Panic, panic, panic, panic, panic. Did I really claim I was going to grow all that stuff: 34 different vegetables from broad bean to butternut squash? Well, we have got cracking (a little) this week. Aubergine and chilli seeds are in pots in a warm windowsill, celery and celeriac in the greenhouse in seed trays covered with clingfilm (we couldn’t find any panes of glass, I am assuming clingfilm will do).

We have planted some peas in half a drainpipe sliced down the middle — a Monty Don tip — and stuck them in the greenhouse, as well as a trench of lettuce. But the big news is that the big Plan has come a cropper already: two places for tomatoes (maybe we had planned that, but why?) and none for spinach, parsley and radishes and probably lots of other things we shall discover as the year goes on. Added to that, the manure went on the wrong bed and had to be lifted off and on to the correct one, so in the bed which was marked down for a second lot of onions (which haven’t turned up anyway) and shallots (which Nicola now tells me we decided not to grow after all) and was wrongly covered in manure, now removed, are instead three half-rows of spinach, parsley and radish.

They are half-rows because I am uncertain: I suspect it might be too early to plant them, but I was panic-sowing, trying to get a head start on it all. I also did a seed tray full of parsley and covered it in clingfilm in the greenhouse on the basis that if one is too cold, the warm one might work instead — last year none of mine even germinated. Every book seems to give completely opposing advice on parsley, including one with a ghastly process known as “fluid sowing” which, unless you really do have time on your hands, you do not want to know about — suffice to say, it involves a plastic container, moisture, heat, a sieve, wallpaper paste, a plastic bag…

So we have two stories going on: neat little pots and seed trays nestling around the house and greenhouse, full of sweet compost, good wishes and hope; and then great dirty expanses of wet, weedy and shitty mud full of curses and sludge. And somehow, somewhere, over the next few months, the two are going to have to converge.

The vegetable patch

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Related Links

• How to grow parsley

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