Soilman

I stumbled on this photo from last year and breathed a heavy sigh.

I did get a harvest of peas last week, but only enough to feed two concentration camp internees. Or perhaps one anorexic… on a diet.

Mind, I don’t feel so bad about the peas as I do about, say, the lousy onions. Peas are always a bugger to grow well, even in ‘good’ seasons. You’ve got the disgusting pea moth, whatever you do. And in my area, pigeons target pea plants with single-minded ruthlessness.

As I’m fond of saying (this year, at any rate): there’s always next year.

First visit to the allotment in 9 days. I’m not proud.

Worked like a demon to pull out about 20% of the weeds (1 hour’s work), plant out the remaining sweetcorn seedlings (30 mins), plant and net the cauliflowers (90 mins) and stick in these beans (20 mins).

So, success. And yet…

The whole place is still swamped in bloody weed. I’m too ashamed to show you the pictures.

Ah, sod it. I’m not really. I have no shame any more. So you can look forward to explicit, unexpurgated and red hot pictures of weedy allotment hell in the next installment.

Don’t say I don’t spoil you.

Hate shelling beans. After only seconds, your neck starts to ache. Then your fingers get cramp. It’s about as much fun as a wet weekend in Crewe.

But it’s worth it, because this is next year’s French bean crop. Store them in a cool, dry place, in paper envelopes, and all should be well.

If you’ve never saved seed before, beans are a great place to start. It’s almost impossible to cock it up; they pollinate easily, and saving the seed is a simply a question of leaving the pods on the plants until they’re huge… then picking and drying them.

Jeez, even I can do it.

A pretty standard basket of veg picked on the allotment at the moment. Lots of peas, LOTS of courgettes.

I’m always struck by the absurdity of those supermarket TV ads competing for prices on ‘a typical basket’.

Whatever they’re punting, it’s not my idea of a ‘typical basket’, that’s for sure.

In five years of allotmenteering, I’ve never cooked a single pea I’ve grown.

They’ve never got near the pan – too sweet and delicious. These only got cooked because I left them a fraction too long and they lost their sweetness.

They were OK. But on balance, I wish I’d scoffed them raw. As usual.

Some folks at my plot site are eating beans already, but mine went out rather late (May is one HELL of a month for a gardener, isn’t it? I chase my tail 24/7 trying to get everything sown, brought on, repotted, planted out, watered, weeded etc etc etc).

This lot will soon be glutting along with everything else, and relatives will be shrinking from my pleas to take courgettes. In late July I become like the Ancient Mariner; I accost total strangers in the street to recite my allotment travails and beg them to relieve me of a marrow.

PS For anyone interested in the business of journalism – what I do with my professional hat on – you may have something to contribute to the conversation about journalism’s online future I’ve been having with Simon at Freelance Unbound.

When I’m not worrying about my courgettes, this is the Big Topic that troubles/concerns/maddens me. It’s fallen to my generation of editorial folk  to ‘fix’ a system that’s been more or less stable for 500 years – but which is now comprehensively broken. And none of us has much of a clue what to do.

These have been a long time coming. They’re still not ready,  of course, but at least the anticipation can begin.

There is nothing – nothing – so delicious as fresh peas. They’re just stupendous; fresh, sweet and irresistible.

I always intend to make complicated salads and soups with them. Dainty morsels drizzled with this and puréed with that. But I never get round to it.

Peas don’t make it as far as a pan. I shell them and scoff them raw, watching TV with Mrs Soilman on the couch. Usually in vast quantities, such that we suffer noisome digestive repercussions.

Ah, summer.

Here’s the last lot of seedlings to go out on the plot. They’re dwarf French beans that started out as Purple Queen but have been selected by me over two seasons.

I’m expecting this, the third generation, to be ultra-vigorous and productive, because I’ve saved seed beans from the strongest, healthiest plants. I’m trying to do more of this a) to save money, and b) to help diversify our vegetable varieties. Find out more about this from Patrick’s pages about seed saving, and the seed savers network.

But it’s all academic unless I can get them planted out… which isn’t easy in this useless rain. Why useless? Because it pitters and patters in dribs and drabs without actually getting down to the plant roots.

We had a ‘thunderstorm’ this morning that delivered precisely half a centimetre of rain. Half a sodding centimetre. I could piss more than that.

Onions have done well. This warm weather we’ve been having is making them grow super fast.

Unfortunately, the garlic (very kindly donated by Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots)  is showing early signs of garlic rust. See the yellowing leaf tips of the plants (on the right). Patrick’s a mine of information about rust, but he too says he’s seeing warning signs of the disease.

Can’t say it’s any great surprise – I get rust every year – but I never get used to the disappointment. Just once I’d love to raise a pure, clean crop of fat garlic bulbs untainted (and unstunted) by rust.

Sigh.

Everything’s bursting at the seams, desperate to get out on the plot. I’ve got sweetcorn, French beans, courgettes, squashes, pumpkins and gherkins all jostling for space in my crappy mini-greenhouse.

But I daren’t put any of them out. Too dangerous; we often have late frosts in the second half of May. Last year a -3C frost blasted everyone’s early potatoes on May 21st.

So I’m stuck with everything until June 1st. I have pots in every nook and cranny of the house and garden, and am considering which body orifices could be pressed into service to provide more space…