Soilman

If you’re unlucky enough to have caught my rantings on Twitter, you’ll know we’ve had rain in south-eastern England.

A fair bit, I’m relieved to report: more than an inch on Sunday night and some good, strong, prolonged showers since.

But you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m not hanging out the bunting… yet. After four months of almost total drought, even the 3-4cm of rain we’ve had in the last few days is a piffling drop in the ocean.

I did a bit of digging on my vegetable plot last night, and the ground is still utterly dry below half a spade’s depth.

We need a LOT more rain where that lot came from.

PS One very good thing about the rain is that it’s arrived just in time to bulk up the early new potatoes. A heartfelt ‘thank you’, then, to the Higher Power.

A follow-up to my rain rant…

This Spring is running true to form with last. It’s already three weeks since the last significant rainfall, and the weather forecasts are exactly the same: scattered showers are always predicted for tomorrow or the day after… but on the morning of ‘rain day’ the forecast mysteriously changes. The showers are suddenly nowhere to be seen.

I swear these guys forecast by looking out of the sodding window.

PS Today I was reduced to watering my potatoes. In April.

I can’t believe I’m already moaning about lack of rain. Jeez, it’s only April.

Reviewing my last few years of posting, I notice that the rain theme runs through my blog like shit through sewers. I whinge about it endlessly. Too much rain, too little rain, wrong sort of rain… you name it, I’m boring for Britain about it.

But the overriding leitmotif is drought. ‘We need rain’ is my nagging, plaintive refrain. There’s never enough.

This has worsened in the last 2-3 years. When I first started my vegetable plot, 6 years ago, drought wasn’t an issue. We had dry weeks, sure. Even the odd fortnight of sunshine. But never months on end without rain.

Nowadays I expect drought. It’s an annual event – usually bad, sometimes serious. Last year, I counted 140 days without rain from early March. This year, the pattern’s repeating.

Two swallows do not a summer make… but obviously I suspect global warming. I live in a dry part of the UK, so I guess we’d see the effects here first. I’m certainly feeling them. They’re making my gardening painful.

The weird thing is that I’m almost alone in noticing this. The folks who surround me every day, with rare exceptions, are urban office workers (as, indeed, am I). They have no connection to gardening, or farming, or anything much that depends upon the weather.

When I moan about lack of rain, they listen politely. Most nod kindly, perhaps offering a ‘Really? Wow, I hadn’t noticed’.

But mostly they just stare at me suspiciously. Their thoughts are clear: “Poor bastard. Spends too much time with his marrows. He’s lost it utterly.”

Please, please reassure me that I’ve not lost it utterly. Obviously if you live in Wales or Scotland, you – like my colleagues – will be wondering what the fuck I’m going on about.

But is anyone else suffering the drought nightmare?

Apologies for radio silence here. As UK readers will know, this is because it’s IMPOSSIBLE TO GO OUTSIDE. Winter has returned, with a vengeance, and I’ve been forced to chain myself to a radiator with a large box of chocolates (yes, at gunpoint… since you ask).

This is bad enough, but I’m living with a cat who takes news of bad weather even more badly than I do – and who blames me for it. When I let him out in the morning to test the temperature of the patio with his paws, he turns a look of such malevolent hatred on me that I fully expect to be turned to stone.

So it’s with special fervour that I’m praying for a bit of sunshine.

PLEASE.

To adopt an expression more familiar to my US readers: The weather sucks a big one.

Jeez, but it’s rained here. I don’t live in Flood Central, thank God, but I’m living like a rat in a hole. Can’t go out without getting soaked, whatever the day, whatever the hour.

The most irritating consequence is that my vegetable plot has had zero attention for almost three weeks; the only times I’ve not been working, it’s been pissing. Extra hard.

So many apologies for the absence, on this gardening blog, of any gardening.

Another splendid example of His sense of humour: Took today off work to do some digging on the allotment, and was greeted with this.

It’s not just raining. It’s coming down in streams as thick as pencils. If I stood stark naked in the garden for five minutes wielding a loofah, I’d have a convincing shower (and my neighbour would have a convincing embolism).

So what to do? Well, I could rearrange my seed drawer. Or perhaps study the outside pebble-dash through the conservatory window.

But I won’t. Instead, I’ll flob on the sofa watching daytime TV, then burp and fart my way through an hour or two with YouTube. Then I’ll give up in despair and go back to work.

Jeez Louise.

I must have been crazy to write that last post. First rule of gardening: NEVER pray for rain. Sunshine, yes – whatever you say, it won’t happen in the UK – but asking for rain hereabouts is like asking for the pox in a whorehouse.

So, predictably, I’m now living in a swamp. Only my roses seem to be enjoying the deluge. Everything else has its head down, hunched up against the horizontal rain.

Worst of all is the wind, which blows perpetually, as sharp as a guillotine blade. It’s been cutting through me for five days now. Much more of it and I’ll go crazy. Clearly I could never live on one of those western isles up in Scotland. The wind would put me in the funny farm in no time.

Dear reader: If YOU live in the western isles, do tell how you cope with the wind. I need the full ‘Gale Survival Guide’.

Phew. Had a few days to cool off and come to my senses. Back to normality.

This lack of rain thing is becoming a problem, isn’t it? I know you guys Oop North have had a lot, but down in the SE of the UK it’s dry as a bone. My allotment’s like a desert. Don’t usually see this until July.

Absurdly, I’m writing this under a Met Office weather warning. By the time you read it, I’ll either be ranting anew about inaccurate weather forecasts, or building an Ark in the attic. See you on the high seas.

We got about 2 inches of rain in the last 24 hours. It’s lowered my morale, but raised the level in my summer water butt.

And of course, there’s Christmas to look forward to.

If there’s one thing worse than freezing cold, pissing rain, the credit crunch, the currency crash, inflation and deflation, it’s Christmas.

Message to Santa: Come down my chimney this Christmas and I’ll shoot your fat, red arse.