Vegetable Wars

Courgette surprise

We have a vegetable crisis. 

In the garden I have 15 raised beds, all neatly organised and rotated. They are a thing of wonder. 

Or so I thought. I know, I’m a vegetable bore. I insist that unsuspecting dinner guests take a tour of my vegetable patch before they can enjoy our canapés. 

But the other week, as soon as some friends arrived for supper, the husband asked to see my garden with just a little too much enthusiasm. This was suspicious. 

“How’s it going?” he asked, as we passed the greenhouse, aubergines fighting cucumbers and peppers for space. 

I sensed a dangerous smugness in his voice. I showed him my bulging peas and beans, calmly growing towards their moment of destiny. He moved on, feigning as much interest as a member of the royal family. But I knew he wasn’t really looking. He was comparing.

After the holiday

Jo nudged me awake. “Are you awake?” she whispered. 

“I’ve been awake for the past five days,” I growled. Another hour of sleeplessness wasn’t going to make any difference. 

Next door we could hear Izzy singing. She makes up the lyrics as she goes along. She’s singing about mermaids on sunny beaches and Truffle our dog marrying Boots, the monkey from Dora the Explorer. 

It’s 4am. Five days after our return from Los Angeles, Izzy still has jetlag. As a result, so do we.

Tomato Blush

I'm most grateful to Mary Yeoman for offering this simple solution to my heirloom/heritage tomato problem (see previous post).  

She wrote: Put them in a brown paper bag with a few banana skins and one or two ripe bananas and I can assure you they will ripen in a few days.

Don't Quit While You're Behind

Some say the secret of true success is to quit while you’re behind. Sadly it’s not something I’m very good at. 

Take my tomato plants, for example.

Plants Prefer Geordie - It's Official

If Cheryl Cole ever gives up singing, she could certainly become a gardener. So too, if they fall from TV favour, could Ant and Dec. 

I don’t know if our local heroes realise they have the power to make plants grow, but a gentleman from Essex called Chris Bonnett does. He owns a garden centre in Chelmsford and has just announced the result of a very important, if not entirely scientific, experiment.

Lessons From a Screeching Child

Oh no, here it comes again. One deep breath and suddenly the Sunday lunchtime hubbub in the Ox Inn is cut to silence by a scream so blood-curdling, you’d swear someone had seen a ghost. Cutlery is dropped in shock, elderly women tut their disapproval. The sound is beyond loud: it’s earsplitting. Sheep four fields away stop their chewing and bleat in alarm. Izzy has dropped a carrot.

I’m not quite sure where she learnt this new technique. I don’t recall my first four children expressing themselves this way. At 16 months Izzy has discovered the voice of a diva, and boy does she like to show it off. The busier the restaurant, the louder she screams. Then, carrot replaced, she magically transforms herself back to an angel.

I guess advanced age has tempered my memories of child-rearing. My wrinkled brain will only recall images of quiet babies politely chewing their rusks as the grownups debate politics and football over long social lunches. Of course, it was probably never like that: I guess you just erase the bad recordings. Or maybe I was so engrossed in my obsession with career-building, I never really took enough notice of my children growing up.

The changes are arriving thick and fast now. This week I’m going to Los Angeles for some meetings with broadcasters about a new programme idea; I’m not looking forward to it, partly because I’ll have to watch England play the United States in the wrong country, but mostly because I’m scared I’ll miss some crucial new Izzy development.

Yesterday she had her feet measured for her first proper pair of shoes. She now runs as well as walks, but always in the opposite direction to where we need her to go. Our formerly open-plan living area is now a maze of child prevention barriers; coffee tables and low shelves lie empty, waiting patiently for the end of toddlerhood.

Izzy’s language is now so advanced she reels off whole paragraphs of gobbledygook. She’ll stumble up with a big grin on her face, stare at you with her big blue eyes and reel off a passionate lecture of totally coherent gabble. She’ll wait patiently for you to answer her, and then nod her head in approval before toddling off to tell her extraordinary story to someone else. But not a phrase of it uses any human word I recognise. It’s a wonderfully sophisticated private language known only to her, and my stubborn attempts at humanising it, by pointing at Truffle and endlessly repeating the word “dog”, have been completely ignored.

Headstrong doesn’t begin to describe my daughter. “And where do you think she gets that from?” asks my wife.

Watching a child grow is like tending a Northumbrian garden. Every day brings a new wonder and, because our seasons are so short, you can’t bear to miss a single flower. You want to freeze in time each new scene, but sadly there’s no still-frame facility. For the last thirty years, my timetable of life was dictated by projects and paydays; now there’s something immensely satisfying about sitting back and watching the natural order of life unfold.

After all, if there’s one thing that the appalling news from Cumbria this week will have taught us, it’s just how fragile and transitory human life can be. If simple, innocent lives can be taken away so easily and unexpectedly, if the security of the safest, happiest community can be destroyed by one hour of madness, the least we should do is to taste and treasure every single moment we have left.

Two Life-Changing Experiences

On the day the Iraq inquiry opened in London last week, coincidentally two palpable weapons of mass destruction were unleashing themselves at home.

Mabel was first. The younger of our two working cockers, she’s always fancied herself as a proper gundog. Now nearly two and despite having no formal training, she races across the kitchen to retrieve her favourite toy and deposits it, saliva encrusted, into whichever lap wears the most expensive trousers. The louder the shriek of the recipient the more she takes it as praise for her extraordinary talent. She doesn’t just wag her tail, her whole lower body heaves from side to side in jubilation.

But despite her golden spaniel cuteness, Mabel’s real ambition is to become a rabbit killer. She and her sister Truffle spend hours in the garden sniffing them out, and occasionally they stumble over one and give chase. Which is fine by me: rabbits are the scourge of any garden. Having just planted several hundred specimens from the Northern Ark nursery in Longhorsley (no imported polytunnel plants there, just naturalized Northumbrian herbaceous stock) I had visions of our local rabbits summoning the entire county to sample our juicy shoots on the first day of spring. Our problem is, despite running themselves ragged and trampling all the borders, our wretched dogs have never caught a thing.

Until last week. It was a wondrous sight: Mabel on the doorstep proudly straddling a monster over half her size. I accepted the gift with genuine pleasure, then shooed her away in case Jo threw a fit: my Californian wife has tolerated quite enough north east wildlife already, including mice in her bathroom and bats and frogs in the hall, without having bunny blood on the carpet. I watched Mabel outside, head held high, strutting the rabbit in triumphant circles round our big yew tree, with Truffle following miserably behind. When I went out half an hour later, they had obviously reached a compromise, because I saw Truffle carrying just the head. Gross, as Jo would say.

I was about to go over and retrieve the carcass when I heard a scream: “Tom, come quick”. Not another mouse, I thought, and dashed inside.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Izzy, after ten determinedly lazy months where she wouldn’t even turn over in her cot, had suddenly taken it upon herself to crawl. From the sitting position she keeled over and, instead of collapsing in her usual sprawl on the carpet, gave first one, then two wobbly little shuffles on her knees. She paused, look up at me and gave me the biggest grin. I broke into spontaneous applause and she giggled hysterically, then, as if to show this was no one-off achievement, proceeded to race across the room towards the television remote lying on the floor. Whereupon Jo and I realised life would never be the same again.

As I write this Jo is unloading gates, fencing, and samples of new carpeting to cover exposed bare boards throughout the house. The saucepans in the kitchen have been raised to a higher shelf – everything below three feet has been elevated out of harm’s way. The DVD player already has butter smeared around its slot and the cat has taken cover under the sofa. Mabel and Truffle are licking Izzy’s face in welcome to their new four-legged playmate.

What a difference a day makes. In one small step she’s left her innocence behind. I’m watching her now as she grabs the remote again and C-Beebies switches to News 24. Some pundits are discussing Iraq. I wonder what Izzy will make of the lies of our generation’s politicians when she’s old enough to understand. She grimaces, then bashes the remote until C-Beebies returns.

Baked Potatoes and Peterborough

I'm somewhere near Doncaster, on my weekly train to London, finishing my scrambled eggs. Breakfasts on the train haven't been the same since they took Robson's Craster kippers off the menu.

Soon I'll be looking sympathetically on the poor people boarding at Peterborough and wondering what on earth made them live in such a dull flatland of a region. Because the geography of a region is directly reflected in the creativity and sense of humour of its inhabitants, I'll be basking in the superior glow of someone who knows just how lucky he is to be returning to Northumberland tonight.

Last week's London trip brought a meeting with Peaches Geldof to talk about a new TV programme idea, then an afternoon at ITV, trying to persuade them to buy a new gameshow. It took us six weeks to plan the pitch, and precisely half an hour for them to turn it down. So Jo and I took solace in the ultimate home of comfort food, The Ivy.

I have a friend who flies up from his home in Provence twice a year just to join me at The Ivy for their French roast chicken. I was there during the famous Ivy lock-in, when the police refused to let us leave because the IRA had planted a bomb in the next street. The owners opened champagne and all the celebrities danced on the tables singing hits from the shows. I've only once had an unhappy evening there, which was with my ex-wife on our first and last wedding anniversary. Julie Andrews, sitting at the next table, complained to the manager because we were rowing so loudly.

Last week's experience was much more pleasant, though the only star sighting was Andrew Lloyd Webber holding court with his Connie/Maria girl.

Later, I thought I caught sight of the back of Monty Don's head. A year ago I wouldn't have blinked, because to me gardening was as dull as a London football derby. When I was young, my parents had an allotment. There, in sub-zero temperatures, they would prise frozen sprouts from their stalks on Christmas Eve. Why they couldn't go to Walter Willson's like everyone else was beyond me. But now, having relocated from Southern California (which grows only dry, fire-ready scrubland) and Hampstead (where an allotment is called a patio), I have my very own vegetable garden and I've discovered the meaning of fresh. We now have enough potatoes to last us through till Christmas Day.

But only just. Jo, who as a Californian is enduring her first Northumbrian autumn, offered to help me with the harvest.

"Just brush off some of this soil before we bag them", I said, doing my Monty Don impression. Twenty minutes later, I walked into the kitchen to find the sink completely full of drowning King Edwards.

To say that there was a strain in Anglo-American relations would be an understatement. I know little enough about gardening, but on Gardeners World I had distinctly heard Monty say "lift and dry potatoes and store in paper sacks in a cool, dry, dark place".

"They're supposed to be dry", I hollered, and stormed out to the spinach to cool off.

Half an hour passed, and I went back inside. There on the kitchen table was a huge mound of potatoes and Jo meticulously drying each one -- with her hair dryer.