The highs and lows of tides

firma kind of gal, plus of course that minor matter of children. Ours just never took to sailing or motor boating or indeed beach combing but it was not for the want of trying. When our firstborn was excluded from the local primary school aged nine, the beach seemed the natural space to replace the classroom. Biology became rock pooling, English lit was covered with Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner read at Moonfleet, maths was plotting a boat course, PE was the easiest: swimming, beach cricket and later kayaking. Ah yes, I know I am making it sound idyllic – it wasn’t, however, it was much better than school for him at the time. And like the best of classrooms there was always something new to stimulate a curious mind. My favourite walks are down from the hills to the beach as I have drawn here with me and Steve doing our own thing but within waving distance and always with stories to tell each other at the end of the day. And so often we are at right angles to each other, my view out to sea from Hive beach and his from our boat Dumpling looking back to Burton Bradstock. Whether you want to beachcomb or mess about on boats it’s worth being aware of our special double lows in the Weymouth area. You can get yearly tide time tables which chart each day’s low and high tides from chandlers or fishing shops or see them online.

Vegetable-dodgers have no need to be afraid: This

The very best wild green vegetable (with stinging nettles a close second) is sea beet, Beta vulgaris maritima. With the inexplicable exception of my discovery of a small population on wasteland in Dagenham, it is only found within earshot of the sea. It is certainly common along the Dorset coast, and I have collected small amounts for tea a hundred times on family outings. It can grow among the pebbles of the upper shore, at the base of cliffs, alongside coastal paths, among boulders and even growing out of cracks in the promenade. Sea beet is a relative of spinach, and looks just like it, excepting that its harsh, drying habitat has required its leaves to be thick, shiny and succulent. It is a perennial plant, and it is possible to find some to eat all year round. However, before the flowering spikes appear spring is best, the leaves disappearing to provide energy for the flowers. Once it has set seed, the leaves return as a clustered, basal rosette. Even then, the huge genetic variety found in this plant will mean that some will flower earlier

JOHN WRIGHT is a naturalist and forager who lives in rural West Dorset. He has written eight books, four of which were for River Cottage. He wrote the award-winning Forager’s Calendar and in 2021 his Spotter’s Guide to Countryside Mysteries was published.

Sally Cooke lives in Tolpuddle with her husband, two grown-up sons and spotty rescue dog. She loves to photograph and write about the everyday wildlife she sees in her garden and on her daily dog walks. You can follow Sally on Instagram at Sparrows in a Puddle or contact her with your wildlife observations at sally@westdorsetmag.co.uk

On a freezing cold March day in the early 1990s I remember carefully planting two long rows of broad bean seeds on our newly rented allotment. My father-in-law had given us a brown paper bag of dried out beans with instructions to get them in early. We had recently moved into our first house together, a tiny starter home with just room outside for a shed and a patio, and small borders that I enthusiastically filled with flowers. But when we saw that just around the corner were some vacant allotments we decided to try growing vegetables too. We were the youngest people at the allotments by about 50 years and the old men would lean on their forks and look at us as if we were a complete novelty, and possibly a bit mad. They were used to spraying the weeds, fertilising the plants and then zapping any bugs that tried to eat the veg before they got to them. We had to explain to them

Perfect pollinators

several times that we weren’t going to use chemicals on our plot. In those pre-internet days we just looked to one bible for advice, Geoff Hamilton’s Successful Organic Gardening, it’s still on our bookshelf.

The broad beans came up, pigeons and mice ate some of them, but the majority grew well and walking home from the allotment on a summer’s evening with fresh beans for our tea was a truly wonderful feeling and I was hooked for life.

Thirty years on, it’s March again, and I’m poring over garden centre displays of seed packets and the photos of garden utopia in seed catalogues. Geoff Hamilton was quoted as saying that a seed seller’s stock trade wasn’t seeds at all, it was optimism and as the warmth of the longer days lures me out into the garden, this certainly is the time of year when anything seems possible.

We no longer have an allotment and my veggies now grow alongside the flowers and wildlife in the garden. Broad beans and many other vegetables rely on insects for pollination and I deliberately grow flowers nearby to encourage them in. Bees and butterflies are excellent pollinators but specifically encouraging hoverflies to the garden too has another benefit. Hoverfly larvae are voracious predators, feasting on aphids, so are very welcome in my garden. As hoverflies do not have a long ‘tongue’, they love open flowers with lots of easily available pollen. It’s important to realise that not all flowers are created equal when it comes to attracting pollinators. Some popular bedding flowers such as busy lizzies, pansies, begonias and petunias contain virtually nothing for the bees. When, like me, you’re optimistically planning for your perfect garden this spring, look out for the RHS Plants for Pollinators label when buying your seeds and you can grow beautiful flowers and do your bit to help the bees.

relative of spinach is one that’s really hard to beet

or later than most of it companions, and it is a poor foraging day when none can be found in edible condition. Pick healthy, un-nibbled leaves well away from the attention of our canine friends, pinching them off at the leaf base. It matters not at all what size they are as the texture and flavour is the same whether they are the size of a sheet of A5 or a postage stamp. The mention of ‘spinach’ may have discouraged some of the vegetable-dodgers among you, but I promise that sea beet has a sweeter flavour and, perhaps best of all, does not disintegrate into a soggy, green puree like its cousin. I do, however, recommend that you cook sea beet as it is slightly bitter when raw. Incidentally, the long, white root is edible, if poor and, obviously, requires uprooting, which is illegal without permission from the landowner. We have much to thank sea beet for as its genetic variability has allowed selection to produce many of our staple crops. Perpetual spinach is the nearest to ancestral sea beet, but there is also Swiss chard, fodder beet and sugar beet. The intense colours of Swiss chard can be seen in some wild sea beet individuals and, (appallingly), also in that root-vegetable from hell, beetroot.