Grow Your Own and Then Some

If the media are to be believed then Britain is undergoing a renaissance of grow your own, and even raise your own, as back gardens fill with chicken coops. But why is this?

There are so many reasons that a list is the best option here:

• It's economic and times are tougher. I have calculated - back of the envelope style - that we save about £1000 a year by growing our own fruit and veg, and that was before we got chickens. Next year I intend from January 1st keeping a diary of what is spent on seeds, compost etc, and what the estimated price of the produce we get to eat would be, to prove the economic case.

• The fantastic variety: with what we have growing now on our allotment and in the kitchen garden here we have, depending on how you score the thing, nearly 40 different vegetables (I count things with different uses, rather than varieties, so radicchio, Catalogna chicory and sugar loaf count as three, but the eight or 10 different lettuces is one). On top of that we have more than a dozen fruits.

• That variety means we get to eat stuff that never makes it to the shops - Hamburg Parsley roots, asparagus chicory, Chinese artichokes, cima di rapa, loads of different chilies, Swiss chard, fresh borlotti beans, tiny broad beans (the shops go for biggies which are bitter and mealy) quince...

• It is great exercise. For a couple of years I had a gym membership, and loathed the tedium of machines and the narcissistic people using them. In the end my £25/month meant one reluctant visit over that period. Digging, carrying, pulling etc etc take it out of you, but with a purpose that obviates the need for posing mirrors.

• We control what we put on our plants, so can be confident that our salad has not been sprayed with noxious pesticide and stored in an unpleasant gas.

• The supermarkets choose veg for looks (so they sell) not taste, and for keeping quality. Not taste is an important thing. If you grow your own then keeping quality is secondary, as the bulk of the stuff you produce is harvested and eaten the same day or within two at most. The difference between our own new spuds and the ones bought from Sainsbury's is incredible, especially if we dig, cook and eat them within an hour.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

We are having the finest summer for six years, though given that means about one week of sunshine that's more a reflection on the vileness of the weather in previous years. The spring though was, in Britain at least, the coldest for half a century.

Combine those two phenomena and it is making gardening a bit of a bugger, which for those of us who enjoy eating food we grow is beyond annoying. We are at least three weeks further back in the growing year than we would normally be, and now the ground is exceptionally dry so to prevent everything running to seed or dying off watering is needed.

In a spare moment the other day I calculated we had 44 different fruits and vegetables on our allotment (and you can add to that another two or three like fennel grown in the garden but not the plot). That isn't counting different varieties of the same thing either. So in spite of the conditions we can hope for some plenty to come, which is probably one definition of the allotment gardener.

Dry - or it Could Be Wet

Five or six years ago every gardening section of the Sundays and every green-fingered programme on TV here would feature ways to prepare your patch for drought. Experts would suggest plants that needed little water, come up with methods of saving the few drops that fell from the skies, and visit sun-drenched lands for insights into dealing with dryness.

Since then it has poured down every bloody summer. Much of the rest of the year too.

It is not just the domestic gardener who is suffering of course, commercial growers have had poor yields: wheat crops too wet to cut; drowned fields of cabbages and carrots; orchards whose blossom and the hope of a harvest has washed away.

The upshot for us is that we're wondering about a polytunnel again. Not for the allotment, as sadly they offer too tempting a target for vandals who think slashing the plastic while nobody is around is the height of daring. They are not things of beauty, but we love growing our own food, and maybe could camouflage it to avoid it being seen from the house, our garden being helpfully long.

It is the second half of May, and we already worry that this year's harvest will be poor. Nature has a way of fighting back, but if the cold weather - we lit a fire yesterday and it was very welcome - and the daily rain continue then potatoes and strawberries will rot again, courgettes struggle to get started, and salads look bruised and battered.

British weather is seeing higher peaks and lower troughs, the extreme weather events of newsroom cliche. Given the choice I'd prefer dry to drown though.

Best Days

The best days in the professional freelancer's life are 1) when you get paid; 2) when you get notice to invoice; 3) when you get more work. So the last couple of days have been pretty good. Notice received yesterday to invoice for a piece I wrote for Lake District Life about sailing on Ullswater (we recently bought a boat built in 1981 and sail it from Glenridding), same day as I had a new commission confirmed for Harpers Wine and Spirit. And today a further list of travel pieces agreed for Information Britain.

That is of course a bit too cynical and materialistic. There are other benefits: last week I had a little epiphany at a breakfast which included eggs from our own chickens, and home-made jam from blackcurrants grown on our allotment. It was sunny, and with no immediate deadline my son and I decided to go to the boat (how grand that sounds for a fibre-glass near antique) for the day. So count future memories for currently teenage son among the advantages of the freelance life.

It proved to be out best trip on Ullswater so far. As ever the wind was changeable and pretty light (there must be blowy days on the water there but so far we have missed them), we were lazy and only put up the mainsail, but still skimmed across the water happily free of gin-palaces. Add to my lengthy list of people who will face immediate execution when eventually I come to absolute power bell ends in £250k powerboats (jealous, me?) who break the water speed limit and create unpleasant wakes.

If anyone wants the full list for publication I can be at your service in moments. Same goes for my thoughtful book of political theory 'Things to Stuff up a Politician's Arse.' A follow-up volume exploring similar themes for celebrities is underway even now. Surely the Christmas hit for 2012. And curmudgeon that I am would suggest something for the Olympics along roughly the same lines. There are several very public figures whose rear ends I would love to fill with cash to the value of what we have spent on the world's biggest sports day. My Winston Smith Room 101 torture would have to be listening to Sebastian Coe's droning voice telling critics of The 2012 Games (never I fear heard on BBC other than by accident) how lucky we are to pay so many billions, about three times the original estimate too, for a few days of circus entertainment.

Back to Blogging

I was so impressed by the blog of one of my former classmates at UCLAN's Magazine Journalism MA, the brilliant Johanna Derry, that I felt inspired to begin blogging again. Too many of the other blogs I have read previously have been semi-literate, self-indulgent and less than informative. So fired with new enthusiasm for the medium I will give it another go.

As a freelance there have to be compensations for (relative) lack of money, and the foremost of them for me is variety. Recently I spent one day of a trip to East Anglia on research for three separate pieces: in the morning I went to Potter Heigham to take new pix of the Wherry Albion, and chat to a few of the members of the trust keeping her afloat. The early afternoon was spent on a tour of the Adnams Distillery in Southwold, which proved throughly enjoyable though driving kept me from any real tasting. Following that I met John Miller, a former Reuters correspondent in Moscow (whose book All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening I can heartily recommend) regarding a gardening feature about George Orwell that I hope will appear in Grow Your Own (the curse of the unconnected and even after five years unknown writer is the "write it and we'll see" offer). That is variety.

The Adnams visit was in response to an offer, at the time feeling more like a threat, after I had given a poor review to their First Rate Gin, and has generated a commisison for Harpers Wine and Spirit, and in turn another for them, which says something for getting out of the office.

Growing our own

Now that the allotment is yielding produce for the table again my smug rating has risen by several notches. Over the last two days we have had green salads (inappropriate label when they generally contain wonderful bronze lettuces as well as various green ones), root salads with grated icicle radishes and purple top turnips in them, strawberries - the first granita of the year will be made and eaten tonight - and onions that taste of something. And last night's meal ended with rhubarb pie and creme fraiche. And yes, thanks for asking, my bowels are in wonderful order. You can, as it were, stick your colonic irrigation up your...

When we started growing our own veg, I thought it was a waste of time growing onions. An onion is an onion, they are cheap in the shops, so why bother? The reason is flavour, though they are also far moister and crunchier than anything I have ever found Sainsbury's offering. A home grown onion cut into tiny half-moon segments and added to a Greek salad lifts it hugely.

The broad beans are about a week off now. They are another vegetable showing the difference between shop bought and home grown. In the shops you see monster pods, floppy after their travels, with beans the size of ten pence coins within, coarse and in need of the outer skin peeling to be palatable. We will pick ours with beans about five pence sized, quick to cook, and perfectly tender.

Fresh is best

It's June and allotments are starting to come into their own. Last night we picked - and ate shortly afterwards - turnips, green mustard and red, rocket, lettuce, onion, radishes and strawberries. With the exception of the strawberries, which need a few more days to be at their best, nothing available from supermarkets comes anywhere close in terms of flavour.

When people say lettuce has no flavour you know they don't grow it. A fresh cos lettuce washed and on the plate an hour after picking is crisp, but more importantly it has real tastes in its dark green leaves. Radishes are perhaps the easiest thing there is to grow. Rinsed of soil and crunched with a dusting of salt they again have a fire that uniform and perfectly red supermarket zombie radishes lack.

And only half a food mile, and that on foot. When we started ours three years ago we had the choice of more than 20 plots. There are still a few available, and one where the renter will get a letter shortly asking if they intend to carry on. We expected there to be a waiting list, but obviously there was not. It's worth asking the council, and it is truly worth doing if you enjoy veg, and like me have a mean streak. I reckon we get more than £1,000 woth of fruit and veg off it a year, for the princely rent of £30, and it has to be said a lot of hard but enjoyable work. Give it a go.