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.

What Are You Smoking?

I just bought a ready-made home smoker, wimping out of making the design I had in my head for a garden incinerator topped with a dustbin (both new of course) fitted with rods and racks. One motive is simply wanting to give it a go, another something of a V-sign to the food fascists, eating more than a single slice of bacon every six months apparently risking Death's instant scythe.

The third is my fascination, or is it obsession, with the wood for free from our garden and allotment. I have a stack of pear logs in the allotment shed, and in the front-garden wood-store a similar stash of apple wood. They were cut with the intention of burning them in our stove, but from all accounts they smell divine when alight and we would miss that if the wood-burner's door is closed as it should be.

Sadly the weather has turned damp and drizzly, not it seems the ideal for smoking food. But watch this space (if anyone is reading this at all) for reports on progress once it brightens again, and I have laid in a stock of salt and salmon.

FYI the smoker is a telescopic thing, supposedly good for cold- as well as hot-smoking, 29cm wide and when extended 92cm tall (if memory serves), complete with a rack, hooks and drip tray, not cheap at just shy of £100 but it is well-made. They provided a starter-pack of sawdust, which will be added to with our own hardwood stuff as and when, plus I intend splitting pear and apple logs down to the thinnest possible slivers and cutting those into chips, ideally not covered in blood from my fingers. A man can dream.

Save the Planet, Wear a Hat

There are innumerable small things we can do to reduce our energy use (and thus costs, reliance on Russia and the Middle East, etc etc), thereby lessening our impact on the environment. It seems to me that wearing hats during cold weather is one of the easiest.

I bought a Scrooge-style nightcap for my father the other day, not in his case really for warmth, his house being generally over-heated, but for comfort - and it has helped him sleep better. As he is almost as bald as me, maybe it is something to do with keeping his head as warm as his duvet-covered body.



Our house is a tougher prospect to heat, being somewhat larger and having four rather than two storeys. The central heating here can be all on or all off, so rather than heat the entire house while my family is out, we have the radiators off in the middle of the day, and I wear a jumper. This is no sacrifice, it is cosy. If it gets colder I make sure the wood-burner is fired up to keep the chill off the place, and put on slippers and a smoking cap - quickly taken off if the postman or couriers arrive. If I venture out I wear gloves. This is not a difficult concept to master.

When did we start thinking that we should roam the home in shirtsleeves or less all the time? Pepys I recall (though I didn't know him personally) wore a waistcoat in bed until the spring weather arrived. It used to bug me travelling in the USA when I ran a company there that in summer the offices you visited were freezing, and in winter they were boiling, defying the elements and then some. When I drove with salesmen I wore a sweater to combat the aircon which was set at something Scott would have jibbed at. The attitude seemed to be deliberately wasteful of energy. Here in Preston I have noticed over the last couple of years that even in winter many men out shopping wear shorts or cargo pants, and women have jeggings and micro-shorts.



Is it too much of a sacrifice to don a hat and a woolly in winter, provided you have the means to own such? By not having the central heating on all day we must cut our energy bills significantly. Happily, unless I am imagining it, hats are becoming slightly more fashionable again. Or maybe people have cottoned on to how warm they keep us?


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Word Gets Round, Like My Stomach

Though our garden is thoroughly secluded our next door neighbours must have noticed me cutting lopped branches into wood for the burner, as they offered me the stuff left by a tree surgeon who sorted out a few of their unloved apple trees. It's a pity that the burner is sealed as applewood smells lovely on an open fire.

Cutting wood is about the only exercise I do these days, but it makes me want to do more as the lift you get afterwards - all those endorphins doubtless - is great. Sunday was spent cutting out-of-place branches from the fruit trees on our allotment, sawing worthwhile bits down into more firewood. Trouble is for all it is a great heart-pumping-muscle-straining-aerobic-workout it gives me a healthier appetite than normal. Add to that it was Mothers' Day so a special meal was called for, any calories burned replaced and then some. Eaten outside though, which in mid-March is pretty wonderful. My patent kale-and-everything bruschetta, lentil salad with the remains of Friday's daube cut into it, a ripe tomato salad, roast chicken with potatoes done beneath it plus PSB fresh-picked, green salad to mop up the juices and bought in cheesecake to finish. Plus two half bots from Adnams. Would have needed to fell a whole tree and turn it into firewood to nullify that lot.

The Scent of Coriander and Bay

Using the food dryer toy to preserve some herbs - a good way to get early payback as a little Schwartz bottle of dried sage etc runs well beyond the £1 mark - had the very pleasant by-product of filling the basement with a fabulous scent, as we pretentious wine-writer gits would say the coriander was the top-note, the bay providing a deeper background aroma, and the sage a subtle little touch of the savoury.

That is one of the joys of proper cooking, of real food: filling the house with mouth-watering smells. This morning's breakfast smell only noticed after we had been in the garden for a moment, returning to a comfortable mixture of bacon, coffee, and toast. Had we been using the wood-burner people would have thought we were selling the place.