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No earthly reason for posting this. Just needed something to cheer me up. Through a combination of family illness and bad luck, I have ended up alone on New Year's Eve... which is a tad depressing.
I took this photo at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens in July. Delphiniums, to me, are still the most beautiful flowers in the world. One day I may even have enough room and sunshine to grow them in my own garden.
For now, here's hoping 2008 proves a great gardening year.
I just love these icy mornings. It's grim getting up in total darkness, but seeing the first light of dawn on a foggy, frosty day almost makes it worthwhile.
Frosted brassicas are particularly photogenic. The ice forms in little beads, like water on a duck's back.
Mercifully, the shortest day is almost here. My spirits lift the moment the days start to lengthen. In only four weeks, I'll be sowing celeriac – the first seeds of the new gardening season. And by mid February, the alarm clock will go off after dawn.
Hurry up, 2008!
There's something wonderful about pulling parsnips and carrots from the ground, fresh, and dicing them into a stew. Tonight's winter staple is pork and bean casserole:
Ingredients
A large double handful of lean pork, diced
Two large onions, chopped
One and half large carrots and a whopping parsnip (see above), all chopped
A large double handful of black beans (or pinto beans)
1 tablespoon flour
Method
Soak the beans overnight. In a heavy casserole, fry the pork in some oil until it starts to brown. Add the onions and flour and fry for two minutes. Add all the other ingredients, plus a bouquet garni and a pint of good stock. Cook in a low oven for two hours, stirring occasionally. Add more stock if it gets too dry.
A Spanish version would leave out the root veg and substitute chorizo sausage and butter beans for the pork and black beans. Plus red wine and paprika. Yum, yum.
A day off work yesterday coincided with some reasonable weather, so I got digging again.
Couch grass is the spawn of Satan, isn't it? If I even go near the stuff, I smell sulphur. As I was hacking out those ghastly long, white roots, I mused on the purpose of couch.
Why's it here? Who benefits? What's it for?
Got no answers, of course. But as I dug, the last lines of Ozymandias kept playing on my internal jukebox:
Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Couldn't figure out why my unconscious had latched on to this. Then I realised what was bothering me.
Shelley was writing bollocks. Desert or no desert... there must have been some couch.
Jack Frost did a great exterior paint job overnight. Everything looked gorgeous early this morning, and I went a bit mad with the camera.
I know what you're thinking:
"It's just a parsnip. And a crappy one, at that. Why's he posting it? Has he finally lost his marbles?"
Thing is, it's not just any parsnip. This is a parsnip that took 13 minutes to dig up.
Reason: Like a klutz, I went to the allotment this morning. Like a double klutz, I didn't think about the effect last night's frost would have on the ground.
Result: 13 minutes (I counted them) hacking at rock-solid soil to excavate this pathetic morsel. It would still be there had the sun not been warming the earth as I toiled.
So it's official. I HAVE lost my marbles.
In other news: I now have the official Soilman 'winter banner' on the site. Regular visitors: Hold down shift and hit your browser's refresh tab to see it.
PS: Scoffed the parsnip this evening. Never were so few calories won by the expenditure of so many.
The weather's been atrocious this week. It's raining so hard today I didn't even want to get out of bed this morning.
No change there, come to think of it. But you take my point.
All I can do is look out of the window and mope. And admire my lovely cymbidium orchid, which has gone berserk this year. It's a cultivar called King's Lock, and I have three flower spikes. Outrageous.
Normal service resumes any time I can get out of the bloody front door. Which doesn't look like happening any time soon.
As you were.
Digging again today. Not my favourite job, but quite satisfying; you see the result of your efforts so clearly. So unlike most everything else in life.
Also, I like soil. I love the smell of it, and the way it crumbles (you hope) when you dig it. I like watching worms writhing in it.
I am, in short, a soil sadster. It's grown on me as I've got older. As the date of one's interment in the stuff approaches, one naturally takes a greater interest.
