Soilman

I am a non-conformist. Not a rebel, note – rebellion’s for idealists and fools – but more a square peg in a round hole. Wherever I am in life, I never seem to fit.

I used to hate this. As a young man, I despaired about it. Young people live in terror of being ‘different’. When you know beyond all doubt that you are a total weirdo, being a 16-year-old is purest shit.

I’ve embraced my outsider status over the years. For good or ill, it’s me. I’m simply not mainstream, and there it is.

On the other hand, I enjoy flirting with convention – and I’m religious about planting my first early potatoes on St Patrick’s Day.

In common with folks up and down the UK, I was digging shit and planting potatoes this weekend – and loving it.

It’s a weekend of promise and optimism, and a job to be savoured. Hurry up, Summer!

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.

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.

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

So there.

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).

Spring is within view, at last; when the seed potato order arrives, it’s not far off.

I’m being very unadventurous: Desiree, Orla, Kerr’s Pink. The only slightly unusual one is Ratte, a terrific French second early/early maincrop that I’ve become fond of. Utterly delicious salad potato.

Who knows? I may even go to the allotment at some point. After, er, a month’s absence.

Harvested the last of the spuds today. Very disappointing; small tubers and not many of them. Two 15ft rows filled only half a sack. Normally I get a sackful and a bit.

I’m assuming it was the hot, dry June. Great for sweetcorn, but not ideal for potatoes, which do a lot of their top growth in June. Even with that wet July, the haulms didn’t grow as big as usual.

Hey ho. Forced optimism is not – as you may already know – my bag. But the great thing about gardening is that there’s always next year.

PS OMG… things could be worse

At this time of year, I’d normally be ranting about courgettes: how many I’ve got, how quickly they turn into marrows, how I can’t get rid of them etc etc.

(See? I almost went off on one there).

But I’m not going to inflict that upon you (not today, anyway). Instead, I want to sing the praises of the Ratte potato.

Granted, it’s French. But that’s a small black mark against a spud that is truly excellent in every other way. Its yield is prodigious (albeit with small-ish tubers in a dry Spring), it tolerates a bit of blight, tastes absolutely delicious and is very versatile in cookery. As a salad potato, it beats Charlotte hands down.

In short, Ratte gets the Soilman Mark of Full Approval. For what that’s worth.

If you’re looking to try a new early (they grow fine as second earlies – ready in mid to late June), you could do worse than this one.