Allotment 15/3/10

One of things that really annoys me is when the perfectly normal things of life are fetishised by the media in order to turn them into “Lifestyle” issues. Food is the most obvious of these things. There are endless shows and articles, many of which descend into nothing more than food porn, about cooking and how hard/easy it is. If you want to see this in action have a look at a menu. Even the Wetherspoons pub next to my house has “Lincolnshire” this and “Organic” that, “Grass feed” this and “Seared” that. Oh for goodness sake, I’ve seen it arrive frozen in the back of a lorry and it is the sort of hot you can only get for either a nuclear reactor or a microwave. You are fooling no one.

The other thing that gets me is people making easy things sound difficult. Again I am looking in the direction of cooking shows; even the ones that claim to be “cooking made easy” still make it sound hard. I make my own bread because it is easy not because it is hard (I’m not Kennedy trying to convince people that we can go to the moon) but you tell people that you make your own bread, damn they are impressed. Why? Because lifestyle programs and Sunday supplement sections tell them it is hard. It’s only got 4 ingredients. Mix it about and leave it for a bit. Make a shape, leave it a bit longer. Put it in a very hot oven and bingo, bread.
Watching the first of the new series of Gardeners World 2 weeks ago and I had this same feeling. They were doing a item on seed planting (which followed a how-to-tell-if-this-plant-is-dead bit which was, “if you cut it and it’s green, it’s fine, if you cut it and it’s brow,n it’s dead. We cut this one and it’s brown.” Dead then? “Well, it might come back later in the year.” What was the point of that then?) Any way back to the seed planting and I’m sure I’ve read that the LHC is less labour intensive than the methods that the presenter went though. It’s no wonder people think that gardening (and by extension, allotment keeping/tending, what’s the term? I like Allotmenteering myself) is hard. He went on about the size of soil particles in seed compost and the surface area of seeds!
A friend of mine was trained by the RHS (makes it sound the SAS, she can be in, prune a Rose, and leave and no one will be any the wiser) and confirms that they take seed planting very seriously, there is a section in the exam on it and they even check the firmness of the compost in the pot, but bet’s be honest, most of us grow the same sorts of things and we treat them in roughly the same way. Shallow trench, sprinkle seeds, cover, water, thin them when they germinate and that’s it. If they don’t germinate, try again or try something else. Well that’s what I do and we feed ourselves through the summer so I must be doing something right.