Soilman

So here’s a small selection of vegetables produced on the ‘unacceptably weedy’ Soilman allotment. And there’s a shit load more where they came from.

Weeds there may be, but I’m getting a bumper harvest. In fact, there’s usually a correlation between the amount of weed and the size of my harvest. In a good growing year, you get a lot of weed. Surprise!

I’m over the warning letter now. Have moved from irritation to resignation. If folks insist upon being cunts, there’s not much I can do about it.

Instead, I’m busy drying my monster onions and preparing for the big potato harvest tomorrow. It’s a month early because we’ve had a major attack of potato blight this year. My maincrop spuds lost the last of their foliage about a fortnight ago – so I’m not expecting a best-ever potato crop.

Still, I’m excited… because a preliminary dig in among the Golden Wonder mounds revealed some monsters. Looks like they’ve done OK, even with blight.

Summer time, and the living is shitty.

So much to do: I spent an hour (well, 54 minutes) after work last night harvesting these onions. They’re flawless and huge – one of my best ever crops – but time is always against me.

I love being at my plot on a warm evening. It’s one of my favourite places to be. But the pleasure is always diluted by the paranoid clock-watching.

I should just give up and get my eyeballs glued permanently to the face of my watch. Then if I have another arm grafted on to my torso, I may be better equipped for the modern world.

The unpatented Soilman Onion Preservation Process, in  steps:

1. Pull up onions. Leaving the stems on, pile them in a heap under glass/plastic for about 10 days
2. When the stems have dried and shrunk, cut them off about three inches above the bulb proper
3. Leave onions for another month or so, until fully dry
4. Peel off the loosest papery skin and store in mesh bags, suspended from the ceiling in a cool, dark place

Works for me.

Right. For all of you folks wanting to know how to plant onion sets…. here it is. The ultimate, definitive ‘how to’.

(For those of you wondering what I’m on about, trust me: there are LOADS of people who want to know how to do this. How do I know? Because I get spectacular numbers coming to the site from a ‘how to plant onion sets’ search in Google).

It’s piss easy. In 3 steps:

• Dig and rake over your onion bed for a smooth, level surface (I flatten my soil with a plank so I can place the sets perfectly)
• To plant each set, make a small hole about a inch deep with a finger, put in the set and gently firm soil around it to leave only the top ‘tail’ sticking above soil surface. DO NOT PUSH SETS INTO HARD SOIL – it damages their tiny roots
• Plant sets at least six inches (15cm) apart (preferably a little more) in rows a foot (30cm) apart

Er, that’s it. Honest – no mystery.

All you have to do now is weed the beds regularly and water in very dry weather (don’t water too often, though – onions tolerate and even prefer a bit of drought).

I cunningly shot these to look bigger than they are. Then I remembered my blog’s mission: ruthless honesty.

So here’s the truth: they’re bloody tiny. Some are barely bigger than the sets I planted back in March. For scale, the wires on the rack are about 4cm apart.

Oddly, though (especially odd given my usual gloomy outlook on these things), I’m strangely nonchalant about this. In fact, it barely registers on my give-a-fuck-o-meter.

Because I have genuinely given up on this season, psychologically speaking.

Downy mildew is a bugger. “A disease of cool, damp seasons,” opines Dr Hessayon, my usual consultant on these matters.

Utter bollocks, sadly (though Hessayon’s rarely wrong). We’re having one of the hottest, driest summers ever – and I’ve still got mildew.

Last year we had one of the wettest summers ever, and I had the best onions I’ve ever grown. Row upon row of flawless whoppers… which stored perfectly. In fact, we’re still eating them.

My theory is that mildew is caused not by damp and cold in summer, but in early Spring. We had dream Spring weather last year, and I reaped the rewards.

Not so 2010, which is turning out to be pretty dire for vegetable growers – at least, round my way. I’ve never had such a lousy crop of almost everything.

How are you doing?

Wretched climate. It’s astonishing how it can be so warm (18C yesterday), yet everything look so lifeless. I planted these onion sets three weeks ago; they’re making very slow and feeble growth.

Might have to get used to it, though, if the Icelandic volcano keeps erupting. Being me, I’m ghoulishly attracted to the doomiest predictions – that Eyjafjallajoekull will erupt for years, that north European air traffic will be semi-permanently disrupted, that trade will be decimated etc etc.

From a gardener’s point of a view, a year without a summer would clearly be tedious. But uncharacteristically, I see silver linings everywhere. To wit:

• Silence. I live not a million miles from Heathrow airport, and to be liberated from the 24/7 whine of jet engines is blissful
• No tourists. OK, so hotels and attractions will suffer – for which my sympathies. But the rest of us get a break from snap-happy, shuffling, sweating, gormless holidaymakers in London (I would set aside a special sort of Hell for those filthy, dreadlocked backpackers who insist upon using the London Underground during rush hour)
• A boost for shipping and trains – civilised forms of transport both. Plus it will be delightful seeing companies doing more conference-calling and video link-ups etc to avoid flying. In my own experience, most corporate air travel is strictly unnecessary – more about a company-funded jolly hundreds of miles from the spouse than for any essential business purpose

Right, it’s all change. No more non-gardening, non-blogging and non-doing.

This weekend, a multitude of jobs WILL get done:

• Planting raspberries (maybe even staking them and rigging wiring for support)
• Planting First Early potatoes
• Planting onion sets
• Digging up remaining Jerusalem artichokes and replanting a new row
• Digging over roots bed
• Weeding
• Hoeing
• Saving the planet and getting the girl

All in a day’s work for New Soilman (it’s like New Labour: full of promises and relaunches, but always the same old bollocks).

I’m still bitter about my shitty leeks. Like an Ethiopian airliner, they just failed to take off (can’t believe I typed that. I’m going straight to hell).

Here’s the enigma: I grow leeks for three straight years and they’re brilliant. Fat, healthy, perfect. Then they’re a washout for two years; a total disaster.

And I’ve done everything the same. No variation, no eccentricities.

The old boys at the plot mutter darkly about leek moth, but none of mine have any peculiar colourings, or other symptoms. They just haven’t grown.

I turn these things over in my mind during the long, dark nights. Never any answers, just more questions.

And so the winter passes.

Probably my best ever crop of onions. They’re nearly all big and sound; only had to eat two in a hurry (they had a bit of mildew and wouldn’t store).

The garlic, on the other hand, has been my worst ever crop. A total rust disaster.

These are the biggest bulbs I could harvest – only a dozen from two 15ft rows. I’m a bit gutted, but it’s hardly a surprise. The garlic has been getting more and more badly affected by rust every year.

So, albeit with a heavy heart, I’m making a Big Decision: I’m giving up on garlic. I’m a big believer in the WC Fields axiom: “If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then give up. No point making a damn fool of yourself.”