All that comes with it

These are the things I am doing at the moment:

• Working full time
• Looking after the kids two days a week
• Organizing the logistics of the Dales Walk
• Fundraising for the Dales Walk
• Training for the Dales Walk
• Blogging nearly every day

But perhaps that’s not enough. Hercules had twelve labors and I’m only managing six. I need to up my game if I want to qualify for greek god status (and lets face it i already have the body for it). How else can I add more weight to my load? I know, the garden!

Spring has sprung and if I want to grow any veg this year I’m going to have to get started on doing it now. Yesterday I spent a bit of time out the back and planted some peas, carrots, and spinach. I’ve already got some tomato and pepper seedlings sitting on the windowsill waiting until the risk of frosts has passed. And I have vague plans for sweetcorn and pumpkins, potatoes and runner beans.

But this year my heart isn’t quite in it. I’m still going to have a go, but wrestling the time away from everything else is proving rather difficult.

Still the evenings are getting lighter and so a little time can perhaps be salvaged there when I’m not working. Whatever happens I must make sure I at least maintain the garden. Despite appearances to the contrary I’ve invested a lot of work out there, and it would be a real shame to let the wilderness re-take it.

This is a picture of the field that adjoins our garden. It is neglected and bramble ridden and has no useful purpose other than providing us with blackberries in the autumn. It’s potential is great, and I have many romantic ideas of how I would use it to raise livestock and grow vegetables.

Finally after gazing over the wall at it for about a year I overcame my natural inertia and found out who owned it. I promptly wrote them a letter asking them how much they would want to sell it for, and for a while my dreams were full of vistas that looked a little like this:

Unfortunately the owners wrote back informing me they were not interested is selling as they had “plans” for the land. The cynical part of me can’t help thinking their plans have little to do with agriculture:

It’s probably for the best really. I can barely look after myself never mind about a field full of livestock. I imagine getting up at 5am to feed them would get pretty old very quickly. And who would care for them when we went on holiday? And would I really be able to send an animal I had raised off to slaughter? Probably not.

But when have dreams ever taken any notice of the petty problems of reality? So despite myself I often still find my gaze wandering over my property line and imagining a field full of chickens, goats and pigs. And my heart fills with longing and a sad whispered song sneaks from beneath my breath:

“Old McDaniel had a farm. Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh”

Despite an enthusiastic start I pretty much gave up on gardening this year. The main reason for this was our horrendously wet summer which dampened both my efforts and my enthusiasm.

Still, I did manage to harvest a reasonable crop of potatoes and strawberries, and today it has been the turn of the apples and the tomatoes. Unfortunately due to the complete absence of the sun over the last five months the tomatoes remain stubbornly unripe. But with the mornings growing ever colder I wanted to get them off the plants before the first frosts kills them.

The solution? Green tomato and apple chutney of course.

Once it’s cooked you’re supposed to let it mature for about a week before trying it. But patience has never been one of my virtues and I snuck a sneaky spoonful before putting it in the jars. It is good. In fact it is damn good.

It’s so good that I think I could market it. Here is a breakdown of my costs:

Tomato seeds & grow bags: £5.00
Apple tree saplings x3: £22.50
Big cooking pan: £10.99
Additional ingredients: £8.83
Jars: £5.16 (I couldn’t find any empty ones so I had to buy jars with stuff already in them)
Labour (charged at national minimum wage): £38.64
Total: £91.12

I’ve managed to get three pretty big jars worth out of the pan, and so including tax each jar will sell for £35.68. Let’s call it £36 just to give me a bit of a profit margin (that’s around $72 for our brethren in the colonies).

So, who wants one? I will accept personal checks or paypal.

What with the constant rain, a barrage of slugs and snails, and a generous dollop of neglect, the front garden has been looking rather tatty recently. Taking advantage of a brief respite from the foul weather Amy, Evan and I have spent the morning pruning, sweeping and tidying. Well, Amy and I have anyway. Evan has mostly been eating dirt.

The potatoes were looking particularly scraggy so I decided to cut my losses and dig them all out. I’ve was pleasantly surprised with the amount, size, and quality of the resulting harvest; and Amy found the whole process of rummaging in the earth for them very enjoyable.

Next year I think I won’t have the tires stacked so tall when I initially put them in, as the bottom two layers contained nothing but earth. But all in all the project was a success.

I’ve also taken out the sunflowers, the lettuce, and some of the sweetpeas as they were all dead or dying. The runner beans are still up, as are the french beans. I’m not anticipating a decent crop from either of them though as the slugs and snails have given them a real pounding. Still, there’s always next year.

Kerry recently alerted me to a website called freecycle, a sort of altruistic ebay where people offer to give away for free various things they no longer want. The aim behind the idea is to reduce the amount of rubbish ending up in landfill sites.

Over the course of the last few days I have become increasingly addicted. The most common items that appear to be listed are freezers and washing machines, but in my three short days of perusing the listings I’ve seen everything from stuffed parrots to classical guitars find new homes.

And I haven’t been slow to jump on the bandwagon either. As I type there are thirty bags of topsoil sitting on my driveway waiting for me to lug them up the hill to the vegetable patch. They normally would have cost me around fifty pounds if I had bought them from a commercial source, but some kind chap in Crosland Moor was levelling his garden and let me have the mound of earth he had dug for nothing. He even bagged it all up for me.

Of course the effort involved in getting the bags in and out of my car has nearly killed me, but that’s not the point.

Anyway, things are developing well in the garden at the moment, so here’s a quick update:

Tree Watch: week 56

I was looking through my blog archives the other day and came across the entries I made after I planted my three apple trees. The trees went in during the dormant season and I was a little worried that I had effectively stuck three dead branches in a hole then added water. My fears were unfounded however, and although they were slow starters they eventually showed signs of life.

This time round however they seem to have got their acts together and are already in full bloom. What’s more I’m allowed to let the crop actually develop this year as the root system should be adequately established. There is the small downside that I don’t actually like apples all that much, but I’m sure I’ll find someone to eat them.

Oh the humanity!

Whilst preparing to install our double glazing last week the workmen had to move a number of pots and containers out from under our lounge window. In the process of moving the mini-greenhouse a tray full of tomato seedlings was tragically upended; scattering it’s fragile passengers all over my lupins. As if to add insult to injury, one of the individuals responsible for the incident was my own wife. Needless to say she shall be sleeping in the car for the foreseeable future.

A few brave souls managed to survive however, and we do have some more growing in individual pots elsewhere. But if Amy develops rickets caused by tomato deficiency then you know who to blame.

The rest of the veg

Our potatoes are doing rather nicely and it will soon be time to add a bit more earth to increase the crop. The strawberries are growing well, although I suspect that the slugs have their eyes on them as they have already had a nibble of the lettuce. Not that that stopped me from eating a few lettuce leaves too this morning. They are very nearly at a size where we can start wandering into the garden and getting a few leaves for our salad. The runner beans are shooting up, but the French beans have some mysterious damage round the edges of the leaves which may be a bit cold damage, apart from we haven’t had any frosts recently. hopefully they will recover, but there is still time to sow some more if they don’t.