That was my gap two-years - though we didn't know the term. One of my horticultural successes were courgettes. I was advised to line a long trench with old newspapers before mounding soil over and planting. The Sun shone. I was a diligent waterer when sober. I had such a glut of courgettes that in the end even the hens wouldn't eat them. I couldn't give them away to Suffolk natives, whose closest experience was of stuffed and roasted marrows. Friends shunned me in case I arrived bearing a box of courgettes for them. I had no recipes for jam or pickle - this was pre-internet. All Summer and well into the Autumn the bloody things just popped up and swelled their little bodies and still I felt obliged to pick them and not waste them. Well, after that, it was fifteen years before I could face a courgette again.
With many thanks to whoever recommended David Archibald's Twilight of Abundance - so far, I'm about 70 pages in, and it's uncompromisingly depressing. I hope it has a happy ending. Its cataloguing of the arguments in favour of global cooling, a reduction of between 1° and 3° in Europe, may mean big changes in food growing. And shortages. So when I saw this article in today's Guardian I thought immediately of my fecund Anglian earth back in the heat of the '70s;
Ha ! - some similar experience with vegetable gardening in the early 80s
ReplyDeleteThe Guardian have so bet the farm on AGW that it's an obsession and also a prevailing dogma with many theological sages employed to guide the faithful in the ways of Gaia.
If cold returns to the northlands - that'll likely mean Africa will become a more conducive place to live.
The zealous ignorant metro-eco goons at GMG Kings Cross are so self absorbed and myopic that just occasionally it's difficult to feel much more than a bit of pity for them - not often mind...
A shortage of courgettes for a season is not in itself a big problem, unless of course if you live in those trendy, upmarket parts of north London where Guardian columnists live, where the lack of a courgette spiral to decorate the halloumi & quinois salad at the street cafe represents an attack on the foundations of socialism itself.
ReplyDeleteRadders, I feel for you have gone through a similar life-changing experience.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago, Dad planted no less than 10 courgette plants when they were a novelty.
As a dutiful student home from school I watered them diligently.
the result....
Boiled courgettes, fried courgettes, courgette soup, courgette chutney etc ad nauseum.
'twas many years before I could look at those green sausage shapes without a shudder.
Courgettes (and marrows, if you don't catch 'em in time) are my most abundant crop in my brief experience of allotmenting. Can't give the blighters away. But Their near relative the Squash has little will to live, and gives up the struggle in the first brisk breeze. Where did it all go wrong…
ReplyDeleteThanks for the book recommendation Radders.
ReplyDeleteLooks fascinating and am waiting for it to come out in paperback.
It was I (& perhaps others too)!
ReplyDeleteYou are correct: it's quite depressing, but most of the predictions seem very reasonable and therefore likely to occur.
John M
ReplyDeleteany mention of the courgette drought in N. London should always be accompanied by the obligatory rendering of Edvard Munch - "The Scream"
Ed P - many thanks!
ReplyDelete"it was fifteen years before I could face a courgette again."
ReplyDeleteI have the same relationship with Pernod, after a long night in the Church inn, Not touched a drop in thirty five years.
Well... whether we call them 'courgettes' or 'zucchini' --- they clearly aren't Brits. So too much of a "good thing," quite naturally, turns the stomach.
ReplyDeleteHappy to learn that the soil around thereabouts was so fecund and yielding to a young tyke, "apple trees" ? pray tell, of course you must..................what was the cider like?
ReplyDeleteAnd if you didna, what were you doing laddie?
:^))))
There is a tale of a small country town in Pennsylvania where no one locks their homes or cars except during zucchini season . Leave your car unlocked at that time and you'll return to find a peck of zucchini on your front seat.
ReplyDeleteMy late mother used, occasionally, to make baked suffed marrow. An East-ender, she had been evacuated to Glemsford, Suffolk for 6 years as a child so perhaps she first had it there. I hated it and now she's no longer around, I'll never have to eat it again.
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised your chums shunned you. "Quick, turn the lights off, Radders is here!"
ReplyDeleteSeriously, i've never had the impulse to buy more than 2 even for a ratatouille.
CODSWALLOP, Codswallop & codwallop.
ReplyDeleteOne, my Courgettes were superabundant this year, so someone is lying.
[ You can freeze slices or sludged courgettes, for later cooking or soups - delicious. I made several pots of pickled Gherkins too...]
Secondly, it's sad to see a supposedly intelligent person re-swallowing Donaldo Trumolini's lies about the climate.
It is getting warmer.
Tough
As the people of Miami Beach, who are raising their roads & houses, because the sea-level is going up ...
See also: "Nature's Calendar" as mass-science data-gathering project, never mind the professional opinions, based on mass data of the general scientific coimmunity.
You'll be supporting Cretinism, oops creationism, next!
Please don't.