Spring rising March 30, 2009

Been a bit busy lately –  having a baby and looking after a toddler too (unfortunately, it seems the two and a half year old can’t look after the baby) – so my blog has rather fallen by the wayside.

Now the clocks have gone back, I can hold back the tide of spring enthusiasm no longer and must once again bore all incomers with minutiae about my London kitchen garden. The carrots that won’t germinate. The blurry close-ups of redcurrant flowers. Sorry, but I’m compelled to. Especially since the Sunday Telegraph has stopped my weekly Edible Gardener column for the time being due to reasons of ‘budget’ and ’space’, those twin horrors of the freelance journalist. 

Meanwhile, in the world of media gardening, Carol Klein has driven around Britain in a Nissan Sunny with the roof down and continued her tireless championing of the rolled up jean, Sarah Raven has come up against the wrath of lower-middle class England with mutterings about cous cous in the Sissinghurst kitchen (‘But Vita and Hadji loved Morrocco!’) and Toby Buckland has become the host of Gardener’s World, channelling Geoff Hamilton. Which some may think is a marvellous thing. Some.

Garden highlights from my early morning garden patrol: two peas have germinated in the wine crate and a cat has sicked up a piece of baling twine. 

Here’s a blurry close-up of a redcurrant flower…

 

Day of the aphids April 23, 2008

My aubergines and melons in the greenhouse are inundated with aphids that are sucking the life out of them and turning them into hunched, defeated shadows of themselves. I fear almost complete destruction within days. And this, despite spraying them with organic pesticide several times. This wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t been nurturing these plants since February with the loving attention of an Antarctic penguin nursing an egg. But it does matter, oh, very much. And don’t tell me I can just pop to Sainsbury’s and buy three types of melon or remind me that I don’t even really like aubergines. That, as any kitchen gardener will know, is not the point.

On a happier note, a photographer came round from The Sunday Telegraph to take some shots of me and my son in the garden, one of which will be in the paper this Sunday. In the past I’ve always dreaded these occasions since, at the age of 36, I have yet to find my ‘photo face’ and generally look either slightly simple or manically deranged when faced with the lens. If it’s a gardening photo, something even worse happens which is that I can’t seem to pose with a pair of secateurs or a trug without a stupidly wry look on my face as though I’m acting in a comedy movie, as if holding a pair of secateurs is a hilarious and odd thing to do, like holding a giant inflatable banana.

Luckily the photographer was charm itself and my son, a born poser at 18 months, stole all the limelight so all I had to do was hang around in the background, fortunately, without any props.