AlexMitchell

In the fright garden

Something very exciting/deeply terrifying is about to happen, in a garden kind of way, over the next couple of days. I can’t say what it is yet because I’m too busy a) panicking b) snipping and deadheading and c) secretly wondering if I could get away with buying a packet of runner beans from Sainsbury’s and tying them onto my runner bean wigwam with fishing line.

‘I’m too busy to eat!’ I shouted at D when she suggested that a 6-month pregnant woman who’s spent all day tying things in while standing on a chair should probably have lunch.

All will be clear by Monday afternoon (when I’ll be resting in a darkened room)…

Toby Buckland, new king of the Long Border

Just goes to show – you slave away long enough building woodland enclosures for UKTV Gardens daytime and writing features for Kitchen Garden magazine in which you show how an electric drill can bring a whole new exciting spin to the kitchen (if I remember correctly, making holes in potatoes and stuffing them with carrots) and you get the new main presenting gig on Gardener’s World.

All you budding gardening presenters out there unafraid to bounce around in a red sweatshirt with the logo Garden Invasion (or some such) on it, to wax lyrical over a shower curtain as an exciting al fresco feature and to concoct over-exuberant pretend team rivalry with another presenter in a different brightly coloured sweatshirt, take heart!! You too could eventually be presiding over the Long Border.

Good luck, Toby, at least you’re not the BFG.

Step away from the raspberry bush.

Last year I wrote a Sunday Telegraph column about how my Autumn Bliss raspberries tasted really disappointing – ‘like diluted fruit squash wrapped in cellulose’ – prompting a Mr Chris Stephens to email in defence of their taste, adding, incidentally, that ‘Your description of the 2007 as “the great raspberry washout” is way over the top and typical of today’s media’. Obviously, he’s right about the last bit (I rather like being ‘typical of today’s media’, as though talking about my raspberries is akin to exaggerating global warming), but it turns out he might be right about the taste too.

So there I’d been kicking along thinking home-grown British strawberries, raspberries and blueberries weren’t quite as sweet as those you could buy in the shops, and it turns out there was a simple explanation. I’ve been picking them too soon.

My partner has been wise to this habit for some time, barricading the secateurs in a locked box and clutching the salad spinner at my approach as if it were a small child in the encroaching shadow of a military tank. But I just can’t help myself. Even after five years of this growing your own lark, I get so excited that anything’s actually grown (which to be fair, it rarely has) that I snip any fruit off the minute it turns from green to… any colour at all.

Thwarted in my hasty culling by the fact I’ve been hundreds of miles away on holiday for the past two weeks, the raspberries and blueberries had actually been allowed to ripen properly. And, a revelation, it turns out they’re absolutely blooming amazingly sweet and fantastic. Very probably the finest thing man has ever eaten. It’s the great raspberry and blueberry bonanza of 2008!! And obviously I would never exaggerate.

Watering costs… and right here’s where you start paying

… in cat feeding. I love living in south London via Trumptonshire – my road where neighbours unaccountably talk to rather than knife each other. One of the greatest assets is my neighbour who is so outstandingly nice that she’s not only agreed to water the garden every day for 3 weeks while I’m away in France but actually claims to ‘enjoy it! (I know, weird…)

But here’s the tricky thing. How do you brief a non-gardener (for, despite her efforts with lettuce, she is one) on the intricacies, skill and exact levels of water required for each of your precious plants to make it to fruition without sounding like you’re mad? You may start well, affecting nonchalance and simple gratitude – ‘Oh, just wave the hose over the raspberries, the salad is in the shade so doesn’t need much…’ – but it’s not long before you’re agonising over whether your instructions have been sufficiently detailed. You invite them over for a ‘watering briefing’, jabbering, pointing at things like a maniac and demonstrating how to hold a garden hose. This is to stop yourself shouting in the middle of a Ryanair flight ‘THE POTS!!! WHAT ABOUT THE POTS!!!!’

No doubt she’ll have similar anxieties when she goes away later this month. She might say ‘Oh just feed the cats twice a day and give them fresh water’. What she probably wants to say but won’t for fear of sounding like a loon is ‘that one likes his ears tickled and that one will only eat her food if you arrange it in a pyramid formation. And they both like The Today Programme.’ I wouldn’t really care but I suspect she may have installed CCTV.

That’s shallot!

At the risk of sounding like a cover headline in Kitchen Garden magazine – and, if they’re looking for a new sub, I’ve got plenty left up my sleeve, honest: ‘Beet that!’ ‘Bean there done that!’ and my personal favourite, ‘Show me the way to Tomatillo!’ (in Kitchen Garden magazine the exclamation marks are compulsory) – and/or winning a competition for the dullest photo ever posted on the interweb, I thought I had to bring you my entire shallot harvest in all its glory.

I know.

If you look very closely you can see that one of the bulbs is normal sized.

Since making a meal out of them is clearly over-ambitious, I think I might try making a scary necklace out of them – like that man did in the 1970s Chinese TV show Monkey. His were skulls though so, in truth, quite a bit scarier.

PYO slugs here

Look, I’m not really complaining. It’s great that my 21-month-old is eating fruit, particularly when it’s from the garden and therefore comes with extra smug ‘Meet my child, he’s 100 per cent organic’ brownie points. It’s just a slight shame his pick-your-own technique is so thorough. It’s not the little white unripe strawberries heading towards his mouth that bother me so much as the rotting hollowed-out ones that come with their own side order of slugs. Hopefully not coming soon, ‘Meet my child, he’s in A&E.’

Still, at least I have strawberries. News came this week of an acquaintance who has left London for the whole Cornwall smallholding knit-your-own-yoghurt lifestyle thing. Anyway, the news is that she’s already boasting of having a glut of courgettes. On her first year of growing vegetables! Obviously mine haven’t even flowered yet and I now hold her in a mixture of envy/contempt.

A pudding of summeriness

Never made a summer pudding before, but when you’ve got a total crop of 13 redcurrants, 2 blueberries, 6 ripe blackcurrants, five ripe raspberries and a whole ton of strawberries, it’s the obvious option. Seems like a traditional summer pudding doesn’t use strawberries at all, but I cobbled together various recipes from the internet – mainly using delia’s – and the sky didn’t fall in.

The key is to simmer the currants and blueberries for about five minutes and only add the softer fruit – the strawberries and raspberries – a few minutes from the end.

I’m always amazed when I follow a recipe and the result is edible. It’s also nice when growing fruit and vegetables in a garden 45×15 foot actually results in a proper dish – which turned out to be absolutely delicious of course (when are you ever going to hear a home-grown person saying otherwise?) – as opposed to barefoot dressing-gown snacking. And I picked sweetpeas today and put them in an actual vase. Oh God, I’m turning into Martha Stewart. I’m sure at one stage I used to have a life, with a desk and a social life and lunch at Pret a Manger. I blame childcare.

Fashionista Mr Fox

You leave your Birkenstocks outside for two nights and this happens…

Apologies, by the way, for the less than pristine soles – what do you expect, I’m a gardener? – but I draw your attention to the almost surgical way the leather has been snipped by, I’d put money on it, Mr Fox. Isn’t it creepy? It’s not like they had a good chow down on the foot-fragrant leather or took it off to their den to hoard it or anything animalistic like that. Instead it’s an act of discreet sabotage, a fashion critique, the nip of sartorial disapproval. Last year, they did it to the blue ones. What do London foxes have against sensible German footwear?

What do you mean you don’t know the whereabouts of your nearest defecating horse?

The Sunday Telegraph
May 2006

Much excitement at gardening school this week since we were asked to bring in a sample of our soil. We plopped our precious offerings on the table and then had to do chemistry tests on them with white powder and tiny spatulas.
It was all rather Groucho club toilets circa 1990. The fabulous news is that I seem to have great soil so well done me. Apparently it’s a light sandy loam which means it drains well, is easy to cultivate and warms up fast so you can plant vegetables in it before other people can. My poor neighbour, on the other hand, had a heavy, claggy clay-silt that just wouldn’t settle in his test tube and made the table shake when he heaved it out of his bag.We were all sympathetic. Secretly, though, I was feeling quite smug. Did I mention I had a light sandy loam?

If you don’t have a soil testing kit, then there’s a lower-tech way to discover what you’re standing on. Pick up a handful. If it won’t form a ball and feels gritty, it’s sandy; if you can form it into a thick cylinder but not a thread, it’s silty; if you can form it into a ring, then it’s a clay; if you can’t form it into any shape at all, it’s a patio.

Whatever you discover, add well-rotted manure. I’m sure it’s more technical than that but all advice seems to end with ‘add well-rotted manure’. In fact, if you ever want to sound like you know about gardening, just pepper every other sentence with this phrase and you can’t go wrong. The experts can’t seem to understand that most people don’t wander around with a mental map of the nearest defecating horse. Surely there’s a handy pile of dung at the end of your garden… in south London. No? Well buy a horse. Or move to
the country and then buy a horse.

There is, however, one thing in kitchen gardening even more covetable than a good soil – something that has vegetable growers weeping with jealousy. A heated greenhouse. Preferably Victorian, with liftable bits in the roof and an ancient grapevine curling above the door. If you have such a thing, I
envy you and I hate you. If you only have a lowly unheated structure (or, like me, an ineptly heated polytunnel) you’ll be familiar with the dread,
particularly at this time of year, of frosts which can lay waste to a row of baby plants faster than Alan Sugar can point his finger. Frost anxiety –
which causes constant visits to weather forecast websites and an obsessive attachment to horticultural fleece – can be almost debilitating. If – and obviously this has never happened to me – you’ve ever considered cancelling a long weeekend in the south of France for fear of leaving a dozen Gardeners Delight tomato seedlings to the elements, then you’re the sort of floundering idiot experienced gardeners would accuse of knowing nothing whatsoever about anything at all. If so, advise them to add some well-rotted manure.

Purple haze

Sometimes I wish I was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Not the way he shouts at the camera all the time, or his obsession with making vegetarians eat offal (‘Faint at the sight of a beefburger? Here’s some lamb’s lungs’) , but the way he knows what to Do with things. He’d know exactly what to do with this Early Wight garlic that I just dug up. Early excitement at its pretty purpleness and lovely smell turned to slight panic when I read that it’s a ‘hardneck’ variety, or ‘wet’ garlic that is supposed to be eaten fresh, not stored like the ‘softneck’ kinds. I have 13 bulbs to get through and the clock is ticking… Should I be roasting? soup-making? eating it raw? Recipe suggestions please, or at the very least, recommendations for a good book since I obviously won’t be going out into polite company for several weeks…