The Idler

Country Diary: 14

The Idler’s Editor, Tom Hodgkinson, has retired to a Devon farmhouse to write a book. Here’s the fourteenth part of his diary.

I’VE BEEN up in the vegetable patch a lot lately. I consider it to be a freedom-seeking, anarchistic activity and it’s largely enjoyable. It’s the first step on the road to self-sufficiency. However, there are two downsides, one is the sheer amount of hard graft and the other is the expense.

Seeds, for starters, cost anything from one to two pounds per packet. I made the mistake of spilling my seed a little too promiscuously with some of the early sowings. I must have planted, for example, around 150 lettuces where there was room for only 15 to grow. That meant throwing away many many seedlings, which seemed like an awful waste.

I’ve also had to buy planks to build the raised beds, that was a cost of about fifty quid. Then there’s been the wheelbarrow, fork, spade, bamboo canes, bark chipping, black plastic sheeting, Growmore fertiliser, watering cans, sprayer, twine, little plastic pegs for showing you what’s growing where, black plastic sheeting for laying on the paths, bark chippings, gardening books, pencil, weedkiller (organic!), lime for liming the soil (whatever that means). Luckily I live on a farm so the cowshit is free.

Then there’s the enormous amount of time the whole project has taken. If you factor that in, these are going to be the most expensive potatoes ever eaten. I was not prepared either for how complicated the whole thing is. I was given a book called ‘The Vegetable and Herb Expert’ to help me learn the ways of the veg, but it has confused me enormously. Every vegetable seems to be different. They require different kinds of soil, light, and watering. Some of them have to be grown indoors and transplanted. Some, thank God, are sown directly into the soil (which has to be raked to fine “tilth” first). I got everything the wrong way round and grew the carrots from seed on my windowsill and then transplanted them.

You’re supposed to have a greenhouse and also things called cloches.

Then I found out that for some vegetables you’re supposed to grow them in a special seed bed, and then transplant them somewhere else when they start shooting through! I mean, why bother moving them?

Well. I have now planted radishes, runner beans, tomatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroots, leeks, kale, garlic, onions, salad onions, one single courgette plant (donated by a neighbour), lettuces and a whole bed of potatoes which I painstakingly DOUBLE DUG (yes, just when you think you’ve got the hang of single digging they spring this on you - DOUBLE DIGGING!) and filled with cow manure. The radishes are doing well.

I was complaining about the amount of expense and hard graft involved in all this to Penny Rimbaud, CRASS founder and experienced vegetable gardener. “But no!” he said. “It doesn’t have to be. It can be cheap and easy. It’s called permaculture. And there are some gardeners who don’t even believe in digging!|” Hmm, I thought. I’d like to meet them.

So I have started looking into permaculture, and it does indeed look fantastic. It’s all about using nature to make your life easier, letting nature do its thing in terms of planting flowers which keep pests down and the like. Rimbaud said also that he is of the “just bung it in and see” school which I also like the sound of. Permaculture is also all about sharing seeds and plants, thus cutting down on the expense and allowing you to avoid becoming a victim of the gardening industry. Apparently, the Henry Doubleday Institute runs seed swap programmes and also produces natural old-fashioned varieties that have been all but destroyed by the big commercial seed companies.

The only permaculture-type thing I have done so far is to plant marigolds near the tomatoes. Apparently they keep slugs away or something. But expect more permaculture tips soon, as and when I learn them.

About six weeks ago, I planted around 40 seed potatoes at neat intervals and they all appeared to be springing up beautifully. I have just showed them proudly to Alan, my mentor in this gardening experiment. He was initially impressed, but then looked a little closer. “The leaves are looking a bit yellow,” he said. I looked at them and had to admit he was right. We looked up “yellowing leaves” in my book. Definitely not good. Could be a bad case of Blackleg. “Strikes early in the season,” my book said. “Treatment: none. Lift and burn all plants.”

More work. More expense.