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.

Quite a mixed bag tonight. I appear to have grown Britain’s biggest beetroots to go with the exhibition cauliflowers. I may have to make that weird summer salad the Greeks like so much – you know, the one that’s a mixture of cooked and raw veg, purple because of the fresh beetroot. Rather nice.

This is turning into an extraordinary year in the vegetable garden. From a very inauspicious start, I’m getting bumper crops in almost all departments.

The ghastly weather helps, of course. Rain sucks, but it makes fierce vegetables.

I totally see why our forebears thought potatoes were ornamental. Planted en masse, they’re very beautiful. Especially the ones with pink and violet flowers.

I’m growing some old maincrop favourites this season – Desirée, Vitelotte – but also some new ones: Golden Wonder (I have a weakness for chips) and a weird one called Mr Yetholm’s Little Gypsy. The latter will probably be shit. It’s clearly special interest (and therefore special needs), and the plants have not exactly thrived thus far.

The Golden Wonder, on the other hand, have produced the tallest and bushiest potato haulms I ever saw. They’re massive.

Does this mean I’ll get a massive crop? Or – as my jaundiced/experienced/cynical heart tells me – lots on top and fuck-all underneath?

So I thought my new potatoes might be ready. So I dug up one plant to see.

This is the result: one egg-sized potato and one pissy rabbit turd. This represents a return on my planting investment of a half potato.

Some return.

There are no words up to the task of adequately describing my disappointment. Digging the first new potatoes is usually one of the highlights of my vegetable growing year.

Obviously not this year. The only consolation is that it’s now pissing with rain pretty much 24/7, so after the drought we’ve had I might at last see things catching up a bit.

Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger.

This year really is turning out just like last. No rain, then spuds frosted in May. Bang go my hopes of new potatoes before June.

Oddly, though, I already feel stirrings of what the French – with genius – call j’en-foutisme (untranslatable in proper English, but rough meaning: “Don’t-give-a-fuck-ism”). So last year was shit, now this one is too.

So what? At 42 years old, perhaps it’s time I started worrying about things that actually matter?

Update, 7th May: I see from my incoming Google traffic that LOTS of you, like me, got caught out by the frost. Don’t panic if you’ve not seen this before: Potatoes DO recover from frost damage. It just sets them back a few weeks and may slightly lower yield. A pain, but not a disaster.

Well I finally did some gardening. First early spuds are in the ground. Yippee!

Sharp-eyed readers may notice that there is, er, rather a gap beneath this post where others used to be. Reason: after running a standard, routine upgrade earlier today, I found my whole site was in the toilet. Complete database scramble and utter fuck-up.

More recent back-ups failed to work (don’t ask), so I’ve had to restore the site at roughly where it was six months ago. Desperately irritating, but at least it’s not all lost forever.

Huge apologies to regular readers for this. I’m trying to find out if my host took a more recent back-up that I can use to get the site back to where it was yesterday.

In the meantime… well, a huge sigh of relief. If anybody fancies quoting back at me my own mantra about the importance of regular site back-ups, do go ahead. I deserve a good kicking.

I just liked this picture. It has absolutely no advisory merit whatsoever, but it came out nicely (by mistake, naturally).

So there.

Ever seen a properly frosted potato haulm? You have now.

This is the wreckage of last night’s sub-zero attack, which has blackened and destroyed every bit of potato leaf above ground – on our whole allotment site. Nobody’s escaped.

Now normally I wouldn’t be too worried. We’ve had late Spring frosts before, and the potatoes – albeit damaged – have always shrugged it off.

This year, though, I confess I AM worried – very worried. The potatoes had been fighting to put on any growth in the cold weather, and this is the worst frost damage I’ve ever seen. If they do manage to regrow, I’m assuming the plants – and therefore the tubers – will struggle to reach a decent size.

And another thing, now guaranteed: we’re going to be digging the first new potatoes MUCH later than usual.

This year is just weird. Definitely the coldest, bleakest growing season I’ve ever known.

I’ve waited for this for what feels like a year. I’ve been desperate to get the bloody potatoes in, but Life has conspired against me for weeks.

It was a lovely afternoon, but Nature is slow to bestir Herself this year. I saw my first daffodil on Wednesday (a pretty mangy specimen), but of Spring there is still barely a sign. No Forsythia, no Camellias, nothing. Have you seen any?

Folks keep saying a hot summer follows a cold winter. But the summer of 1963, following the ‘Great Freeze’ of 62/63, was apparently unremarkable… so I’m not holding my breath. This Global Warming thingamajig ain’t all it’s cracked up to be – in the UK, at any rate.

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).