Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I can grow beetroot. Believe me, if we wake up tomorrow in some post-apocalyptic waste-
land I'm your go-to guy for beetroot. Even I can't kill that stuff, which leads me to suspect
that beetroot is so easy to grow you could actually just throw a few seeds at a multi-storey car
park and still get a decent harvest a few months later. I'm also a dab hand at tomato growing,
which is something of an irony as I'm allergic to the things. I was once stung by a jelly fish
in Tunisia where the local remedy for such an incident is either to rub a tomato into the sting
or urinate on it. They are lovely, warm people the Tunisians but even their generosity can be
stretched if you lie on their beaches and demand that innocent passersby wee on you.
I'm also a success with Swiss chard, again a seemingly indestructible vegetable that survives
rain, sleet, direct sunlight and routine indifference. It never stops growing! My children are
good eaters and will try anything, but offer up Swiss chard ten days in a row and the novelty
wears off, I can tell you. I know lots of parents find it difficult to get their offspring to eat their
greens, but how many are greeted at the dinner table with 'Oh, Daddy, Swiss chard again?
Really?' I tried growing spinach as an alternative, actually a 'cut and come again' spinach
which was just awful and relentless; even Popeye would have baulked at this bitter, stringy
variant. Samuel quite reasonably asked one day if we couldn't 'just put it out of its misery.'
Some things you plant on advice, 'This will keep you going all summer' they say in spring,
only to follow it up in early autumn with 'Well, it worked for me.' Carrots, for instance. Car-
rots should be simple, surely? It's a carrot, they're everywhere - who can't grow a carrot? I
can't, that's who. I did exactly as the seed packet suggested, the correct depth, the right level
of watering, I 'thinned' the seedlings when required, I nurtured the little sods through all the
elements and how did they repay me? By being so measly, so pitifully small and thin, you'd
have been forgiven for thinking I'd invented the 'Pre-Julienned Carrot'. Broad beans were the
same, three months I waited for those things and in the end had barely enough to sprinkle on
an omelette for one.
I think I'm much better suited to orchard husbandry - there's no digging involved there, just
a bit of judicious pruning over the winter months and then harvesting when ripe. It's lazy
farming and suits me down to the ground; the orchard also acts as a surrogate office for me
too. One of the reasons why the Loire Valley is supposedly a haven for peace is that mobile
phone signals are something of a lottery and for some reason at times the best signal can only
be found standing next to the plum tree in the orchard.
Generally though, I try not to take advantage of this as the orchard is a calming place, dis-
turbed only by the bees going about their business, but I needed to take an important call and
that was the only place (in between a plum tree and the fence to the paddock) that I could
guarantee the necessary signal. It was during this call that Junior, never a horse to miss an
opportunity to be a complete bastard, decided to stand just the other side of the fence and
urinate so loudly and for such a long period of time that by the end we were both standing in
a huge puddle of horse wee. Obviously under normal circumstances I would have moved but
