Return of the gardening mojo

All of a sudden I’m back in the mood for tackling my vegetable patch, no doubt helped by the fact that I’ve been playing a few levels of this game, which tends to make me think that I could run a little farm NO PROBLEM AT ALL, WHAT DO YOU MEAN CLICKING MY MOUSE IS NOT THE SAME AS ACTUALLY HARVESTING WHEAT WITH MY BARE HANDS? The graphics are so bright and the veggies look so lush that they just make me think, mmm, me want to grow things. Me want them to grow magically and if they could not fail inexplicably like last year, then that would be just tops.

So out came the garden plan, the ruler and the nice pencil that I took from the hotel in Saarbrücken. Then came a whole lot of wondering about what scale I’d used when I drew the plan. When I’m wondering the same thing next year, let’s all remember that one big square equals a foot. Which would have been more obvious had I not counted the little squares as being 16 per big square, when in fact there were only 12 per square.

A good gardener rotates their crops, ensuring for example that a brassica is not planted in the same soil in which a brassica grew the year before. A gardener like me says, well I’ve only got so much space and if the sweetcorn didn’t actually grow last year, then it doesn’t count and so puts the sweetcorn in pretty much the same place as before. Where it had better damn well grow this time, because if it doesn’t, I may have to write a strongly worded letter to someone. Possibly to Thursday.

This is the plan I came up with last night (click on the photo to see the notes at Flickr). Starting on the left, I shall try a few cucumber plants, training them up off the ground onto trellis/supports.

At the bottom of the patch I’ll be putting the dwarf aubergine plants that are currently just spindly little seedlings in pots indoors. It’s about time they grew some proper leaves and stopped looking quiet so pathetic, so I’ve moved them from the den into the conservatory in an effort to warm them up a bit.

Carrots worked well for me last year, partly because I finally learned to thin seedlings when I’m told to. It turns out that instructions are sometimes for my benefit. I’ll be planting a couple of rows, a couple of weeks apart, so as to have a staggered harvest (which does not mean I’ll be drinking heavily in the intervening weeks) (but does not necessarily rule it out).

I’ve not tried tomatoes before and being new to the game I am of course aiming straight off for the incredible harvest that Lee and Debbie had a few years back, producing approximately 3 tonnes of tomatoes that ended up with us making pots and pots of chutney. I’ll be growing bush varieties of ordinary toms and cherry toms, rather than cordon varieties. This is because I prefer to succeed with as little effort as possible and bush varieties don’t need staking and supporting and all that guff. They just grow.

Beetroot is something of which I’m very fond in my summertime sandwiches, so I want to have another go at growing that. Last year I did actually plant some beetroot seed, but bugger all happened. I’m hoping that that was simply the curse of 2008 and that this year will be a bit more like 2007 in terms of bounty in the patch.

Finally I’ll also be doing a few vines of runner beans. I’m not mad about them myself, but Mum likes them and I’ve been denying her a home-grown crop for the past couple of years. I plan to grow them up the back of Juniper Lodge, either pinching out the tops when they reach roof height, or letting them grow further up canes, we’ll see.

Germany calling

One day at school in 1998 after I’d made my A Level subject choices – History, English Literature and Theatre Studies – I was leaving our empty classroom when my German teacher, Mrs Utting, said to me that I could do A Level German if I wanted to, I was good enough to do so. It was nice to hear that, but it wasn’t for me. Languages never came naturally to me at school and the idea of another two years of German lessons just didn’t appeal.

Yet for the past eight and a half years I’ve been running a website about an Austrian musician. It is translating German articles about him, singing his songs and corresponding with German-speakers over this time that has brought my German way beyond what it was in 1998. I’ve re-taught myself the grammar and have picked up a much larger vocabulary, though it’s now somewhat more centered on the exploits of my musician than on asking for directions, or buying a stamp.

Since so much of my German has come from reading and writing I’ve been somewhat shy when it comes to speaking, as I’d had no practice. But it’s something that I’m now improving and so when the phone rang this morning at 8.30am (a time at which I’m not exactly “at the office” yet) I was so pleased with myself for handling the unexpected call from Germany. I was able to understand the lady calling without the slightest problem and talked almost effortlessly to her, these strange foreign words tumbling out of my mouth, not just in the right order and with the right meaning, but also giving my opinion on the subject at hand.

I think Mrs Utting would have been proud … because, dammit, I know I was!

Now if I could just teach those guys over there about the one hour time difference…

Fluffy and cute

What more could you possibly want?

Click for the set

And then maybe when I’ve recovered from the 15 hours I’ve just spent processing hundreds of concert photos, I’ll tell you about the trip to Saarbrücken.

In a county where wildlife eats the food rather than the feeder

We went to Northants last week to see Granpop and Aunty Ann and Uncle Terry. They get a lot of interesting birds visiting their respective gardens, which always make for some good entertainment. Of course, one way to keep them away is to get your camera out. Nonetheless I got a few garden shots at Granpop’s, where bird seed is scattered across the patio to attract the winged hordes. There were chaffinches, pigeons, tits and starlings and – bonus! – not one of them bit me on the shoulder.

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I bet Laura Ingalls Wilder never had this trouble

I had some weedy little turnips that I thought might be a nice treat for the Shetland ponies and goats that I occasionally walk past on a wander in the fields, so I dropped them into my rucksack along with my camera and cycled up the little hill to feed them.

On one side of the path was the field with the Shetlands and the goats, but they were at first nowhere to be seen. On the other side of the path was a field with a big horse (horsus maximus) and another Shetland. Suddenly a Shetland in the first field noticed me and came trotting along the fence to see me. I offered it a turnip, which was duly sniffed and poked, but ultimately spurned. Ok, be that way.

I turned to the big horse, who now had his head over the fence, chopping on the evidently much greener grass by the path. I held up one of the bigger turnips on my flat palm and he took it gratefully and ate it calmly.

Turning my back on him I went back to the other fence and a second Shetland came careering across the field towards me. Hmm, he’s eager, I thought. No, not eager so much as crazy. He wasn’t pleased to see me and ran up and down the fence line, huffing and puffing. Then as I reached down to pick up my bag to move away, he shoved his head over the electric fence and bit me on the shoulder. Clearly he’d been told after some earlier moment of aggression to pick on someone his own size and he wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity when it stood before him holding a bag of turnips.

I stood back from the fence, now with a nice grass stain on my jumper and a bruise beginning on my shoulder and watched as the mad thing ran up and down in front of me. He stopped for a moment to smell a big pile of dung on the grass and then let off a big fart. Which at least left me feeling like the more civilised of the pair of us.

I have worms

In an effort to suppress the uninvited slug population of my vegetable patch I bought worms online. Not the kind that infect PCs, but nematode worms. Magic microscopic worms that, I don’t know, eat slugs from the inside or something gross. But they do this below the surface of the soil, so I need never know about it.

The worms arrived through the post in a little carton that needed refrigerating. Note to the manufacturers: if you want someone to put your produce in the fridge, maybe you should rethink the packet illustration of a GIANT SLIMY SLUG COMING TO GET YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN WHILE YOU SLEEP. But I don’t work in marketing, so what do I know?

There were apparently twelve million worms in the packet, but as I didn’t have a microscope to hand I was unable to check the veracity of the claim. I may well have just paid £12 for a small tray of sawdust. I divided the dry, but slightly spongey material into five portions, one portion per 6 litres of water in my watering can. The instructions said that I needed to use the coarse rose. I looked at the rose on my can. Pfft, I dunno, they’re holes, what are you calling coarse? Answer: bigger than the holes I had. The water started off sprinkling out of the can just fine, but then slowed to a dribble as 2.4 million nematode worms settled inside the rose and refused to come any further. So I took the rose off and swung the can as I watered to try and scatter the water somewhat.

With four cans of water and worms I’d pretty much covered my patch and so with the fifth I was standing on soggy ground here and there, the mud sticking to my boots. Having emptied the fifth and final can I then had to be sure to clean off my boots as much as I could. Otherwise several thousand nematode worms were going to be crawling around my boots wondering where all the slugs were. And that would have been weird.

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Fair weather farmer

The sun’s beginning to shine, the air is beginning to warm up and so I’m starting to think properly about my vegetable patch. Nobody should have improper thoughts about their vegetable patch. I still haven’t quite settled on what I’ll grow this year, nor yet where in the patch I would grow it, but I have now said goodbye to the last remnant’s of last year’s not-so-good gardening.

The turnips, like the onions before them, had fallen completely out of kilter with what they were meant to be doing when. Now in the spring their roots were swelling and their tops were taking off too, some on the verge of running to seed. So I’ve dug them up. There’s a 365g harvest for you, before I’ve even begun.

I’ve also been through my seed box and hiked out all the out-of-date seed. No doubt it will now grow in my compost heap just to spite me. Going through the various packets that I’d been given by Fernie and Alex last year I found some aubergine seeds still in date. On the whole I’m much more inclined to stick a seed in the ground, water it and see what happens. If nothing happens, that’s clearly down to the weather, if I get a good crop, then, well, I’m obviously a gardening genius.

Planting seeds in little pots and keeping them indoors under little plastic bag greenhouses is more unusual for me, but that’s what I’ve done with the aubergines. The instructions said to do so and I was evidently placated enough by the later instruction for inaction “It is not necessary to pinch out growth or sideshoot” to be good and do it. So eight little aubergine seeds are upstairs in the den and should germinate in about 10 days or so. They produce little golf ball-sized fruits on dwarf plants, so they should be pretty cute. Which is an adjective commonly used in connection with aubergines.