The Idler

Country Diary: 21

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

I DUG UP four lovely leeks yesterday. Agreed, they weren’t exactly monsters, but they oozed leeky charm and when I’d washed them I thought they looked quite splendid, almost too good to eat. Contemplating them admiringly I was reminded of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, who preferred vegetables to flowers and memorably stated: “I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium.” It gave me the idea of doing a series of vegetable photographs, or vegetable paintings. You don’t really see much nature in art these days and it could be fun. It could be a feature in the new magazine I am planning, The Radish, for the radical vegetable gardener. Readers could send in their vegetable pictures. We could have a “carrot of the month” feature.

THE STRAWBERRY patch is now finished. There are twenty four little strawberry plants neatly arranged in rows in the new raised bed. After I had finished. I stood gazing at them and I understand that this gazing is common among gardeners. After the work is done, or you need a rest from digging, you just stand there staring at the plants, enjoying the sight of your labour, and vaguely wondering what you need to do next. I’m looking forward to the first crop, although I was taken aback to find that John Seymour, in Self Sufficiency, does not approve of strawberries. “Strawberries are a luxury, and nothing more,” he says, and goes on to rhapsodise about raspberries. Why strawberries should be seen as a bourgeois luxury and raspberries as a manly crop suitable for the freeborn smallholder I really have no idea. No news on the broccoli: the plants are all alive but they very small. A friend asked me what variety I had planted. I had no idea but he said that maybe they were a dwarfish sort, and I hope so, otherwise they are very sad indeed. I thought perhaps that they were planted too close together so I pulled up a few and spread them out a bit. Another friend came to inspect. “Your kale makes me very sad,” she said. “Like bonsai.” Apparently I had planted them much too close together. She was no more positive about the broccoli. “Much too close together. Maybe something will come up in the summer. I would keep three and throw the rest away.” She, like John Seymour, was anti-strawberry. “Raspberries are much easier,” she said. “And more delicious.” So what did she suggest? “Pull all those up and plant raspberries.” Which was not the sort of advice I was after.

AND SO TO the chickens. We now seem to have just one bantam left, and I realised when I saw it pecking around in the front garden that I hadn’t fed it for a few days. So it really is very free range indeed. So free range that we don’t see for days at a time. And we certainly don’t see any eggs. My correspondent Mr Lahood writes to tell me that he has invested in three ordinary hybrid chickens, which provide three eggs a day and a lot of fun for little work. I wonder if our one remaining bantam will get on with a new brood? Or will I have to dispatch her?

THE SNOWDROPS are peeping up everywhere. Each morning when I wait up at the corner for the school bus with Arthur, there seem to be more of them. I’m worried about picking them in case the woman who lives on the corner comes out and tells us off. But I did see a nun there yesterday as I drove past. If a nun is picking snowdrops, then surely that makes it OK. My own flowers are starting to appear: I planted around fifty tulip bulbs in early winter and their green shoots are coming up. I’ve completely forgotten which varieties went where so it will be a nice surprise if and when they flower. In the meantime I am struggling with my new book. The idea is to write in the morning and nap and tend the garden in the afternoon, but what with broadband problems and general mess it is quite easy to let the morning vanish into nothing. And there seems to be an endless amount of domestic work. Still, I thank the good Lord every day that I don’t have a job and I’ve learned I’d far rather be free and poor than enslaved and rich.