UK agriculture and its dependence on fossil fuels. Although there wasn't much new information it was a very good summary of the problems that we will face as the supply of oil runs out.

One thing I hadn't realised was the damage done to soil by ploughing year after year. Although land has been ploughed for thousands of years the damage has only occurred on a large scale as mechanisation has increased, more efficient ploughing means more efficient destruction of the soil wildlife and bacteria as the soil is turned and exposed to light and air. I was struck by a film of a tractor ploughing around thirty years ago when it was followed by flocks of birds picking up worms and insects and another film of ploughing taking place today, no birds follow the tractors now because there is so little life in the soil.  I remember seeing seagulls following tractors when I was small, but I hadn't really noticed that it didn't happen any more.  How sad, and bad news for food production too.

I was thinking about the program when I was out for a walk this afternoon, lots of the fields were freshly ploughed.

The program was not all doom and gloom though and there were some good examples of working with nature instead of against it such as very productive forest gardens producing huge crops from a small space. It makes me want to cram even more into my small garden.

Changes

We celebrated our wedding anniversary this week - 19 years. Each year I make an anniversary card for my husband. As I can't draw I use photographs or magazine cuttings to make a card that depicts something we have done during the year. Usually its somewhere we have been on holiday but this time I thought we should remember this last year as "the year we got the chickens". Here are two of the photographs I used to make the card.

I would never have imagined, nineteen years ago, that someday I'd be keeping chickens!



Nineteen years isn't a particularly long time but we were talking with the boys about things that are available now that we didn't even think about 19 years ago - mobile phones, DVDs, iPods, X box, Internet, ordering shopping online, booking holidays online, cheap air travel, zillions of TV channels, blogging.

Very few people, nineteen years ago would have worried about peak oil and global warming. I didn't start thinking about fossil fuel use until around eight years ago which was the last time we flew abroad for a holiday. We went to Bali for our honeymoon and I didn't give any thought to the damage that the flight might be doing to the planet.

I wonder what changes we will see in the next nineteen years. How much will the climate have changed? Will there still be fuel available for most people to have cars? Will we still be importing food from far away or will we all have to eat local? On balance I think its just as well we can't see into the future (probably too scary!) but I am sure that there are changes ahead that we haven't even begun to think about yet.

Time to Sleep

After the holiday break we are now back to our usual routine.One of the biggest differences between holiday and work (apart obviously from the absence of work and school during the holidays) is the amount of time we sleep.

Our usual weekday routine gives us a maximum sleep time of about seven and a half hours but during the holiday, with no alarm clock, we found that we were sleeping for over nine hours a night. I felt much better for the extra sleep. I felt ready to get up as soon as I woke instead of feeling groggy while making my first essential cup of tea and I lost that sleepy feeling around mid afternoon.

In his book, Sleep Thieves, Stanley Coren explores the idea that a large proportion of the population of the western world is sleep deprived. He traces this back to the development of the electric light bulb. Before that invention sources of light for most people were inefficient and expensive and so people went to bed once it was dark.

He compares a study carried out in his laboratory in which he found that a young adult today sleeps an average of seven and a half hours a night with a similar study carried out in 1910. The date was chosen because it was three years before modern efficient light bulbs were introduced. In 1910 the average sleep time of a young adult was nine hours.

It is amazing that this change has occurred in just under one hundred years - probably most of the change in the last generation as we have 24 hour supermarkets, 24 hour television and of course the internet. In the same way that we seem driven to consume, cluttering our lives with excess stuff, our sleep time is being consumed by all the excess activities available to us.

I wonder, will this change in our lives which has occurred so quickly (far too quick for us to become adapted to it) be reversed as we run out of cheap oil? As the price of heating and lighting increases - how soon before the cost of keeping premises warm and light becomes prohibitively high? Will power cuts mean that some of our electronic toys will not always available and will we use the time to sleep more?

There will be many, many problems when the oil crisis hits but I like to think that there will be some good things as well. I hope that having more time to slow down (because rushing from place to place to consume will become too expensive) will mean that we can fall back to the pace of life our bodies are adapted to and I think that means we might sleep more.