Carrot Cock (Rude veg!)

I haven’t blogged for a while and make no excuses for that: those in the know will understand that wifey and I have had a very difficult few months: we know we are in your thoughts and continue to thank you dearly.

To brighter topics, we have both been keeping as busy as possible and many of you will doubtless know we have been hard at work in the garden. We put up one of those plastic greenhouses to add to our square footage, bought some more troughs for our salads and, in a nod to a bygone era, decided to pressgang the front lawn into an “on your doorstep” allotment.

Strange.... I hear some of you cry and yes I suppose when I was welly deep in horse-turds and mud mid February I would have agreed with you. Not so now though....oh those of you of little foresight and fortitude! My vegetable plots this year have been an unrivalled success. We are still taking beans, lettuce and courgettes from the back garden and the greenhouse is festooned with plump peppers tomatoes and red hot chillies. As for the front, we pulled and stored enough garlic and onions to last us through until Christmas.

We have just bagged our fourth huge bag of spuds and there are still 3 rows left to pull. Our brussels sprouts and cabbages are looking resplendent and we are having to give our carrots away. What’s more, the neighbours and (bless them) the children are genuinely interested in what’s going on in our own little corner of “the good life”.

My next steps are to make sure we have plenty to keep us though the winter and to that end brassicas and Kale are planted out and lettuce is still going strong in the shed.

My next major ambition is to persuade wifey to let me get some meat and egg chickens. Yes there is a difference, egg chickens being the sort that cost you a fortune to feed and take to the vet and in return they give you a couple of eggs a week if you are lucky or salmonella and bird flu if you are unlucky. Meat chickens, in a display of true altruism, give you themselves: from fluffy Easter postcard candidate to Sunday roast in three months.

 Maybe getting carried away with the fervour of it all? Definitely. I do still think though, that I am still the same old Goosh everyone has come to love though. When talking of my gardening achievements this Summer harvest time, with a cornucopia of subject matter I could have selected to discuss, the only topic currently on my lips, greeted always with a precursory snigger of childish delight, is “carrot-cock”.