The Idler

Country Diary 55, 11 September 2007

WELL, IT’S been three long months since the last instalment, during which time I have done very little work, been to four festivals, drunk a huge amount of beer and wine, and watched weeds completely cover the vegetable patch. One weekend we left the pigs in the care of Divorcing Dad. During their time in his care they escaped and started to eat the neighbour’s garden, and when he went to round them up, he said, they “went for my balls.” Everyone says how intelligent pigs are and how wonderful but we have found them to be quite unsympathetic creatures, really interested only in food. They do like to be scratched, I suppose, and will sit down like a dog if you rub their backs. But I have not found myself getting particularly attached to them. They have been very easy to keep. They take, I would say, about five minutes work a day. We keep a bucket under the sink into which go all scraps. Twice a day we feed them the scraps along with a few handfuls of pig nuts, eight pounds a sack from the farmers’ shop. Last week we collected 164 apples from an apple tree down the lane and the pigs have gone through all of them. We gave them some acrons, too. We hope this will impart a good flavour to the meat. The time for slaughter approaches, and we have no shortage of willing volunteers to come down and practise their knife skills when it comes to the pig-slicing weekend.

RIGHT NOW in the vegetable patch, the climbing French beans have finally started to climb after a very slow start. We’ve had some good cabbages and a few lettuces from the patch. Swiss chard is always easy although I have only three or four plants. The courgettes have finally started producing, again after a very slow start. The strawberries were a disaster again. We got a few pounds but really I don’t think they’re worth it when you consider all the work involved. John Seymour says they are a luxury, and nothing more. I might just dig them all up and chuck them in the hedgerow and let them go wild. Or maybe plant them at the bottom of the treehouse. I’d rather have the space for asparagus – although that’s been a disaster as well. Only four out fo the ten plants I put in seem to have survived. Maybe the others will get going again, who knows.

AND WHAT ELSE? The no-dig potatoes bed was a disaster. I think it was the hens’ fault: they pecked at the straw and then pecked at the little growing potatoes. I think I might go back to the traditional way of planting them in the soil next year. Having forgotten to sow brassicas, I bought twelve Brussells sprouts plants from the nursery. This feels a bit ike cheating, but bugger it. I protected them from slugs with cabbage leaves placed around the base, the idea being that the slugs would eat the cabbage leaves and not the plants. That seemed to work OK. But now they are being attacked by caterpillars. And the purple sprouting plants I bought have been stripped completely. I’m not sure whether they’ll make it at all. Still, I suppose if I’m only putting in half an hour’s work a week I can’t expect the world. On the plus side, a host of sunflowers popped up, seeded from last year’s plants, and they are surrounded by nasturtiums, which is a great flower: so easy to grow, pretty and edible, too. As far as the roots go, mixed success., The turnips were delicious but never seemed to reach any size. I got quite a nice crop of little plug-shaped Italian carrots, from some seeds I picked up in the Italian delicatessan in Clerkenwell. The parsnips look good but I dug one up and it had terrible forked roots – not a problem I’ve had before. There are maybe half a dozen beetroots almost ready – why only now? Really, each year that goes past I seem to get worse at growing vegetables, not better. I have to shamefacedly admit that the new Jamie Oliver book on growing veg looks excellent. I read some extracts in the paper and he certainly does know how to communicate.

WE PUT UP a rope swing and Arthur taught himself to swing from one side of the pond to the other and is now quite an elegant little monkey. My ongoing battle against computers and telly has had its ups and downs. But today when the came home from school I took the kids out down the lanes and we picked parasol mushrooms and blackberries, and put some bread and an apple in a hankie and tied it to the end of a stick, whcih Arthur carried over his shoudler. On returning home we cooked the mushrooms with bacon and ate them with pasta and made an apple and blackberry crumble, which was actually incredibly easy. The kids either helped or did some treehouse decorations and they went to bed at eight – having had no screens at all all evening. Which I counted as a triumph. The next step will be to send them out on their own to pick blackberries, so I can stay at home and watch Sex Pistols clips on Youtube.