Recently in gardening Category

When I popped over to Cambridge's famous Scotsdales garden centre I was keen on grabbing just a packet of courgette seeds for planting out ASAP.

I thought that I'd be early enough (it was just before 10am) that the world and his wife would not have surfaced yet. I was wrong, it was getting busy already. So I selected my seeds and zoomed over to the tills, cash in hand. Most of the tills had a fair queue at them except one. Going over to it I saw why, there was an old lady just about to be served and her trolley was packed to the gunwales with potting compost and bedding plants. She was a bit brusque and I could see that she was going to be some time, even longer than two or three normal customers.

Then I noticed who it was... None other than Germaine Greer ladies and gentlemen. It's been a while since I've seen a celebrity in town, nice to see them doing something normal though.

For several years I've been a fairly ardent fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV programmes. More especially 'A Cook on the Wild Side' and the first few series of River Cottage.

I think I was as attracted more to the carefree lifestyle that was portrayed as much as to the food that was shown. After all these were just cooking shows with a twist. I also accepted that there must have been a certain amount of economy with the truth to give the viewer the idea that this rural idyll was attainable. However, I thought that this was also a good means to an end on behalf of HFW, after all he was essentially hoping to make people think a little more about the food they eat and also encouraging people to become a little more independent by growing their own food.

It seems to have worked too, a while back I read a report that stated that vegetable seeds have outsold flower seeds in this country. Coupled with the news that farmland prices are at a historic high (probably an effect of speculation and overspill from the house price bubble) we can see that there is something afoot in the psyche of the inhabitants of this island.

A few years ago I had a semi-successful dabble with a vegetable patch but since then I have not been able to have another go. 2008 will be different though as I will attempt to grow some home produce. My seed packets were rather out of date, so I sowed all of the seeds expecting a poor turnout at germination. To my surprise however I appear to have rather a lot of tomato plants on the go!

One of my main vices is the consumption of fennel, which, as fennel is quite expensive in the supermarket seems to make it an ideal candidate for growing at home.

I had tried to grow fennel previously but had no luck whatsoever. This year I undertook a little more soil preparation and you can see that a month from planting the seeds things are looking pretty... Pretty good...

I'll be doing the occasional blog entry about this just to keep a record of events. More plants will be going over to the 'allotment' shortly as well. I've been using the tried and tested technique of "plug gardening" where seeds are sown into plastic containers that consist of little "plugs" of soil. When the seedlings are large enough these are then transferred (carefully) into the final cropping medium. In my case the garden and the allotment.

Returning to the subject of our friend in Dorset I was impressed to see some 'blogs' appear on his website (www.rivercottage.net) but sad to discover that only members of his site (for which a fee is payable) are allowed to comment on the blog entries. To me this means that this isn't a true blog, I've always felt that allowing the general public the opportunity of commenting on your entires is in the real spirit of blogging on the Internet. So come on Hugh! Let's all have a chance to comment on those excellent River Cottage blog entries!