At last some time outside. The book went to the publishers last weekend, a few hours ahead of deadline. It's been a long stretch - more than twice as long as the last book in half the time. Now, start of March and I can get some hours outside to plant the many things that are arriving or have arrived.



On Saturday I had a walk around the forest garden, planning what to add and where to put it. The cornelian cherry I put in last year is starting to open its blossom, the giant sweet coltsfoot beating the rhubarb for vigour and it won't be long before the buds on the blue honeysuckle open.



I scribbled an inventory of the plants in the polytunnel which holds so many of the plants I have yet to get out from last year, even the year before and some I've dug up this year for relocating. The apricot is covered in about-to-burst blossom, the daylilies are ready to plant out and I counted the szechuan pepper plants (40 large, 35 small if you must know) and spiked myself in the finger with one of the prickles that had fallen into the compost in its pot. I'm not sure why but they hurt more than most other prickles. It's one of the special tier of pain at the top end of small tedious pains. It was the latest in a weekend of bashes, tweaks, cuts and scuffs that got me thinking about the nature of pain while reclining in an over-full bath.



I think there are three types of pain. Cut-yourself-and-it-hurts-straight-away pain; dull-dead-leg-disabling-sort-of pain, and; stub-your-toe-think-you've-got-away-with-it-but-give-it-7-seconds-and-here-it-comes pain. I've experienced all three this weekend.

Friday night I broke the first law of washing up - I put the sharpest knife into the washing up bowl along with other cutlery. I actually just wrote 'the sharp knife' but changed it to 'the sharpest knife'. There are some things that come with a certain upbringing, like turning 'the big light' on. When I was a child we had 'the sharp knife'. Pass me the sharp knife...watch out for the sharp knife...I'm off to sharpen the sharp knife. A bread knife and a sharp knife were all a household needed to cut anything. The sharp knife was always sharpened by my dad, only on a Sunday, always just before the roast whatever came out of the oven. He sharpened it on the concrete post that the garden gate was fixed to. It had lost its handle (the knife, and the gate come to think of it) but it didn't matter: it was sharp. Over the years it got smaller, in that way that I got taller - you didn't notice very often but when you did it was undeniable and mildly surprising. When he died the blade was little more than an inch long. I guess he was having slivers of lamb for Sunday lunch. I can't quite get the thought out of my head that his lifespan was attached to the knife's lifespan in some ridiculous way. Which is unfortunate as I have a sharp knife I've had for 15 years and it's handle is about to come off...I can't say I'm looking forward to the prospect of my handle falling off.

Anyway, one of the sharp knives, in the washing up bowl. Instant, millisecond pain - I'm guessing as evolutionary impulse stopping me from doing further damage to the second smallest finger of my left hand. It's safe to say that my otherwise sparkling flash metal guitar future will be on hold for a couple of weeks.

Saturday I caught the outside of my left thigh on the corner of the table. An early contender for Best Self-Dead Leg (South West region) 2010.



Later on Saturday I trod on a plug. A misfortune normally reserved for the first step of the day, this is a special sort of pain that gets to the very core of a person. Something about it makes a man talk. The CIA must've have used this at Guantanamo. Just a three-pin plug by the side of a someone's bed for a couple of days, they'll tell you whatever you want to know. It's only rivalled by pitta pocket palm pain - take a pitta out of the toaster and as you grip it you expel a jet of hot air from a hole in the rim of the pocket straight into the soft, vulnerable cup of your hand. You drop it, of course, and chances are it'll be your last pitta. Still second to the plug though.


(salsify)

Sunday I stubbed my toe on a table leg. This is one of those special pains that gives you a few seconds to think you've got away with it...although by now I know that the time from impact to pain relates entirely to the degree of pain to come - the longer the wait the worse it'll be. Like a hangover after you're thirty.

The worst I've had this sort of pain was in 1991 playing football on the local park. Ten of us shared a house that was due for demolition after a long summer of us living there. It had a huge garden aand gorgeous views across the Exe estuary. Another 10 or so friends moved into the neighbouring house about 100 yards away across the garden. Another 10 or so lived in vans in the car park. Most weekends the housedwellers would play the 'hippies' that lived in the vans at football - for the Cider Cup. Pete the hippy was unrivalled in goal. The cat. I was usually the other keeper, partly on account of being the only other who was any good in goal and partly on account of playing like I had a 50p piece for a forehead and Toblerones for boots. Games were usually played at midnight or so, after the pub had hut and with house and van lights for floodlights. Each team had their own themetune to run out to...I think ours still holds up as a theme to run out to play football to. Games were usually low on quality and high on giggling as you might imagine. After a series of draws we agree to play in the daytime in the hope of raising the quality and deciding who would hold the Cider Cup aloft once and for all. The date was set for the Park, Saturday afternoon.

It was actually quite a decent game, although off to a slow start given the previous evening's cider thanksgiving and the large breakfast enjoyed by all. Having said that, as with the Wembley pitch midweek, it was the same for everyone. I was acquitting myself well in goal, producing a couple of gymnastic saves to deny the hippies, although slightly slow off my line to come for the odd cross - for which I was rightly berated by our ginger central defender, rightly famous for what he could do with £1.73 of small change. With his coarse words ringing in my ears I came for a cross I shouldn't have. It was low and a little too far out. It was dropping perfectly for the hippy striker to volley. It was summer, the ground was hard, I wore tracksuit bottoms to soften the impact of pale West Country skin on dessicated earth. As I came for the ball, mistimed as my run was, I realised I had only the Peter Schmiechel option of spreading myself as wide as possible in an attempt to get something on the ball. My arse landed on the ground with my feet very far apart. I was still travelling forwards, causing the tracksuit bottoms to ride up and (how can I put this) lift and separate most effectively. He caught the cross perfectly, full on the volley, the balling travelling approximately two foot six before it clattered at maximum velocity into my now perfectly presented undercarriage. I immediately started counting. 1...2...3...4...Time slowed down. 21 grown men fell to the ground, in tears, howling, having evidently seen the funniest thing that had ever happened in the history of the earth. 7...8...9...no pain...10..11..then the world turned upside down. It took over half an hour to feel human again. And everyone was still laughing so much from my misfortune that we couldn't play on. Game declared a draw, the Cider Cup shared.


(rosa rugosa buds)

Where was I...finger and szechuan pepper thorn, very painful. Also up there in the rollcall of gardening pain is pruner's tip. No matter what grip I affect I always stub the tips of my fingers when squeezing the secateurs to prune off a branch. It makes me mad. It's a delay-pain, with a couple of seconds between stubbage and annoyance. I'm beginning to suspect that the delay inherent in delay-pain is to allow the about-to-be sufferer to find someone else to blame for their misfortune.

But there are two maladies that can afflict the gardener which while not painful are a little weird. Firstly, Wellysock - when your sock rides down your ankle into the toe-end of you welly. This has little to do with the quality of the sock and more to do partly with the looseness of the welly but more so with the sucking action inherent in the rubber wellington boot. Yesterday I bought some waterproof laceup short boots in the hope of innoculating myself against this tedium.

Secondly, phantom hat syndrome. I first wrote of this almost 5 years ago. My thesis awaits publication. In case you can't be bothered to click the link, some amputees are able to 'feel' their missing limb, and this 'phantom limb' may even experience 'pain'...phantom hat syndrome occurs when you've been wearing a hat all day, come in, remove the hat, go to make a cup of tea and you reach up to take your hat off clutching a mop of your own hair - the hat, although removed, has left a trace of itself on your head. For hours it can feel like it's still there, and making you feel incrementally idiotic everytime you reach to take it off.

Today is sunny. It's also cold. I'm outside for a change, with Trent, planting almonds, chestnuts, oregon grape, pears, oriental quince as well as pruning a few apple trees. I'll need my hat. And my secateurs. Wish me luck.

Sitting in my office I crane my neck round every few minutes to stare at the 3 darts lodged in the treble twenty. I placed them there not (as more cynical observers might postulate) with my nose a few inches from the bully but from the official distance of 7ft 9¼in (that's 2.369m metric lovers). This may give you the impression that I'm good at darts but the fact that I felt the need to leave them there to admire since their last flight last night should reassure you that this happens infrequently enough to be worthy of extended observation.

I know almost without doubt that when I take them out to throw again I'll score somewhere in the region of 17. This, I think, is a microcosm of my life. Pleasing peaks followed by laughable troughs. I'm not too good at 'steady eddie' which is a shame. In kinder moments I try to convince myself that this is exactly the pattern of genius - I've written about this a while back - but I suspect all it means is that I have the atttention span of a 7 year old and an inability to stick at stuff. Maybe I'll throw the darts at the end when I've finished writing whatever this turns into.



I was throwing darts as I'd bored myself (never mind everyone else) commenting on Lia Leendertz's fabulous new blog. She's written a particularly interesting post about lawns and their ability to sequester carbon. I get awfully wound up by the idea of carbon sequestering and offsetting, especially if I'm a little hungry. It means I'm slightly more inclined to be boring. And at length.

I have a backlog of quacking-on caused by holding my tongue when I feel the urge to squawk every time anything close to this little hobby horse gets mentioned. It's hard not to sound like a pious arse when you're talking about such things so I resisted quacking on too much on Lia's blog - I have my own blogspace here to be boring rather than sully Lia's. I'd like to stop myself now - as the runner up in the Garden Media Awards Best Blog Award 2010 frequently reminds us 'it's only gardening' and of course he's right. There are so many more important things to get yourself in a palaver about. And usually I do stop myself but not today.

I'd go and have a short walk rather than read this if I was you - I just need to get it out somewhere, and here's that somewhere.

Carbon sequestration and offsetting is at once boring and very interesting. It's also a matter of maths. The idea with offsetting is that you can fly to India and not have to worry about the dreadfully high amount of carbon that results because you pay (for example) for a few trees to be planted in some far flung corner of Lincolnshire. The trees take carbon from the atmosphere and hold it within as they grow and/or convert it into non-polluting substances.

Offsetting worries me for three reasons. It doesn't encourage any change of behaviour (eg flying less). It means that those who can afford to offset can carry on polluting more easily and regularly than those less well off. But most importantly the maths doesn't work. You generate xx carbon flying to India, so you need to plant yy trees to balance this out. But for this to work we need to know both sides of the equation.

It's straightforward enough to obtain a decent approximation of the carbon your share of the flight to India generates. Actually this isn't quite so straightforward - do you include a contribution to the buildings, the infrastructure, including the road network, the vast amount of concrete that makes something like an airport possible? Let's leave that one for now. The other side of the equation is mildly more interesting. The amount of carbon you've generated in your trip to India is then converted to a number of trees which are planted in your name to sequester (or more accurately 'offset') the equivalent carbon your trip generated. This sounds perfectly plausible until some dullard (like me) asks a few simple questions.

How long will the trees be there sequestering carbon?
What happens to the tree when it dies or is cut down?
What species is it?
More importantly, what would've been on the land where you've planted trees over the course of their lifespan? Grassland perhaps, which itself sequesters carbon. The problem, I hope I'm conveying, is that no-one is calculating the net benefit, ie how much carbon would be sequestered by that woodland over and above what would have been sequestered on that land anyway. And no-one calculates that because they can't see into the future (let's say the next 20 years) and predict what might happen on that land. Someone might have planted trees ther in a few years simply because grants made it worthwhile, so the next carbon sequestered? None.

It's hard not to see offsetting is a patsy, making the concerned feel better about polluting. I don't mean to knock concerned people. Acting positively when you haven't all got time or inclination to find out or think about all the ins-and-outs is hardly to be ridiculed. But it makes me quietly furious that people make a living exploiting it.



Similarly, we get thrown 'food miles' as the digestible shorthand for doing something about the carbon footprint of our food. Food accounts for around 30% of the average persons carbon footprint. That's quite a startling figure if you ask me. Food miles accounts for around 10% of that (ie 3% of your average carbon footprint) yet it's the single concept relating to food and climate change that people attach to. The concept is simple and understandable: the further we drive food from where it's grown to where it's sold, the more carbon we produce. The imagery is perfect: cars produce carbon, carbon produces climate change, simple. Simpler than telling people the whole story - that it's how it's grown that accounts for a very much larger proportion of carbon.

Growing food is the simplest of beautiful things. Green plants turn sunlight into food with the addition of just a few bits and bobs from the soil. With a tiny amount of sensible soil management, this idle process would keep us going indefinitely. Not fast enough for us though. We have hurried the endless 'current' sunlight energy along with 'old' energy in the form of fossil fuels.

Nitrogen is vital for healthy plant growth and you'll find it in most virgin soils. Most non-organic farms grow food (including grass) using man-made nitrogen fertilisers. I think I've mentioned before that my favourite/least favourite recipe is for 1 tonne of nitrogen fertiliser. You will need:

- 1 tonne of oil
- 108 tonnes of water

and as well as your tonne of nitrogen fertiliser you will produce 7 tonnes of CO2 equivalent GHGs int he process. And as it breaks down nitrogen fertiliser releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Only around 5% of the UK farmland is registered organic, meaning that 95% of our food relies on this recipe, ie it is dependent on a resource we know to be running out: our food supply = our oil supply.

Phosphate is another key limiting factor to crop growth, vital to all life. We import 206,000 tonnes of it a year, almost all coming from 4 North African countries. Phosphate is a finite mine-able resource and most estimates suggest that at current levels of use we have perhaps 30 years of supplies left. Keeping use at current levels is unlikely as the emerging nations, predominantly China and India, are using it at ever-increasing rates, causing prices to increase by 700% in second half of last year alone.

There is a natural alternative to man-made nitrogen and phosphate - using green manures, appropriate rotations and animal manures: the sort of practices carried out by most organic farmers. Which is why eating organic food rather than non-organic reduces your carbon footprint by around 12% - four times more than if you wipe out just the food miles. But stick the two together....local organic food and the gains stack up and compound.



Water illustrates this well I think. Climate change is changing how we receive our water supplies. The south and east of England have many of the best soils for agriculture. It is predicted that as a result of climate change by 2080 this region is likely to have half its current rainfall and that it will get it in sharper events - think of it like a weekly bath rather than a daily shower. This poses huge problems both for retaining the water for using between rains events and mitigating the impacts of such volumes of water falling. Globally the picture is even more scary.

70% of world’s potable water goes to agriculture. Wow. We think of it as a free, self refilling resource so we waste it. Or at the very least afford it little respect. Every tonne of grain produced in the US uses around 1000 tonnes of potable water to grow to harvest. Climate change makes this way of growing hugely vulnerable. Most of the grain goes to feeding animals, which we then eat. A Dutch university has calculated that the typical beefburger ‘contains’ 2400 litres of embedded water when you take account of the grain grown to feed the cow, the water and care, and the processing involved in making the burger.

This concept of embedded water or virtual water is something we'll be hearing more and more about as climate change becomes increasingly apparent in our lives. Embedded or virtual water reflects the amount of water used to deliver the product to us. And it's not just about meat. We import 12% of our fruit and veg from Africa, a continent not famous for over-production of food. It's a hot continent and water is a scarce resource. Every year we import 189million m3 of virtual water in green beans alone. So everytime we buy Kenyan green beans we are importing water and in effect exporting drought. Small, repeated actions - it's where almost all the damage is done. It's what makes the supermarkets dominate our food supply - all of us toddling off to spend our £50s every few days.

Perversely, this makes me quietly optimistic, and I'll get on to why in a mo.



Back to Lia's post. Lawns sequestering carbon. Soil is comprised of anything up to 58% carbon which can be released due to over-tillage and not putting it back naturally through green manures and/or animal manures. Rising temperatures speed this up. Two years ago mismanagement of the UKs soils reached such a level that our soils began releasing more carbon than they were locking up. Put simply, our soils are contributing to climate change. They are releasing 13m tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases a year, almost matching the 14m tonnes emittted from rest of agriculture. Globally the picture is no different - according to the UN 2 billion hectares of land have been affected by human-induced soil degradation. It also predicts that half the world’s arable land will be ‘unusable’ by 2050.

The scale of the problem is huge and lawns seem insignificant but I don't think they are. It's not what they are so much as what they mean. If me, my neighbours and everybody else in the village perceives that green square as a place where at least for a few square yards some good is being quietly achieved, some contribution to addressing the march of climate change, then where's the harm?

Which is where my comment on Lia's blog comes in.

There is no harm in planting trees or recognising your lawn as a carbon repository but I'm greedy and I felt like shouting as much as I could in the hope that people wouldn't just enjoy their lawn in its sequestering loveliness but go beyond the first step and make the most of it. Yes, it grows therefore it sequesters. This is good in itself, but if you feed it, water it and hit the moss and weeds with chemicals you're lawn account is still hugely in the carbon negative - still causing climate change. Avoid all those and your lawn becomes a small contribution to dealing with climate change.

It's the same with growing even a small amount of your own food. It's a small contribution but an ongoing one. Like wandering to the supermarket to spend your money every week, it's a powerful cumulative step, but in the opposite direction. More importantly it's a small change of mindset we won't get anywhere without one of those.

All of this is remarkably dull when someone's telling you about it or, more particularly, when someone's telling you not to do what you're doing. I'm not meaning to tell anyone not to do anything, other than to play more darts. I just like the maths to be more than just the answer. I like to see the workings. Then you can choose what you like.



I didn't eat meat for 15 or more years and started again around 6 years ago. I'd stopped eating meat in an attempt to do some 'good' and I didn't feel I was anymore. My wrestling match with my conscience was the subject of the first rather clumsy piece I had published. Somehow this relates to this post but I'm hungry and boring myself good n proper now and I should be writing the book and a piece for the English Garden about growing vines in England or polishing shoes or something.

Apologies. Enough dullness. I promise to get back to apricots, killing plants and half naked americans later today.

Nearly forgot. 66, quite respectable really. 5, treble 20, 1

If ever I would stop thinking about music and assorted sporting activities, as The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopresy almost said, I'd get on and open some seed catalogues. I feel happier doing it now I've sorted the plant orders for the coming year - you've got to do the big stuff first. After the snow and the big freeze I've no idea if I've lost one, two or 3000 plants, so I may have plenty more to order in a few weeks. It'll reveal itself in spring when at least I'll have a little sunshine to cheer me up if the news is bad.

The weather station recorded -14C on two nights which is pretty special for this part of the world. The snow may well have been the saviour, duveting the ground and the roots below. Time will tell. The cold did bring the fox(es) a little closer than normal - tredding a snowy path through the vineyard.



So, ahead of any additional replacements the spring reveals, these are the plants coming to the farm for planting in the next month or two:

1400 replacement grape vines - thank you, once-in-a-hundred-year flood
750 grape vines for the sweet wine vineyard
30 quinces to extend the quince orchard
60 almonds
2 Asian pears
a few blackcurrants
a couple of jostaberries
2 Mirabelles
15 perry pears
a load of raspberries
140 rhubarb
11 plumcots
2 pears
1 plum
1 American bladdernut
4 edible fuchsias
2 Worcesterberries
1 Crimson Chaenomeles quince
1 Gold Chaenomeles quince
1 Cido Chaenomeles quince
1 Nivalis Chaenomeles quince
2 Chinese dogwood
2 Chinese mulberry
17 Mahonia aquifolium
100 swamp cypress
2 coleworts
2 daylilies
2 ostrich fern
2 Great Solomon's Seal
2 winters bark
1 snowdrop tree
and 59 sweet chestnuts.

I think there's more but I'm a little too snoozy to remember.

It would've been 60 sweet chestnuts but I forgot I was ordering one for Lia Leendertz, and given that the ordering conversation was in french and my french starts and ends with La vache qui rit. I'm happy to live with an odd number on account of it being a nut. Almost interestingly, the lovely Italian liqueur Nocino is made using rocket fuel and walnuts picked when you can slide a knitting needle into the centre without their shell stopping it. There's a competition each year in Italy which has two limitations: to enter you must be a woman, and your Nocino should be made using an odd number of walnuts. I'm putting my own vodka-based version into the book - DiacoNocino I think I'll call it. Some sugar and a few months are all that's between you and a dark sweet liquour that'll take your ears off if you go for a gulp rather than a sip.



The vines, all 2150 of them arrive at the end of April and they're barerooted so we have to get them in sharpish. Me, Trent and two trowels.

A couple of years back Ernst and his team planted 3500 in a morning but they had a clean field (the metal framework the vines grow on went in afterwards) and all the gear to do it professionally. I think it might take Trent and I a little longer.

The other 500 or so plants have to be planted, mulch matted, staked and tree guarded where appropriate in 8 days in March - 8 days being the intersection of when I'm done with the book and when Trent's here. That's 31.25 each a day; 4 an hour. It doesn't sound too hard, but many have rootstocks a good metre or so across so a fair size hole in unploughed grassland for each is the order of the day.

Until then it's mostly writing and eating the pork rillette made with the five spice powder I made using szechuan pepper from out by the veg patch *polishes halo*



Almost forgot...all this working at home means my contact with the outside world is limited. There's no time not to be not writing the book and everytime I go to do anything that isn't write the book I feel guilty. My diet is shored up with dried apricots and rooibos tea. The air can get a little interesting in the office as you can imagine. I open the window. I tweet. I ration my tweeting as my attention span is that of a 2 year old.

I has given me the opportunity of fulfilling a small ambition. I am not shaving. As opposed to growing a beard. Growing a beard implies an active involvement, something more than simply not doing something. I'm just watching to see what's going on. 15 days now. The longest I've ever been since shaving became something more than an optimistic teenage pursuit. I'm wearing a hat too, as extended periods without having to see other people have given me none of the necessary compulsion to tend my appearance in any more than a perfunctory way. I have homeworker's-hair. Hair and beard means I look a little like Badly Drawn Mark.

I'm sort of liking it in a not-having-to-do-something-I'm-not-that-interested-in kind of a way. I'm going to let it go for a while longer, probably until approaching the Soil Association conference next week when shame will get the better of me. On the Sunday before (I think it's the 31 Jan) I may offer myself a few hours of free pleasure by shaving it into certain styles. Perhaps inspired by great cricketers of yesteryear. The ordering of facial styles is vital - with a little care it means I could do a Merv Hughes followed by an Ian Botham - although rumour has it that an Australian barmaid has already managed that feat.

Suggestions for notable moustaches/beards welcome.

I've had a fabulous Christmas and New Year, thanks for asking. It was dominated by more than my share of Christmas pud, our nation's finest sportsman winning his 15th world title (which I think made him quite happy, the ref perhaps less so), my 4 year old asking me to marry her, and receiving a very fine preserving pan. Not quite all the ingredients for a film with either Martin Sheen or Michael Sheen playing me, I know.



Talking of Hollywood stars (seamless stuff eh) Warren Beatty reckons he's slept with getting on for 13000 women. After calculating my own slightly lower tally (he is a few years older than me after all) it got me wondering (in that end-of-year way) about a couple of other tallies - how many plants I'd sunk into the soil in the 5 years of Otter Farm, and the visitors to this website.

Apparently Warren deems it beneath him to include "daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on" in his total. Oh the luxury. Upon such rocks is my own (currently) less-than-Beattyesque total built. But when calculating the Otter Farm inventory I will take a leaf out of his book and discount all passing fancies and commonness - so there'll be no annuals, broadcast-sown perennials, or anything vaguely falling near to but not quite into those two categories.

Handily, Warren's list doesn't exclude any that are no longer alive, and I feel to veer away from Warren's guiding path at this point would be churlish. I'll find an evening to add them up this month and let you know, avid reader.

Like Warren, I do like to make a clean breast of things once in a while and as we stride happily into New Year it seems as good a time as any. In Spring last year I mentioned that some of the olives had died, others were doing ok, and probably more interestingly the debt I owe a researcher on 'Richard and Judy'.

Before the coldest weather arrived this last month I decided to take some action. 120 olive trees went in 3 years ago - a third are now dead, a third ok, a third thriving. Some died due to wildlife and my dimness, most departing due to the combined effect of a couple of disappointing summers - olives keep much of their energy in their leaves, so even if there's a harsh winter they tend to be fine if they have the chance to put on good new growth in a good summer. Two years on the trot they didn't.



6 varieties were planted, some hardier than others, and the split of 'dead' to 'so-so' to 'happy' follows the varieties pretty well, and I now know where the lines between 'viable', 'reasonable gamble' and 'too vulnerable' lie.

Up came the dead third. Excellent kindling they make too. One in the eye for Warren: I bet he doesn't start his open fires with olive wood. Read em and weep Mr B.

Which left me a choice - infill the grove with other olives, infill with other trees and make a mixed orchard, or think more creatively. Uncharacteristically I went for the last option.

Up came all but the end two rows, where the happiest variety is growing. The rest are now in pots in the polytunnel, awaiting Spring, when they'll be scattered around the farm in ones and twos - a few in the forest garden, one by the veg patch, a few as you come into the first field, one or two in the perennial allotment etc. Already it feels like sense - the place needs a little random character, and although I sometimes give the impression that it's otherwise, Otter farm is (amongst other things) supposed to be a sensible business - and as an acre-sized grove the olives weren't pulling their weight.



So, a spare acre. Not only that, the best acre of the 17. South(ish) facing, with well-drained soils on river gravels dumped many thousands of years ago as the path of the river moved east.

It took me about 4 seconds to decide what would go in its place: two hundred of the very promising new Spanish olive variety (of which more soon) and 750 vines for dessert wine. We make precious little of it in England and I think that way something lovely lies. And a cheeky 100 or so Riesling vines just to see.

The rest of this year's plant wishlist has already started to arrive - more about them soon too.

In the meantime, I should come clean about one more thing: for the last 2 months I've done little else but write the book. So all the digging up, the repotting, and the vine pruning has been done by Trent. Happily I'll be out there more when the big planting starts. Until then, out in the cold, two days a week, Trent has made himself indispensible.

The other tally: the visitors to this website. There were almost 60000 unique visits to the Otter Farm website last year. A person coming to the site and looking at 10 pages counts as one visit; that person coming back the next day counts as 2. I suspect that this total isn't made up of 60000 people making one visit a year, or 3 people making 20000 visits a year. It seems to me to be a rather large total, especially given that nothing is sold here.

To Trent and all you visitors, thank you: I rely on you.

Someone somewhere has a Basil Hallward painting of my hands in their attic in which the digits are getting younger with each day that passes while mine age in tragic contrast to my youthful visage and ruggedly handsome countenance*

I have hands like monkey's paws.

You'd swear they belong to someone with great-great-grandchildren, to an emu, or to a man whose job it is to remove the paintwork from hot Cadillacs in Death Valley using white spirit wearing no gloves, after eating salt and vinegar crisps and squeezing the juice out of 3 dozen lemons with his bare hands on a day when an off-course Papagayo wind is blowing itself silly.

This gives me a good excuse to keep my hands out of most of the photographs I take. And it's not so simple to take a picture and hold the harvest at the same time - I'm not a fan of most of those pics where you dig the whatever-it-is up a little and take a pic of it half in/half out of the earth.

Early last week I got the fork in the ground for a few minutes - I'm glad I did, it's been frozen ever since. And in this season of good will, I got three presents for my trouble. All needed photographing.

So it's handy to have the odd stunt hand double around. Now that I'm an award winning photographer you'd be almost right in imagining that people are literally unqueueing up to volunteer themselves to be hand models at Otter Farm.

Salsify - a size-zero parsnip to look at, with many stringy roots working their way out into the soil, perpendicular to the main root itself. It makes them a pain to dig up - you have to lift them carefully with a fork. It's worth the little trouble.



They're also known as the underground oyster which is stretching their delicate flavour rather too seaward to my taste. Having lived in Whitstable for a year or two I know an oyster, and this ain't no oyster. Somewhere in between artichoke hearts and asparagus, and very fine they are too.

My lucky wife won the race to hold the salsify and the glimpse of stardom that comes with it. She also got to have a small slug work it's slippery way across her hand. Don't worry, I told her about the slug once I got the shot right.

Salsify was the first thing I grew that I'd never heard of before seeing it in a seed catalogue, and it convinced me to always grow something I hadn't eaten every year, even within the constraints of the veg patch. This year it was oca and yacon, both beloved of the ancient people of South America.

Trent (who regular readers may remember enjoys the occasional jig around the farm) was here the following day and as he hasn't got old hands I roped him in for the oca and yacon. There was a little added tension as I hope to include oca and yacon in the book I'm writing.

There were a few 'ifs' attached to this: if tubers had formed below the surface over the course of the summer, if we didn't knacker them all trying to get them out, if they weren't riddled with slug holes, if they tasted good, AND if I could take a reasonable shot of any we harvested. This was the only photoshoot we had as I don't know anyone growing any, and the photos have to be delivered in February, so no time to grow any more.

You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to take a few pictures of a man holding a tuber, but it took a good few attempts. Bless him, he's American so we mustn't be too hard on the poor love. A few sharp taps with a hefty stick and he was soon holding it just right.

Oca looks like a blind cobblers thumb....



....or not unlike pink fir apple potatoes if you prefer.

They taste weirdly lemony raw, the moment they're dug up - a little like sorrel. The oxalic acid gives it the sharp edge, but this glides away over a few days in the light. They don't turn green like potatoes, so you can let them sweeten in the sun. Very good they are too.



The yacon has been growing about 2 feet away from the oca. If the leaves were the prize I'd have been in long ago, as their tatty but rather beautiful green growth shoots up a good metre or so tall. As with oca, you have to let winter arrive before nosing under the soil for the tubers.



Fresh out of the ground they're very much like baking potatoes to look at and water chestnuts to eat. They don't quite collapse as such - they've more resistance than that - but, like a very fine sorbet, they do sort of 'give in'. There's a hint of flavour about them raw although not much, but the texture is incredible. Ideal in a strange Waldorf salad I should think. They're now on the same window sill as the oca - a few more days where they should develop the flavour of pears. So they say.

Just in time for Christmas. Oysters, pears and lemon all from under the surface of the soil. Now there's a seasonal present.

Merry Christmas x




*some, more or all of this sentence may not be true

1977 was one of those years where everything seemed to happen. It was a big year for the world, for England and for me.

Jimmy Carter became President of the USA, and I quite liked him - he was a peanut farmer I think, which appealed to me for some reason. It was the Queen's Silver Jubilee, which as far as I remember meant everyone had the sudden urge to close off their road, tie bunting to lamp posts and eat fairy cakes outside.

It was the year Liverpool first won the European Cup. Worth a click as much as anything to hear how a good commentator does his job. It's beyond comprehension that some fool in a grey office decided that John Motson should be given the biggest games a year or two after this. Not one stat, not one 'there's no question about that' trotted out here. Davies was simplicity itself. He said nothing when the picture didn't need adding to. You could tell he really felt it. He still commentates on hockey, gymnastics, just about anything other than football and he's utterly brilliant at each of them. Everytime I watch a game I regret I'm not hearing his voice.

I remember it as the year Roots, Jesus of Nazareth, Starsky and Hutch and the Incredible Hulk were on the box. They might have been a year or so either side in reality, but 1977 seems like a year where things happened, a year of focus with a blurring around the outside where not so much occurred.



I started going to the big school. I learnt the saxaphone for a term. My parents separated. But something far far bigger happened: Elvis died.

I was on holiday that summer in Lancashire, where most of my mum's family live. The girl who lived next door and I took a shine to each other and swapped many notes over the summer. I hid the ones she sent under the bed. I forgot to take them with me. They were found. I think she may still be blushing. I know I still am.

In 1977 you could still pick up the paper and be surprised at the main story, it was news to you almost every day. Imagine that: hearing something as huge as 'Elvis is Dead' from the paper first.

The aunties were in bits. They'd grown up with Elvis, with the emergence of rock n roll, with society letting out its belt a little. 42. Dying, as he did, 'at stool', overweight, and addled with prescription drugs seems impossible for someone who looked like this only 8 years before.

I guess the aunties felt old overnight.

I think I might feel very weird if Morrissey dies while I'm still alive. The second I heard the first Smiths late on one of many sleepy nights spent listening to John Peel the world changed a little. Like so many people you'll hear a similar story from, it felt like it was music made for and played to me alone. I hate saying it, but there it is - I'm a walking cliche of a male of a certain age, and every one of us feels like we alone were the authentic one.

I saw them as soon as I could - Cornwall Colliseum, summer 1984. Still-close friend Stu, myself and a girl with curly hair with a name I can't remember and a mini that could drive us there went. We backed into a wooden fence having taken a wrong turning, but that's all I remember apart from being blown away (by the Smiths I should add). Their first album had been out a couple of months, Heaven Knows Im Miserable Now was the new single. Every single single failed to let you down, which as anyone knows is the main responsibility of any band.

I only saw them once after that, a couple of years later at the GMEX Centre in Manchester. Factory records organised the event to celebrate Manchester's contribution to punk and all things related. I had an idle life punctuated only by traveling to see bands. Exmouth to Manchester. 254 miles each way. Up and back in a day. 20 or so of us hired a minibus, piled in at 5 in the morning and off we went.

£10 got you New Order, The Smiths, The Fall, A Certain Ratio, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Pete Shelley, John Cale (from the Velvet Underground), The Worst, OMD, Cabaret Voltaire, the Virgin Prunes, and Adultery (former members of Magazine). That is certainly the best £10 I've ever spent. I can't imagine the circumstances under which that may change.



It was also the year I won the Devon Under 11 Table Tennis Championship. As anyone who's ever been in my company for longer than it takes to drink a cup of tea will testify, I haven't forgotten my triumph. This may well be because other than an encyclopedic knowledge of Liverpool FC 1974-present, maths, identifying what smells smell like, identifying lookalikes, and catching a pile of coins in one hand having been balanced on an elbow, table tennis is my sole area of expertise. I say 'is', I mean 'was'. A few years ago I had a quick game and it was a waste of time - my centre of gravity (from where you play most shots) was no longer below the level of the table: nothing worked as it should. I connected with most shots sweetly, but they sailed way past the end of the table. A rather cruel indication of time passing.

I mention this table tennising triumph not merely out of pride, but because I think it may well have been the last time I won anything. This isn't a prompt for the violins: I rarely, if ever, place myself in a situation where I am competing to win something for many complicated and largely uninteresting reasons. That was until last Thursday at the Garden Media Awards.

The Media Awards is the yearly shindig organised by the Garden Media Guild (formerly the Garden Writers Guild). It doubles as the garden world's excuse to let its hair down. It was my first visit. The great, the good and the truly godawful are all there and if you can't have a top time on a day like this then you need to try a little harder.

I had the pleasure of James Alexander-Sinclair, Martyn Cox, Cleve West and Matthew Wilson on the same table along with Hayley Monkton (RHS PR Queen) sitting on my right hand. There were 3 others but I'm boring myself listing people so it must be sending you fast asleep.

It's a very simple day: food, awards, everyone gets to the pub.

There are around 15 awards. The host announces the 5 shortlisted parties for the award, followed immediately by the winner. If you'd have lashed me to a tree and flicked my buttocks with a wet towel I might have owned up to hoping I might make the Blog of the Year shortlist. Blog was the 5th award announced. I didn't make the shortlist.

I'll be honest, I didn't want to win it - I knew if I did I'd feel it was a miscarriage of horticultural justice - the actual winner should have won it all year long. But I was disappointed not to make the shortlist. I'll confess that I looked at the shortlist and thought I should have snuck in above one or two of the contenders. Ugly isn't it? But there we are. Better out than in. It's a hideous thing to acknowledge, and is probably not the cleverest to own up to, but when I stopped doing my other job and tried to spend more of my time doing what I love for a living I promised myself that I'd not pretend to be something I wasn't. I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I was miserable then. This is supposed to be different.

Then the shock of being nominated for and winning Practical Book of the Year and Book Photographer of the Year. I think I took leave of my senses. Not
in a Gwyneth Paltrow sort of a way, but the world sort of shut off. I acquired a sort of deafness - I don't remember the music they played (the title of which had some relevance to each person) as I walked up to try not to get nervous-smile face while being photographed. I can't remember what anyone said to me.



At some point between blog failure and Practical Book of the Year, Cleve West and I got roped in (somewhat willingly it has to be said) to sharing a cooking demo at Hampton Court Flower Show next summer. This can't be right.

I spent some time apologising to Martyn Cox - he was rightly nominated a few times and wrongly won none of them. Later I would spend so long apologising to Andrea Jones for winning the Book Photographer award that I must've seemed insincere.

The pub followed, spent mostly with Cleve, JAS, Joe Swift, James Wong and Lia Leendertz. Then an eventful train journey home with the very lovely Mr and Mrs Buckland.

So, 32 years after I last won something, I won something again. It was very pleasant.

Last weekend was spent mostly transfixed by darts. No, not Darts, the darts. I also made medlar jam, medlar syrup and apple and medlar chutney - each was a reasonable success. The darts though, was fabulous.

I'm not under any illusions that most of the rest of the world shares my pleasure. A good wedge of me wants to convince you of the magnificence of darts, another sizeable quartile quietly rejoices in the fact that only some of us can see the beauty. But I'm going to make a little effort - not to persuade you to love darts, but just so you might see a little of the magic therein, even if you then choose to step away from the oche. Give me a couple of minutes grace if you would, and I'll try and weedle food in there somewhere. I think I've got a bigger point to make, but I'm not sure.



Darts is considered by many as a rather ludicrous spectacle. It's often viewed from above, looked down on by some who feel that if it's worthy of anything it's a raised eyebrow. Many of these tutting folk will happily tell you there is beauty in everything, maybe because Jane Austin once said so in one of her few novels, yet find it difficult to exercise that fine sentiment other than about the very obviously beautiful. That's a bit like loving someone in health and for richer, or having a year of eternal summer. I think it's worth looking a little harder for less obvious beauty.

The essence of sport is in the competition - I don't mean 'the winning', or even 'the taking part'. Competition is a state of mind, an agreement you make with yourself to engage with another. The rules are irrelevant, this agreement is essentially a personal one: you will conduct yourself, you will display yourself, you will reveal yourself, having made the agreement to compete. Even though it is an agreement you make with yourself, you may have very little understanding of the nature of that agreement, much less an idea of the consequences.

When the pressure is on, when you have greatness, qualification, glory or even just a perfect moment beckoning, how will you be? Or more accurately, who will you be? These milliseconds don't replay, we have no opportunity to see how the ramifications compound and unravel. Would you handle (even instinctively) as Thierry Henry did a fortnight ago? With a moment to choose, would you slam the ball into the net or do this? Would you do as Andy Roddick did in the final of the 2005 Rome Masters - with a triple match point in the final set, his opponent Fernando Verdasco double-faulted and lost the match. That was until Roddick disputed the call and said the serve was in. Verdasco won the point and went on to turn the game around and win. Extreme moments maybe, but smaller, often unnoticed instances happen in every contest and help make sport much more than the sum of the rules and the fundamentals.



We tend to value the feats of the mind, the intellect, the cultural creations far more than the merely physical. Brain over brawn. Even when it comes to something as apparently physical as sport, we allow ourselves to enjoy a psychological battle. Donald and Atherton's battle of wills was as good as aggressive cricket gets, and, for all the leather and willow, an entirely mental tussle. Coe v Ovett was as much about a clash of personalities as it was about simple running speed. Even when it gets to the most physical of physical sports, it's where your head and heart is as much as anything that separates A from B.

This is what makes football so little about hoofing a pigs bladder around a wet green rectangle, what makes the Tour de France so much more than simply pedaling and dropping cogs, what separates men like Sugar Ray Leonard from other more powerful boxers, and what makes sailing around the world on your own much more than just sitting on a boat in bad weather. It asks questions which you may or may not have any answers to - you may not even be aware that you have or haven't the answers. You may not like what you see. You may surprise yourself. This is what I love most about sport, about music, about pretty much anything - not the 'thing' so much as what the 'thing' reveals.

This is a goal that made me cry when I saw it. He may be the only person alive who would have imagined that possibility, never mind be able to execute it. He knew, I think you can tell, that for a moment he had been touched, that it wasn't really he alone that should be congratulated. A moment made of exactly the same material as this. And this. I could go on, but you get my point. We all recognise magic where we see it.

We seem to withhold this understanding somewhere just short of darts. Perhaps it's one mental leap of faith too far to entertain the idea that beauty is in everything if that everything includes darts. I'd urge you to look again.



There are some unique aspects to darts. They are worth considering when you compare darts to other sports. Your opponent can't block you, can't put you off, can't change the terrain or the target of the missiles. They can't alter one single thing about your opportunity. In short, your opponent can't stop you winning: it's down only to you.

Every single time you go to throw it is absolutely the same as it was last time. Apart from in your head.

Stripped of other complications, what is left is boiled down to the absolute essence of sport, without the usual distractions. There's no pretty Beckham, no excuisite physique, no erroneous decisions, no flukey advantages, no need for outside adjudication. It becomes almost entirely mental, almost completely about what you have inside on the day. Almost everything we'd normally admire above the predominantly physical in other areas of life.

With darts, many of us seem to be distracted by the appearance of the players. We are, apparently, allowed to make remarks about them that would not be tolerated if they were said about their wives. If they were from China or Japan no doubt we would be admiring them as proponents of such a singularly Zen pastime: they imagine the throw, they imagine the dart arc and land, they quieten and focus, then they execute the throw...wwwoooooowwww. Perhaps we don't mind fat sportsmen as long as their foreignness confers upon us a little exoticism.

Stephen Fry has spoken beautifully about the magic of darts and his love for it. There is nothing quite like it for watching a player at the very doorhandle of victory lose it - utterly exposed, completely undiluted by teammates, the collapse often entirely unprompted by their opponent. A single dart can sow the doubt. It's almost properly cruel. Defeat can be naked in darts in a way unlike another sport. And victory uniquely singular also.

Yet most of us don't notice it. We celebrate and knight a canoer who (with a few mates to help him row the way he's not looking) wins a race once every four years, and virtually ignore the astonishing genius of a 14 times world champion who dedicates himself to the practice and execution of his art over many many years, and has it examined against many many hundreds of opponents. I'm not sure why that would be.



There's been a lot of guff and hot air talked recently about gardens and what they might mean, as opposed to just what they 'are'. Many have had their say, and for all the arguments, if there's a commonality it's that gardens can be full of meaning, cultural references and represent far more than an ordered display of plants. Obvious enough you might think. The disagreements seem to come along when some won't accept that they don't always have to. That they can just be enjoyed as a place to barbecue a fish. Or that their cultural importance is not necessarily more significant than their ability to host a game of badminton or to look nice.

If there's a point I'm going round the houses to make, it's probably my first one: you can find whatever wherever you choose to look for it. I'm not here to argue that darts stands alone as the repository of meaning and beauty, just that it has every single milligram of ability to so as a book, an opera or indeed a garden.

And if anyone feels superior to those who can see in darts, Hendrix, Di Canio, Diabate, Korbet, Corbett, Schnorbitz or Ritz biscuits what they can only see in a meaningful garden then I know who I feel sorry for.

What has this to do with medlars? Medlars were hugely popular a century or two back. Then came sugar. Then came supermarkets. And our view of fruit became guided by them. Medlars stopped being appreciated as widely as they had - they didn't fit our new-found prejudices about what fruit should be. They look like an open-ended apple (the french call medlars 'dogs arse') - and if we can't tolerate a wonky carrot, what chance we'll accept a fruit that looks like canine's tea-towelholder? And medlars need to soften, as if rotting, before you eat them.

They are truly delicious - with a taste somewhere between apples, dates and figs. They are perfectly easy to grow, plentiful in production and easily sourced from plant nurseries. There is absolutely no reason why medlars aren't widely available. No reason except we can't be bothered to pay attention to what they are really like rather than just the immediate impression next to their more 'beautiful' cousins.

Part of their pleasure is in uncovering such a fabulously unique rich flavour in such an unlikely packaging. It's the same with darts. But we tend to prefer our sport and our fruit (and our music for that matter) as exotic, good looking, and full of uncomplicated one dimensional sweetness.