Me and my celebrity vegetables

2 May 2009

And so the vegetable patch shenanigans begin. I bought the seeds I needed today and enjoyed a day in the sunshine milling about on my patch. Doing one tiny job at a time, wandering around in between. Perhaps checking email, perhaps rescuing a stag beetle, perhaps dropping a cutworm into the pond for the fish to ~~eat~~ ignore. And for all my work, at the end of the day it looks as though I’ve just planted a bunch of sticks and watered only some of them.

First into the ground were the cucumbers. Celebrity cucumbers. Alan Titchmarsh-endorsed “Marketmore” cucumbers. I’d actually wanted to get the Burpless Tasty Green cucumbers, yes, mainly because of the funny name. But unfortunately they were sold-out, the rest of the local gardeners having clearly been of the same mind as me, but having got to the garden centre sooner. Outdoor cucumbers are not as smooth-skinned as the cucumbers we usually see, they’re a bit bobbly and weird, but that just makes them all the more suited to pushing through the neighbour’s letterboxes and shouting, “The Martians have landed!”.

For the carrots and beetroot I’m using seed from the same packets I bought last year. Um, naughty gardener. But they’re still in date, so screw it. And if they don’t grow, then screw them. I’ve also left room for a second row of each, which is very grownup of me. But if I don’t mention sowing second rows in the next few weeks, maybe you guys could remind me? Otherwise I might be left standing gormlessly up the end of the garden, wondering what I was going to do with those big gaps between the blue markers.

The sweetcorn has been planted in the traditional Laura Ingalls Wilder manner: three seeds at each marker, one for the blackbird, one for the crow, that’ll leave just one to grow. Though last year the seeds didn’t pay proper attention and misheard this as: three seeds at each marker, each to mysteriously rot without so much as an apology.

My runner beans are also in the ground and I’ve bought some appropriately-named bean string for them to climb. It’s heavy, coarse stuff and the bale is incredibly tightly wound. Somehow I don’t think the mouse would find it as an inviting place to nest as he did the twine.

The aubergines are still moseying along in their pots, the first signs of their proper leaves now showing between the cotyledons. With any luck they’ll finally pick up the pace a bit soon and in a while I’ll be transplanting them to the patch of ground beneath the kerria.

That just leaves the tomatoes. The ordinary-sized tomatoes were planted in pots indoors a few days ago and I spied the very first signs of life in one of the pots today. Eventually they’ll be planted out between the rows of carrots and beetroot. I also want to grow some cherry tomatoes, so I made sure to get some seed from the garden centre. Celebrity seed. Prince Charles-approved seed. Which means that Prince Charles owes me £2.49, because when I opened up my seed box back home, I discovered two packets of exactly the same variety of “Gardener’s Delight” cherry tomato seed staring back at me. Both of which I’d gained free of charge from elsewhere, but had no idea I had. And to add insult to injury, these cherry tomatoes are not a bush variety. Meaning that they’ll need staking. Meaning I’ll have to put a stick in the ground. Meaning MORE WORK FOR ME. Damn it all, Charles.