A View From (The Shed By) The Greenhouse; A Better Life…..Innit?

We had a bit of a blow up our way last weekend, we didn’t get it quite so bad as other places, so I don’t want to make light of it, but we lost only one pane of glass in the main house and a poly carbonate sheet from the south facing end wall of the repurposed log cutting and storage ‘space’. Burt remained his usual stoic self through it all, and hardly moved from his appointed post (the one up his back), even though the birds rarely visit him these days. The corn did take a bit of a battering, but the only reason most of it’s still in the ground is because I’m too lazy to dig it up, which can’t be said for the runner beans, which are now on the secondary compost pile. Nobody (apart from me) eats the bloody things anyway.

Some of the tomato plants and resultant crops have fared better than others. The black opal, orange cherry and oval red cherry have all been both prolific and very tasty. The orange cherry is, possibly, the nicest tomato I’ve ever eaten. The Greek is still going strong, although I only ended up with one productive plant the tomatoes from it were excellent and eminently “stuffable”. The biggest disappointment was the San Marzano. I ended up with six viable plants, and they all cropped well but they were very reluctant to ripen and they didn’t take too kindly to the couple of frosts we had. I manage to save about a tenth of the crop, I have seed left over, so rather than harvesting I’ll try them again. If they don’t do any good this time I’ll have to go back to Italy. I should have thought of that when I was last there!

We harvested the last of the grapes from the smaller vine, both wasp and fruit flies had been making merry amongst them but we still managed another few pints of really good juice. For some reason (I may have previously mentioned this) it’s considerably sweeter than in previous years. We’ve cut down the refining process too, as the B&M department has invested in a juicer. Instead of passing through the muslin two or three times, we passed it through once and then carefully decanted it, leaving the must behind. Far less timer consuming and the lost juice is minimal (we think).

Amongst the new chilies I planted I’ve ended up with three bushes of what I’ve now identified as a breed of Habanero. Not dissimilar to a Scotch Bonnet in appearance (which they’re actually related to), they’re now starting to ripen to a vibrant orangey-red. Alarmingly for someone who likes a bit of heat, but not too much, this particular breed has a Scoville rating in the same range as the bonnet (between 100,000 and 350,000). I shall be using them sparingly, if at all!

I won’t dwell here, we’ve been down this particular track several times before, but the old leek and potato soup, or “Kartoffelsuppe mit lauch” as we hard and far-right Nazis should properly call it, remains one of my favourite things to make from my garden produce. Simple to make, nourishing and inexpensive. The pink stuff, you ask? Chard stalks as a substitute for celery, omit them or not, add a carrot or two or not, it’s a versatile recipe.

I’ve left a couple of tomato plants in the ground, having removed most of the leaves and the harvested trusses, but I think I’ve re-learned something about tomatoes that I shouldn’t have forgotten. Over-watering is just as bad, if not worse, than under watering and sticking to a watering regime, so long as you don’t overdo it, is the best way to keep plants healthy and productive. The soil isn’t as free draining as I’d like, so I’m looking at (once the plants are established) watering every two to three days and misting daily when it’s very warm. I might even get the B&M department to look it up, the incidences of splitting fruit has been a constant problem since the last warm spell (when I probably did over-water).

The root crops are all but done, apart from three stitches of main crop potatoes and a couple of tops of later planted news’. I’m going to persevere with the turnips, although returns haven’t been great, in both number and size (I had one decent sized bulb out of a dozen or so planted) the flavour’s excellent (sweet and peppery) and they eat well both raw, grated on salad and cooked. The Chantenay carrots didn’t get round to developing properly and although we did have some half decent ones from the other varieties we planted, we’re going to raise the soil level by a couple of inches and be a little bit more judicious with the seed spacing and the thinning out. Home grown carrots, whatever their size and colour, taste far superior to shop bought (IMHO).

My first lift of main-crop potatoes, and although they were quite sparse in number (I can’t remember the breed of these) they turned out to be excellent “mashers” and, given the ground they were in and the amount of rain we had (in between the dry spells) they were very clean once peeled. If B&M can remember the name we might try them again, hopefully with better (in terms of crop size) results.

Any road up, as the business of looking after a greenhouse full of tomatoes, chilies, strawberries, cucumbers etc…etc…, a decent sized potato plot (that’d benefit from a good weeding) and four raised beds starts to wind down I find myself (as, no doubt, do many others) pondering the ongoing illegal immigration “crisis” and the wonder that is the much lauded “one in, one out” system. A system so good, or so we’re constantly told by our “mission driven” government, that it’ll “Stop The Boats”, “put more money in the pockets of working people”, “delivers a plan for change” and “reduce all our energy bills by three hundred pounds”, once they’ve gone up by at least a monkey.

In the year to June 2025, there were almost 50,000 “irregular”(sic) arrivals into the UK. It’s virtually impossible to find out the exact cost of this “irregularity”, suffice to say, the hotel bill alone, as of January 2025, was standing at £8million a day. I have no doubt at all that those arriving here will, indeed, have a better life than they did before they arrived, we are the softest touch in Europe. However, to be brutally honest, when 30 “irregulars” are removed back to whence they came, but another several thousand arrive, plus the replacements for the aforementioned 30, that hardly adds up to “one in, one out” does it?

What sticks in my craw, as much as anything, is the disdain with which the ordinary folk of this country are treated by those we employ to keep us safe and maintain our borders. Every crime that’s committed by an “irregular” immigrant, every pound that’s “earned” in a car wash, from driving a food delivery bike or from sweeping the clippings from the floor of a “Turkish” barbers shop, every NHS hour that’s taken up by someone who shouldn’t be here in the first place, every street corner that’s now less safe than it once was may well make the lives of “irregulars” better, but it does nothing to enhance our lives, unless you live on a diet of kebabs and like a shaved parting. We’re constantly told by politicians, client journalists and assorted talking heads that these things are a price worth paying in the name of “fairness” and, if we don’t accept the crime, the illegal working, the strain on the NHS and all the other benefits of “multicultural diversity”, then we’re nothing more than “hard and far-right racists”. There’s nothing fair about any of it and, so far as I can see, there’s nothing happening to put it right any time soon. It’s “part and parcel” they say, because of “human rights”, but it becomes clearer by the day that my right to live in a civilised, high trust and free country is of secondary importance when the mates of the powerful, dinghy manufacturers and Albanian people smugglers are turning a tidy profit.

As an aside, but not unrelated, for two years now hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian flags have been paraded through the streets of our towns and cities by people, some of whom no doubt came here for the fabled “better life”, are calling for the state of Israel (and, by extension Israeli citizens) to cease to exist. It’s a matter of record that British Jews, seeing said flags, have felt threatened by them yet nothing (so far as I know) has really been done to assuage their concerns, as evidenced by events in London just this weekend. Some might even say that our current Home Secretary (prior to her elevation to said position) was complicit in fomenting said distress, I couldn’t possibly comment, but it’s a bit rich that the flag of a Middle Eastern country, hardly recognised as such by other nations, can be openly displayed while, at the same time, the displaying of the England flag is somehow seen as inflammatory, or even, dare I say it, a bit “racist” by those very same politicians and talking heads who preach down to us about “fairness”.
 

© Colin Cross 2025