Fair weather farmer

6 April 2009

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I’ve also been through my seed box and hiked out all the out-of-date seed.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.