Soilman

No activity on this blog because there’s been so little movement on the allotment.

It’s still so very cold. My roses, blooming at the end of May in a good year, are barely out of winter dormancy. Chestnut trees, usually in full flower on May 1st, have only just produced their first white candles.

I had to re-sow my cauliflowers last night. The first batch, sown in early April, were stunted and hopeless. It’s just too bloody cold for anything to grow properly.

The worst of it is that the weather pattern is beginning to look depressingly like last year’s: A low jetstream ‘trapped’ over the UK bringing endless low pressure weather systems from the northern Atlantic.

I really don’t think I can face a fourth CRAP summer in a row.

Very exciting to see some asparagus at last. More than a month after the earliest date I’ve cut it, but better late than never. This lot will make a very welcome supper.

The potatoes remain a mystery. Still no sign of ‘em, and I’m afraid there never will be. One suspicious piece of evidence: I gave a few to my mother, who lives at the opposite end of the country – and none of hers have come up either.

Is there such a thing as dud seed potato?

Postscript, May 10th: Two tiny leaves have finally appeared today. That’s two plants out of 50 seed potatoes planted.

BUT it may mean the others are following on behind. Let’s hope.

Weirder and weirder: my first early potatoes haven’t grown. At all.

I put them in in March, just before that ghastly late cold snap. The maincrop ones (which I put in a month later) are just starting to show above ground. But of the first earlies, no sign.

I dug one up and it had a few spindly roots (and a few small slug holes), but no shoots. This is absolutely unprecedented. I’ve never had potatoes simply not grow.

Was it the frost? I’ve never known tubers underground to get frost damaged, but is it possible? Has anybody else every experienced this? Would love to hear from you if so. I’m baffled as to what’s going on.

What I really want to know is this: will they grow if I wait long enough? Or are they dead and ruined?

At the risk of sounding like an insufferable egomaniac, I’m always stunned by the performance of my ‘how to plant asparagus’ video. It gets hundreds of plays every weekend, especially at this time of year – from which I infer that there are a lot of folks out there wanting to know how to do it right.

If you’re one of them, this video aims to help. I’m embedding it here again for punters arriving from search engines wanting to know how to do it:

A guide to planting asparagus from Soilman on Vimeo.

Well, everything’s about a month behind. These onions would normally have gone in mid-March. By now, they’d be at least a foot high and the bulbs would be starting to swell.

Obviously this year that’s a way ahead. Not a single potato has shown a leaf above ground yet. Five years ago, I harvested my first potatoes on May 21.

I’ve not even sown any root vegetables yet. No point: Soil is still too cold. I may risk sowing some carrots tomorrow, but I’m not optimistic they will work. What a helluva winter it’s been.

The marvellous thing about being a gardener is that every year is different. Every year you see things you’ve not witnessed before. This is undoubtedly the latest spring I’ve ever seen, but records are there to be broken: £1,000 says I’ll see a colder and later one before I die.

Being a gardener also helps you understand the concept of ‘average’. You see with your own eyes, every year, that the seasons are wildly different. So many folks think ‘average’ means ‘normal’. There is no such thing as ‘normal’. There are only anomalies – sometimes extreme ones – that cancel each other out into a mean when you do the maths.

This year, we’re merely seeing the kind of weather that stops my May 21 potato harvest being ‘normal’.

Incredibly, there is sunshine today. At 12C, it’s not exactly the Sahara… but it sure feels like it after the winter we’ve endured.

I went to the plot. I planted onion sets, cleared the asparagus bed and spread manure. It felt good.

Why can’t I live in Italy? 12C is about as bad as it gets in, say, Sicily. I could grow melons, lemons and oranges – and peaches and nectarines. Bloody marvellous.

Instead, I’m living in this shithole. Buggeration.

I watched that crap TV show about the end of Pompeii last night.

Jeez, it was shit.

Took an hour to say what could have been said in 10 mins. Endless repeats, belaboured non-points, selling ancient news (Pompeiians killed by pyroclastic flow) as ‘new discoveries’ and breathy build-ups to rubbish ‘climaxes’.

Truly the BBC thinks we’re all fucking idiots these days.

The only bit I enjoyed – and I really, really enjoyed this – was one of the reconstruction scenes where a young Roman boy is seen carrying a pumpkin… a vegetable that would not be brought back to Europe from the New World until the early 16th century.

What makes it even juicier and funnier is the obvious care taken by the show researchers to get the right seasonal vegetable into the reconstruction. They knew Vesuvius erupted on August 24th, so they clearly chose something that they thought would be appropriate for an end of summer harvest.

You can imagine the conversation at the production company:

Young metrosexual researcher: “What vegetables get harvested in late August? Anyone know?”

(Slightly) older townee: “Er, dunno. French beans? Potatoes?”

Young metrosexual researcher: “Nah, don’t think so. Arthur off Eastenders dug his up in the autumn. I remember cos it was pissing with rain in the show.”

(Slightly) older townee: “All right, then: Pumpkins. I know that’s right cos they’re always eating them in autumn in America. Had some pumpkin pie on holiday in Boston once.”

Young metrosexual researcher: “Thanks. At least if we use the right vegetable we won’t get tons of pedantic crap about the wrong season from reactionary cocks in Tunbridge Wells.”

[If you have access to BBC iPlayer and want to see it for yourself, it's at 05:35 mins here]

I am pissed off with reading crap about the weather.

To take but one example, today, from the hundreds I read every year: this shit from the Daily Telegraph (a ‘respectable’ UK newspaper that, like many newspapers these days, is dying on its feet).

Nobody, in fact, is ‘predicting a heatwave’. Here is the UK meteorological office’s 3-month weather outlook (the basis for the DT story) and nowhere does it say anything about a coming heatwave. It only points out that if this weather pattern were replicated later in the year, with the high pressure a little further south, it would bring hot weather. Not that it will bring hot weather – not any time soon, not even ‘at the end of spring’.

The DT’s bollocks got picked up by the Independent today, another tottering UK newspaper. The scientific and meteorological ignorance and/or wilful fact-twisting, by the writers of both pieces, is staggering.

There are several reasons for this:

• Weather reports are usually written by newbies and youngsters (my US readers would call them ‘cub reporters’). They haven’t a clue about getting facts right, so they just write nonsense without ever realising that they betray their ignorance with every sentence
• Most are artsy, humanities grads who know fuck all about maths, science or statistics – and it shows
• “It’s only the weather”. It’s not an important issue, so nobody thinks it matters to be accurate. Editors shamelessly ham up the stories for maximum linkbait appeal
• Free-to-read online newspapers are increasingly desperate for traffic. It’s all they’ve got to sell ads against. As their readers desert them, and they get more desperate (and many are now very desperate indeed) their attempts to gain eyeballs by any means become more and more unethical and mendacious. Anything will do, if it might get somebody to click (picture galleries with each pic on a separate URL, utterly misleading ‘headlines’ etc etc)

This infuriates me every day. I CARE about weather. As a gardener, it matters very much to me. But I’m fed an endless diet of sensationalist shit and outright lies masquerading as serious weather reporting.

It also saddens me, because it’s a daily reminder of the parlous state of the western world’s news media. There is no money in news publishing any more, so there are fewer and fewer trustworthy folks doing it. Sure, there’s lots of reporting and ‘news’. But more and more of it is tendentious, unprofessional, dishonest, biassed, paid-for or just downright bad. Finding accurate, reliable, unpartisan reporting – even on something as uncontentious as the weather – is getting rather difficult.

Having said that, nobody seems to care. Which is perhaps the scariest part of all.

PS The Guardian’s at it this morning (Tues 26th) – suggesting that the Met Office is predicting that this weather will continue until the end of April. Of course it isn’t, and it won’t.

There is no gardening going on, as you may have inferred. Reason: It is still winter (even though it’s spring).

Here in the UK, the Gods appear to have cancelled spring. We have snow, floods and below-zero temperatures. March has in fact been colder than both December and January, which is quite an achievement. It hasn’t been this cold since 1962.

But hey, records are there to be broken. If it’s a stinker of a spring, it’s just the inevitable suite to a stinker of a summer and a shitty autumn. Of late, we have not had good luck with the weather.

The thing to remember, though, is that This Shit Happens. From 1310-1330, northern Europe suffered appalling weather. Millions starved. By 1325, the population was 25% smaller than 1310 – and all before the Black Death had killed a soul. According to contemporaries, it just rained and rained and rained. For 20 years. Unremittingly.

Let’s hope history’s not repeating itself.

One bright thought: This time last year it hadn’t rained for months and the UK authorities were imposing hosepipe bans. All I can say to that is: Ha ha, ha ha, ha bloody ha ha.

Welcome to the new United Kingdom, a country that the Index on Press Censorship has described as having “abandoned [the] democratic principle” of a free press. Here is the full quote:

“In spite of David Cameron’s claims, there can be no doubt that what has been established is statutory underpinning of the press regulator. This introduces a layer of political control that is extremely undesirable.”

Britain’s festering, dying freedoms

If you live in the UK, you probably think you live in a free country. I’m afraid you’re deluded. Here are two powerful reasons why:

• Defamation Law. For many years, this has kept lids on very dirty pots.  Robert Maxwell’s crimes went unreported in his lifetime because he used this legislation so aggressively. There are countless unpleasant truths known to broadcasters and journalists today that can’t be published for fear of expensive litigation. Defamation law may be slightly liberalised shortly – if Lord Puttnam’s absurd amends can be ditched – but it won’t change much.
• Privacy law. This actually falls under the Human Rights Act (although privacy issues are also involved in the Data Protection Act and older Law of Confidence). Perversely, existing legislation prevents the press from publishing many things most of us would feel we ought to know, but is frequently too weak to protect us from public and private sector misuse of our data.

These are the most censorious laws in the free world. So anti-free speech, in fact, that the USA enacted a law to protect its citizens from them.

They are soon to be joined by the most powerful state-regulated press watchdog in the free world. It will have the power to levy fines up to £1 million for breaches of its code and prevent its ‘members’ (who will be paying for all of it) publishing things in the first place. It will also operate an arbitration service for people wishing to bring claims. This will hand out cash in damages – and will be free for users (but paid for by the regulated publishers).

Any publisher who fails to belong to the new regulator will face exemplary damages (for which read VAST sums) if they lose civil actions in court. This is almost certainly against European law (ironically, the Human Rights Act), but it’s being forced through against legal advice.

A vicious assault on YOUR freedom of speech

You may well feel this is condign. You watched the Leveson Inquiry, you heard the evidence. You saw how disgracefully many UK popular papers behaved. Like most people (including me), you were revolted by it. Like me, you probably feel the popular press has lost all authority to lead any campaign against this new regulation.

But here’s the thing: whatever your dislike for the tabloid and/or Murdoch press, this proposed press regulation is a vicious and sustained assault on some of the most fundamental British liberties that we all take for granted. It will chill freedom of expression for everyone trying to expose wrongdoing, criminality, hypocrisy and dishonesty.

And it was all cooked up at 2am by a couple of politicians and some luvvies from Hacked Off.

This is no way to decide essential issues of constitutional freedom. If you doubt that, don’t take my word for it. Ask Ian Hislop, or the editor of the Spectator – both thoughtful people unafraid to stand apart from both the mainstream press and the establishment.

What can you do about it?

Write to your MP. Now, today. By all means tell him/her how much you hate journalists, the press, the tabloids… whatever. Tell him/her what a bunch of immoral bastards they/we are. You’d be right, and I’d agree.

But make it clear, also, that the issue of freedom of speech – for everyone and anyone – is too important to be coloured by rage against criminal behaviour (which is what all the phone hacking and other harassments aired at Leveson were, BTW) that strictly has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s too important to be cooked up by a handful of luvvie actors, their lawyers and politicians in their pyjamas at 2am.

Please don’t be the person who stood by and said nothing while a small pillar of your freedom was chipped away in front of your very eyes. Think of your children and the state you want them to be living in.