Romping runner beans and things

Well work has been as relentless as ever in the last week. It’s been a bit of a ruddy nightmare, if I’m honest, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.  My back - for the moment - is just about holding out. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m hoping that in little over a week things will have calmed down somewhat. And I’ll have some energy and inclination to tackle the (roughly) six thousand, four hundred and ninety-three jobs that need doing at home.

First on my list is my greenhouse. It’s looking very sorry for itself, parked in the corner and slowly being overrun by a tangle of bindweed and other annoyingly persistent perennial weeds. It’s currently hosting a mountain of used plastic plant pots, seed trays and various garden tools, including a small broken electric lawn mower and a strimmer. It’s missing two panes in the roof - something that I’ve been meaning to address for months now - and just looks ugly.

At the beginning of the summer I was intending to plonk a couple of straw bales inside the greenhouse, and use them as a planting medium for my butternut squashes. Rich’s parents also gave us some courgette plants, so I need to get those in there too. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m going to be damned if I don’t at least achieve that this year.

I mean, I do have the time now. Being the summer solstice, I can easily work outside up until 10 o’clock in the evenings. It just feels like madness. To think that, at 10pm, in six months’ time, if I stood in the same place it’ll be pitch black, cold, most likely wet and windy, and pretty uninviting. So strange.

But I digress. There are jobs to be done. Mowing is a gargantuan effort at the moment, especially around my veg plots. I want to lay down a weed supressant mat and some bark or gravel, but once again, this is where funds are an issue. If I do it, I want to do it properly. I can’t stand half-finished or half-hearted jobs, and unfortunately, there are a lot of them about around here.

I’m pleased though that what little I did manage to do this year seems to be coming along well. My (german) prizewinner runner beans were a gift from a German friend. At first, I thought that they weren’t going to come to much, but in the last two weeks they’ve put on a growth spurt, spiralling and twisting themselves around the bamboo canes, and suddenly bursting into flower. I’m not a massive fan of runner beans, but I’m hoping that picking them fresh will make a difference to my indifference. Rich, on the other hand, loves raw runner beans, so I think he’s looking forward to a PYO session, when the time comes.

I’m feeling quite smug about my Charlotte potatoes. They’re huge. It’s like digging for big hunks of gold. It’s tantamount to looking for freshly laid eggs in the nest box each day - there’s something about that feeling of making the discovery, the anticipation of what you might find, that never goes away. I’ve only dug up about 5 potato plants so far, but the results have been good. The only downside is that (I suspect) because we have sandy soil, our potatoes can be prone to a bit of scab. It’s no biggie, just an aesthetic thing realy  - a quick scrub with a brush under some water gets rid of it.

My onions and garlic are swelling nicely, and my carrots are putting on a lot of growth. They always do well in our soil. I’ve got Autumn King in, so it’s going to be a while until I can savour their sweetness. The rabbits, on the other hand, are enjoying nibbling their way through the thinned-out carrot tops. I think I’m right in saying that the carrot is part of the parsley family, and the carrot tops certainly resemble some sort of herb. I’m sure they can be used in cooking, although I’ve never come across any recipes that use them.

My parsnips - all five or six that germinated - are actually doing well. OK, so I’ll only get a couple of meals’ worth, but I think I could maybe sow a couple of rows of salads inbetween to make use of the space. I also rehomed some surplus cabbages that Mum had knocking about, so they’ve gone in, with one lone brussel sprout plant for Rich. I just don’t like them. I live in a county famed for it’s brussel sprout growth (I think there was even some sort of campaign to rename it a Bedfordshire sprout), but they’ve just never hit the spot with me.

There’s still lots to do though. Greenhouse, weeding, cutting back, planting up… it just never stops, but I think, in some ways, that’s the beauty of it. Just don’t get me started on the house. The burrow. The tip.  When I have some time off, I’m going to have to blitz it. It’s just unbelievably… cluttered. But for the last two or three weeks I’ve only had one and a half day’s off work, and I am NOT spending all of that time cleaning. No, I’ll wait until I have a few days off after Edinburgh. Then I’ll tackle it.

The other thing that’s been whipping around my head is writing. I want to write a book. I really do. When I was a kid, I used to write loads of stories, some of them actually quite good. As I got older, I would try and start a ‘novel’, get in two or three chapters, and then give up. I haven’t attempted anything like that for years, but I’ve had something bouncing around in my head for over a year now, and I’m wondering… actually, I’m wondering a lot of things. Trying to work out plot lines, characters that fit, themes, the politics of the whole thing. I have what I think are awesome ideas, and then realise that they’ve featured in other stories, films or TV shows. I look at what JK Rowling has done and think… pah. I could never build a world as impressive as HP. This is my downfall. I want to be the best at what I do, but inevitably, as you might guess, it never happens, so I don’t bother. Because that would be like losing.

Silly girl.

I might just do it. Writing creatively is something I’ve done since I was able to write my first sentence. OK, so my story about the bulldozer that got angry and pushed the crab in the water won’t be on the Telegraph’s best seller’s list in five years’ time, but I would at least love to have one of my stories published. I’d love to get people reading, to inspire children, to fire up their imaginations and get them thinking. To love (and probably, at times, hate in equal measure) what I do.

That would be a Good Life.