Far Lands

Summer is kind of coming, and the grass at least is starting to grow. So, I have had the scythe out and started with the orchard. Sarah is very worried that I might decapitate a chicken but hey ho we could always pop it in the pot. No great warmth yet so not much growth outside the greenhouse. But the hot box (see blog 105) is working well - our radishes are the size of golf-balls. Elsewhere we are eating lovage (well, I am), rhubarb and spinach. And most excitingly the St George's mushrooms which appeared in a huge fairy ring last year have re-appeared. I am drying them on top of our boiler.

Compost heaps are, as I tend to tell most people, the engines of the garden. So my thinking is that the more engines, the more productive the garden will be. I have recently built my 5th! I make them out of old pallets, and have become a regular skip-surfer in the locality. With my background I always knock on the door and ask - legally, even rubbish has an owner. I have space and plans for seven. And who knows, maybe my 50th will see double figures.

No such thing as a normal Monday. Today it was a runaway trailer. One of the local farmers was towing a heavy water tank and it unhitched itself and took out our gate and wall. Could have been a lot worse, and taken out people, cars or ended up in the river. Been promised a shiny new gate. Less of the shiny, I hope.

Still writing my book, ' From Cop to Coppicer '. A week or two ago I went on a Guardian masterclass with Danuta Kean to learn how to pitch it - how to contact and hopefully hook an agent or a publisher. I now have my two line elevator pitch (so-called because you can relay it during an elevator ride). So here it is:- It is a book about a Cop who has a breakdown and attempts to recover by developing a smallholding. I came back from the course furiously motivated, and have now written in the region of 60 000 words although it will need a serious edit. If I do suffer from any writer's block I could copy James Patterson (just about the UK's most successful-selling author at the moment) - he was on Radio 4 on Monday and said that he hangs in his gravity boots for inspiration.

Sarah about to look for me. Well, not quite that wet. But windy enough to have ransacked our poly tunnel  I had to take it back - not up to the job. I am not sure how any poly tunnel can survive - they are just sails in the veg garden. Any ideas? We needed the rain - water butts almost full again. Garden slowly coming...eating lovage, rhubarb, radishes and rocket. Potatoes and onions saying hello, fruit cage looking extremely vigorous.

A few months after the initial grafting I received an email from my friend Nick asking how my 'Frankenpears' were. Frankenpears? I had no idea what he was taking about. 'Frankenpears' were not in the dictionary, and google did not have the foggiest either. It was a while - an embarrassing while - until I realised he was referring to my pear-on-hawthorn grafts. During my search Google had come up with 'Frankenfish'  http://www.livescience.com/25799-frankenfish-salmon-gmo.html  Clearly, Nick is ahead of his time. Now, of course, looking up 'Frankenpears' on Google returns my blog entries!

Last August (see blog No 60) I was inspired by Seymour's Self-Sufficiency book and tried some 'T' bud grafting. His suggestion was that pear scions can be grafted onto established hawthorn bushes. So, I acquired some pear scions, some grafting tape and did about 25 'T' bud grafts onto our hawthorn hedge. Sarah perhaps unsurprisingly was a little sceptical, and went as far as to say that she would eat my hat. Well, she will have to eat my hat. I am delighted, and a little surprised, to report that 2 buds are doing nicely, and there is hope for a third. The photo on the left shows an emerging (and growing) pear bud - it is quite different from the surrounding emerging hawthorn buds. Of course being a top-johnny-banana lawyer Sarah will probably cite some ancient common law (no eating of hats in uplands) or unearth some small-print (only if the hat is made of marzipan) to get her out of the mire. The title of this blog will become clear in The Frankenpear