1st May - May Day & Ascension

Today is a double celebration. It's Ascension Day, a public holiday in Germany amongst other places, marking the day Christ left the world for heaven. It's also the first day of May, the month that makes us think summer isn't so far away, even with the cold and rather dismal spring we've been having. It's also a date with significant socialist meaning, and the Bank Holiday we're due in England on the Monday following was instigated by the 1975 Labour government in honour of International Labour Day. Steve Roud, in The English Year comments on this innovation:

The Times ran a suitably thunderous leader suggesting that the British public should use the day to commemorate innocent people murdered in the Soviet Union.

The various local customs for May Day would need several posts to cover. The oldest and simplest (see below) is 'bringing in the May' - so we cut some blossoming twigs this afternoon and brought them inside to freshen the place up. Hawthorn's the classic choice - according to superstition the only time of year it's not desperately unlucky to bring its blossom indoors.

Back to the religious feast falling today, early as Easter was early, I've been listening to a few recordings of Bach's Ascension Oratorio over the last few days, thinking I'll jot my thoughts down on here. On May's summery associations, a tangible sign of summer is provided by our thriving seedlings. Various young plants are doing pretty well, just as the latest batch of seedlings are sprouting in the propagator. First up are the tomatoes (left). There's possibly nothing nicer than home-grown tomatoes, either eaten fresh or preserved for future months. I blogged earlier about the varieties we've chosen this year. The trailing bush tomatoes that we're planning to put in hanging baskets are now out of the greenhouse during the day to get used to the outside temperatures.

The other plants (picture down to the right) are various chillies and aubergines, which also seem to be thriving. It's been great using a greenhouse this year - everything seems to be moving along really quickly! I'm hoping for a bumper crop of chilli peppers, hopefully enough of the hottest ones to make chilli pickle, which is something that really brightens up the winter months.

One of the great things about growing your own produce is the sense you get, particularly at this time of year, of the whole year opening up before you, with its hopeful culmination in a bumper crop of tomatoes to bottle as passata or roast and blend into sauce for freezing, and chillies to ferment into the pickle.

If it seems strange to be thinking these thoughts about autumn and winter at the onset of summer, it's not so unusual to mark the turn of the season in its effect on growing things now. The earliest recorded May Day tradition in England was to go and gather greenery and blossom for decorating houses and public buildings. These jaunts provided the opportunity for much immoral behaviour, subsequently thundered against by ecclesiastical moralists. Despite this, the church was often the focus - and sponsor - of the custom. Protestant reformers duly joined the battle against popular celebrations; bringing in the May was banned under the Commonwealth; it was reintroduced at the Restoration; and then gradually dwindled to the custom of children's garlands in the nineteenth century and up to their remnants in the present day.

Present day Tories are obviously too busy fighting the local elections to mither about May Day and propose its replacement with some patriotic battle-anniversary ('Trafalgar Day' in October was their plan in 1979). Just the usual morris and madrigals reported by the BBC.