You Dig?

I used to read sci-fi comics and the NME; I moved on to the Times and Mojo. Now as I drift into old age I find I am irresistibly drawn to gardening catalogues. I've given up gigging for digging. There, I’ve said it. How much longer before I start wearing beige knitwear with Werthers originals in the pockets?



A (younger) friend tried to get me to go to the Portmerion Festival the other day. It’s a special place – the location of The Prisoner series; it was a great bill, the weather forecast was good. I weighed up the merits of traipsing to Wales, watching bands, eating dodgy burgers and bedding down in a field, or staying at home and gently pottering in my garden. No competition, I pottered.

Not only did I save a fortune, I rather think I enjoyed myself more.

 This year I have over fifty tomato plants and they all seem to have fruit on them but they will not surrender their blushing globes easily, needing fairly constant love and attention. There are lower leaves to trim, there is watering to be done, a bit of weeding, suckers to pluck, snails to remove and canes to fix. How could I have ever considered abandoning my lovelies at this crucial stage in their development, even for the not inconsiderable charms of New Order or Primal Scream? Plus the fact, the idea of standing in a mosh pit in a foreign field is just a little too exciting for me these days.



Yes, gardening – specifically vegetable growing - is the new rock ‘n’ roll. Waiting lists for allotments stretch into decades, many enlightened schools in the area have put in veg beds, the Horniman has installed a very impressive World Food Garden (http://www.timmackley.co.uk/tag/horniman-gardens) and the Dulwich Vegetable Garden (http://www.dulwichgoinggreener.org.uk/dulwich-vegetable-garden), behind Roseberry Lodge in the park is now well established. It was where, the other Sunday a very congenial hoary-handed man of the soil was happy to take a five-minute break from his labours to talk manure.



But what to put in my bed? Onions, spuds and parsnips are all cheap and plentiful in the shops just down the road, as well as being dull so I don’t see the point in growing them. I’ve made a point of planting things that taste better than shop bought produce or things that you can’t easily get, or things that are expensive: I’ve had asparagus in for three years now. We had a crop of two spears last year which I admit is less than spectacular and doth not a dinner make but I’ve got high hopes that once they get going we’ll get about ten years of free asparagus out of the plants. More successful this summer was some delicious chard and a fair crop of raspberries.



There are set up costs of course, tools and compost to buy. The catalogue bursts with labour saving money-wasting gadgets. I figured out that the three raspberries I had last year stood me in at about seven quid each, but persevere and as the years go by the unit costs fall away.

My next crop is very ambitious; I’m planting fifty saffron crocuses, which will look pretty and yield little rust-coloured stigmas that weight-for-weight are more valuable than gold. To plant these, I of course needed to buy a special crocus-planting tool, which is £20 and may only get used once, but that’s less than the cost of a new shirt and since I don’t go out any more I don’t need a new shirt. 

Apparently 150 crocuses provide only one gramme of saffron (enough for 12 meals), while you would need to plant the equivalent of two football pitches to get a crop of one kilo.

Now I’m not suggesting we plant crocuses all over the sports fields but it has made me think about the bits of land there are scattered around the area that could benefit from the addition of a fruit tree or a tomato plant. The plant shop lady from Herne Hill grows tomatoes up beside the tree outside Pullens restaurant in a space of about ten square centimetres. 

Imagine if Dulwich was covered in fruit and veg and you could just help your self? That appeals to my old hippie mentality. Perhaps the council should plant fruit trees rather than ornamentals; cabbages rather than daffs; like Johnny Appleseed who travelled the USA planting apple trees wherever he went, I shall start scattering veg seeds in the verges of Dulwich. A little bit of guerrilla gardening would go a long way.



To think of all those years I wasted hanging around record shops on Saturdays when I should have been in the garden centre mulling over mulch. Now what on earth am I going to do with all these tomatoes?



© Steve Overbury 2012



Steve’s book London Babylon about the dark side of the Swinging Sixties is available from www.londonbabylon.co.uk priced £12.99. There are 414 pages of previously untold stories, anecdotes, pictures and spelling mistakes. Each visitor to the site is entitled to the two ‘missing’ chapters free.

See Steve’s blogs: London-babylon.blogspot.com, Spoot-shoot.blogspot.com, beastdulwich.blogspot.com/