ONE OF MY favourite gardening books is One Hundred Points of Good Husbandrye by Thomas Tusser. This Tudor version of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wrote a best-selling book of farming advice in rhyming couplets.

Tusser has two good bits of advice for May. The first is to hire children to do the dirty work:

Let children be hired, to lay to their bones,

from fallow as needeth to picket up stones

As I have argued in my book The Idle Parent, children should always serve their parents, and not the other way round.

Tusser goes on to mention the importance of weeding:

Who weeding slacketh,

good husbandry lacketh.

Wise words, Mr T.

I also turn to Palladius, the medieval gardening writer. He also advises a heavy bout of weeding, and also suggests making pesto. I’d always though that pesto was a modern invention, but it appears not. And my advice would be to make it with the wild garlic that is growing everywhere at the moment.

Finally, John Seymour, the 1970s smallholder, recommends that you concentrate on peas. “Sow peas… more peas. You can never have enough peas.”

ENDS