Soilman

Er, gosh. Wow. Can it really be that long since I last updated this blog?

Dear, oh dear. I’ve not gone a month without posting since I started this nonsense four years ago. I guess circumstances must really be as difficult as they’ve felt. I won’t bore you with the details.

Anyway, I’ve actually been to the plot and dug up some veg. Carrots, my reliable standby, have been excellent this year. We’ve had buckets and buckets of ‘em. A welcome consequence of the rain that otherwise ruined our summer (shame about the chickweed, which has run rampant in the wet).

One nice thing: I’m just back from Rome, one of my favourite places EVAH. Spent three days simply walking… and walking. Really the most wonderful city in the world: beautiful, exciting, stimulating, moving. I’m footsore, but delighted.

Just the one disappointment: couldn’t get into the Galleria Borghese, so missed the ticklesome statue of Pauline Bonaparte, posed from life as she reclined, Venus-like and semi-naked, on a divan. When asked how she could possibly have posed naked, she replied: “Oh it wasn’t cold. There was a stove in the room.”

Love it that she’s still embarrassing her wretched brother all these centuries later.

What an miserable summer it’s been. Even September – usually dependably lovely – has let us down this year.

Having said that, the endless rain has given me some astonishing crops. This is just one trugful. I’ve been getting this every week for months.

That’s not to say everything’s been good, of course. Potatoes got blight VERY early and yields suffered accordingly. The corn didn’t like it much, either.

But everything else has gone bananas. I’ve had the best beetroot, onions, courgettes and carrots I can ever remember. The courgettes, in particular, are a menace. I am already a leper to my neighbours – to be avoided at all costs, lest I attempt to foist a courgette upon them.

How did you do this season?

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.

So the world financial system is about to crash around our ears, and London is burning.

The perfect time, then, to report that I’ve grown a heart-shaped beetroot.

So that’s nice.

PS (And you just knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, didn’t you?) To my non-UK readers, who are probably aghast and amazed that such things can happen in frightfully ‘nice’ and civilised Britain: Here’s an explanation.

Britain is a rioting nation. Is now, always has been. The cause and the ‘answer’ are the same they’ve always been: the have-nots are fed up with their ‘have-not’ status and the enormous disparity between them and the ‘haves’ (the gap’s been growing for about 25 years).

This will play out the way it always plays out. First, we’ll get on top of it – because of course the law-abiders and taxpayers are the majority, we have the money and we have the material/manpower. Then there will be enquiries and reviews and reports – as usual. They’ll say what they always say: That these luckless, under-privileged people are mistreated and deserve more.

Then we’ll do what we always do: Bribe them with more state handouts and more community support and more locally manufactured ‘jobs’ (in truth, state sinecures paid from taxation) and more ‘stuff’ to enable them to live the way they want. And when we’ve forgotten to do that again, in about 15-20 years, they’ll give up their favourite post-modernist tactic – moral blackmail – and resort, again, to burning down our cities until we re-bribe them.

Naturally, we’d prefer to give them fishing rods, not fish. But a) we’re too mean to spend the money and make the effort required to properly educate and assimilate them, and b) they’re too debased and feral to respond to education and opportunities anyway. They prefer the bribes.

So bribery it is.

This is how Britain works. It is one of our little eccentricities. In less fortunate nations, which can’t afford to bribe their underclass, these people are starved routinely and shot when they get out of hand.

But here in the UK, we don’t like that. It’s messy and well, just not cricket.

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.

Well these are pretty shit, aren’t they?

I sowed them in April. By now they should be double this size… maybe bigger. It’s been so hot and dry they never stood a chance. Half never even germinated – and I’ve never seen rows of Bolthardy beetroot with a third of the expected plants missing.

I’m watering almost every day at this point. That’s a July/August regime. Yet I’m barely making a dent in the arid conditions.

Nothing’s growing. By dint of massively soaking the spuds once a week, I’ve just about kept them going. Most everything else is sulking, unable to put on any growth through lack of water.

It’s all very gloomy.

Enough of the deranged rantings already. You guys may start to suspect I’m some kind of twisted, embittered old bore (Too late – imaginary Ed).

Here, instead, is a confessional photograph – just to warm the hearts of those who may still be under the illusion that I know what I’m doing (Again, too late – imaginary Ed). It’s not in soft focus. There was shit on the lens.

I tell everyone at the plot that I left last year’s parsnips to seed on purpose. This is, of course, bollocks. Truth: I got bored of eating them and ran out of time to pull them out (Translation: too lazy – imaginary Ed). Now they have roots half way to Sydney, Australia.

Hey ho. I WILL get some great seed from them, so every cloud etc etc.

PS Anyone out there a WordPress whizz who can tell me how to get rid of this fucking imaginary Editor?

Ladies and gentlemen, you may be looking at my most successful crop in 2010.

Yes, these humble beetroots are about the only things I’ve grown that I can be proud of this year. And I’m not that proud, frankly.

It’s all OK, though, because I’ve rationalised everything. It’s just a one-off lousy year. Shit happens. Next year, I’ll be drowning in veg again.

Everything’s going to be just fine.

Right?

Well it’s a funny old year when your best crop is parsnips. For me, this is a first.

Parsnips are always OK – you know, forgettably acceptable. I have germination issues most years, but that’s about the limit of the grief parsnips give. They grow, to a pretty standard size, and I eat them with barely a moment’s thought or gratitude.

All that’s changed in 2010, as the rest of my vegetable plot dies around me. Gone is my blithe indifference, replaced by quivering gratitude for the parsnips’ ploddy, undemanding, stolid performance.

They are the new love of my gardening life.

I’ve just about caught up with the weeding and got all the crops in… on midsummer’s day.

Hey. Better late than never.

This season isn’t going to be my finest hour. I’m late with everything, the weather’s been SHIT (dry, cold, miserable) and I’ve not had time to plant more than 60% of my plot.

Oh, and now we’re going to have a drought. Fucking great. Wake me up when it’s all over.