Ode to potatoes

O spuds! O earthly treats!
For one that eats no meat
A fine old thing to eat.

We planted one and dug up twenty.
Now we've filled our horn of plenty.

Dug from mud
this humble spud
fills the space twixt starter and pud.

We've just dug up the last of them. The kitchen is full of sacks and bags and buckets full of Pink Lady Fairapple, and Desiré. We had mash and chips for tea tonight. Again. We're giving them away to all and sundry.

Free potato with every driving lesson!


We also had Burdock today. You eat the root. It's pretty bland, so you eat it with other stuff. In this case, mashed with carrots (also from the allottment). Not found a way of growing my own Linda McCartney pies yet, sadly.

Taters have only been part of the UK diet for a few hundred years. It's difficult to envisage life without them. They're pretty ubiquitous, and I'd imagine they're the biggest non-cereal crop. (They are. I checked)

Potatoes are the world's number one non-grain food commodity. Unlike major cereals, potatoes are not a globally traded commodity and thus prices are not influenced by the vagaries of international markets.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Babies, allotments, barbecues, etc...

Baby.


This is my neice, Cerys Eleanor. I think she is going to grow up with the ability to do rubik cubes.





















Allotment.


Went to my dad's allottment today. It's not good. Overshadowed by trees. No on site water supply. Not a patch on ours. We got a big piece of ground covering material from him, and will be spreading it across some of our uncultivated space until we can do something with it.

The picture abovet shows what passes for soil. Couch grass ran amok, and we have to get all those roots out before anything will grow. Apart from couch grass of course.



Barbecue.

The allottment society organised a barbecue for today. It was fun. They had a special cooker for vegetables and vegetarians, and the folk players kept us entertained with everything from Van Morrison to Captain Pugwash.

And it was a good bonding exercise. We now know a few of our neighbours a bit better.







And to top it all, a baby, at a barbecue, on an allottment!

Grasping the nettle

Yup. It's a nettle.

Urtica Dioica. It's actually related to the cannabis plant, and if you look at how they grow, you'll see the same growth pattern of two north-south leaves, a bit of stem, two east-west leaves, repeat until fully grown...

I've had a phobia of the things since as long as I can remember. Presumably I got stung when I was little or something. I don't remember any particular incident that caused it, although I do remember early incidents of beig terrified by them.

I climbed through a hole in a fence and climbed partway up a railway embankment, but when I turned back, I found that I'd actually crawled under a looping nettle, and I couldn't get back until some kind soul held it back for me.

I also remember plucking up the courage to touch one. I was about 7 or 8 years old, it seemed to take many many minutes before I managed to quickly touch a very small one with my finger. But I did it. I was so proud of myself. And it didn't even sting me. A couple of days later, I went up Moel Famau with my family and found a big clump of nettles. "Look at this!" I said, and stuck my knee into them. They stung me to buggery. Back to square one.

There are worse things to have a phobia of. They stay in one place, unlike spiders, and living in a town, it's rare that I have to come into anything like close proximity to them. Still, it's had an impact over the years. When I was a child, other children could always generate an extreme response, by picking them and waving them at me. Little fucking shits. I've broken world records scrambling over garden fences to get away from them. I'm highly attuned to their presence, (nettles, not children) and can spot one even when mixed with other foliage. It's extremely rare that I get stung. Last time I did was in the grounds of a derelict house in Ireland, when I was hitching. Big bugger too. I brushed against it in the twilight. I had a bit of a panic attack as a result.

I suppose all phobias are limiting to some degree. It limits my freedom of choice and action. If you have a phobia, of pretty much anything, you know where I'm coming from. If you have no phobias at all, you'd struggle to understand, just as I struggle to understand how anyone can be scared of clowns or sticky labels.

The allotment, of course, has plenty of nettles. They're mainly on the margins, up the top by the compost heaps, but they sprout in the potato beds, and in the unworked bits of the plot. I have to get Bren to deal with them.


Today, I donned a pair of sturdy rubber gardening gloves, and although I didn't actually manage to grasp one, I did manage to touch one. I managed to do this several times. It made me shudder, and I couldn't keep my finger there for too long, but this is the first time I have tried to confront my fear for over 3 decades. I will try to go a bit further next time, maybe.

So where have I been?

Not posted for a few weeks, and I'm not even going to say I'm sorry.

Been to Wales with Dave, who was up for a few days. We got rat-arsed watching the world cup at an Anglesey campsite. Could have gone for something really bleak, but played it safe and went to a proper campsite. I got to drive Dave's car, a 1.8VTEC Honda Civic. And very nice it was too.

My own car is turning into a bag of crap. It smokes when you start it up. The aircon doesn't work properly. I feel like Hunter S Thompson after he trashed the cadillac, but the car has done over 70,000 miles now, and it does get treated badly.

What else? Well been failing to do things that really really need to be done.

And have been spending time doing things that don't need doing at all.

I applied to the DSA about becoming a driving examiner, but they're not taking anyone on at the moment. Given the current waiting lists, you'd think they'd be crying out for them, but no. they've kept my details on file. (Want to make the roads safer? Make everyone retake their test every 10 years. Just a thought. Might blog about it in more detail sometime.)

So I need to sort out re-registration as an ADI. I need to do my tax return. I need to decide what to do once the lease runs out on my current car in about 6 weeks, and I need to book some tests for people. All these things need to happen yesterday, and torn between them, I do none of them.

I did open my drawer in the living room today. The registration form should be in there. Perhaps tomorrow I will take it out of the drawer and put it on the sofa, or the mantlepiece.

Anything else? Well as a result of meeting Ray tonight, I've also re-established contact with another blast from the past. A guy called Steve Wood, who is now a nurse in Liverpool. Last time I saw him he was a sort of teddy boy.

The allottment continues to provide ever increasing amounts of tasty and nutricious food. Bren picked 5lbs of strawberries the other day, and made more jam than you could shake a shitty stick at. Also getting raspberries, redcurrants, various salad leaves, peas, potatoes, sweet peas, and tomatoes. We've hardly done any shopping for weeks.

Mind you, there's bugger all to eat, apart from jam, raspberries, redcurrants, various salad leaves, peas, potatoes, sweet peas, and tomatoes.

The shed got broken into last night. Since it wan't locked (no point when they are prepared to rip the roof off to get in) breaking in consisted of of moving a board and opening the door. The scumfucks that did it appear to have nicked one small hand tool. Silly buggers.

Also been arguing on the internet. This time about the role of the police. People seem to find it difficult to seperate the role from the person, so when they do bad things because of their role maintaining the status quo, it's taken as an attack on the very existence of any kind of police force. I found an excellent article about it by Merrick Godhaven right here.

And since this post is a series of disconnected things, I shall finish with a random image from google earth. Yes it's time to SPIN THE GLOBE!



It's a mountain in Mongolia! Where the kids all dress in black. The capital of Mongolia is Ulan Bator. The houses all seem to have little white rotundas in the gardens. Why???

This is not just a radish...

This is an iceberg radish, grown on our allotment by the sweat of our brows, and I just had to take a piccy of it before I scoffed it.

If I'd been blindfolded and someone had forced it between my quivering lips, Id have said it was bloody lovely. I suppose knowing that it was something that we'd facilitated by weeding, digging, hoeing, planting, hoeing, and generally nurturing made it all the sweeter.

It was probably the strongest, most peppery radish I've ever tasted.

They're part of the brassicae family apparently. That's OK. I can get on with Frank while despising Gary. And I can like Radishes while puking at the taste of cauliflower. Totally different.

I do hope though that all this allottmenting stuff will help breakdown some of the psychological blocks I have in place. Perhaps at some point I will grow my own sprouts and eat them, and thus eradicate the force feeding negative conditioning that my parents fostered.

There are quite a few things harvestable right now. I couldn't tell you what they all are, although I'm sure my beautiful talented vivacious tolerant sexy and intelligent other half could post a list when she reads this.

Anyway... Picture...



Some of that is rhubarb. Some of it is rocket. Indeed, some of it is wild rocket, and it's the tastiest rocket I've ever tasted. And I've tasted some tasty rocket in my time, I can tell you.

Go on! Get your name on the list for an allottment! It might take a while before you hear anything, and the plot you get might need a lot of prep before you start seeing results, but this stuff knocks supermarket produce into the middle of last week in terms of freshness and flavour.

A whole lotta allotment!

Well we've been on the waiting list for a while. We even got a close relative to put their name down. And in the end it was their name that got drawn out of the hat first. We have a long skinny piece of land to call our own, sort of, and upon which we can grow tomatoes and asparagus and thyme and gherkins and apple trees and dandelions and flax and aubergines and kale. It needs a bit of work as the photos below show, but that's kind of the point isn't it? To take something that is nothing and turn it into something that is something that will feed us and give us something to do with our hands and minds that is productive and that connects us to the Earth.

So here's how it looks on Google Earth... A whole load of allotments. Some tidy. Some wild.



And here's how ours looks in the flesh.

From the far end looking back towards the entrance...



And from the entrance looking in...

Ah, the joy of it. There's so much to do! The sheds need sorting out because they're not properly secure right now. The greenhouse has no glass. The top, or far end, is a sea of grass and, particularly near the fence, nettles. I'm afraid Brenda is going to have to deal with them. I could legitimately be on an episode of The Panic Room when it comes to Urtica dioica