It’s early yet, but the world turns, and we have to start getting things ready to put into the soil. These potatoes will then sit in there for 10 months or so and, usually, we just dig up about the same number as we put in, of about the same size. So maybe we should just eat them now. But who knows, maybe this is the year they will run riot.
There are so many questions begged by this corner of Calder Holmes Park that I don’t even know where to start. Who is ‘Bird’? Why is s/he called that? Is the superhero graffito connected in any way? What have they done to deserve being called a ‘potatoe’ and has Dan Quayle been involved?
When the potatoes went in the ground earlier last year, May frosts killed them off. So we’re hanging back on planting these for a bit longer yet. Time for the sprouts to adopt their own interesting shapes, for all the world like a family of bunny rabbits sitting on some boulders (or have I spent too long indoors lately?).
So, it’s happened then. Britain is in a state of lockdown. Except maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s all voluntary, because with this government, remember that they don’t really have a clue about anything very much.
Either way I suspect I will be seeing a lot more of Hebden Bridge and home in the next few weeks. Or possibly months. For now I will do my best to keep this blog going, why should it become another victim of this pandemic? But how long I will sustain any creative juices in a world with greatly reduced horizons, I don’t know.
I must already be going slightly crazy, anyway. In these sprouting potatoes (for life, and the garden, must go on) I see little people, sitting in their boxes having a pre-planting natter. Or in the case of the couple to bottom right, a gentle cuddle.
A day spent working at home whilst a series of bands of rain hurled themselves past outside — although the sun is briefly shining on this shot, illuminating the coming year’s seed potatoes as they start to wake up. We were all cosy in the warmth inside, not looking forward much to going out, if truth be told.
It’s a small digital clock powered by two zinc and two copper rods stuck into two potatoes. Hence, a potato clock. Well, the run of landscape shots had to come to an end at some point, but I guess we can still call this ‘nature’?
Always nice when the garden starts paying off to some extent. Plums, apples, potatoes, picked up at the allotment on this drizzly late August afternoon.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, which means two things, first that the title of this blog is going to be three years out of date, and therefore, that I have managed to document three full years of my life as of today. Exactly one-fifteenth of it in fact. It’s another point when I might have considered stopping, but there are enough things coming up that will be interesting to document so I’m not bored enough yet. See you tomorrow.
Being 42 