A View From (The Bit Outside) The Greenhouse; Ordinary Folk

The 95% situation has moved on to something approaching 99% in terms of my health, in comparison to how I was feeling as an almost 74 year old (complete with all the aches and pains age delivers to many) prior to the hip operation and subsequent travails. Without going too far into it, for those of a sensitive nature, the bowel seems, finally, to have returned to something like proper working order. I’m weaning myself off the low fibre/low residue dietary regime and this also seems to be helping. Onwards and upwards, as the saying goes.

I had to be told what this particular weed is. Apparently it’s a ranuculus repens, a pernicious plant colloquially known as the creeping buttercup. It does flower, but it doesn’t do vegetable plots any good as it’s both vigorous and well rooted. Getting better means having to accept, eventually, that the old “wounded soldier” routine no longer washes, especially with those who know me well. Consequently I’ve ended up having to weed the potato and pea patch. Not just a hoeing, either, but a proper fork in the ground, lift em’ out, root and all, beat the excess soil off said roots before disposal. This little bugger, which seems to have taken over virtually the whole patch has turned what I’d hope would be a days work into a long and arduous task, but we’re almost there now. Once this particular task’s completed I’m going to put terram down where peas and broad beans are going to be relocated to (watch this space) and leave a little wider gap between each potato stitch, so as to better manage weeds going forward. I really don’t fancy repeating this job in another twelve months time.

I’ve long used banana skins (for the potassium) in the initial process of nettle steeping, but this simple “yawk up” allows me to enrich the nettle infused water at the final stage, thereby retaining the strength without (hopefully overdoing it). I suspended a porous kindling bag with a dozen or so of said skins into the butt, ingeniously employing a simple knot and a bit of wood. Ingenuity isn’t confined to the B&M team, the seeding, weeding and feeding department isn’t without an idea or two when push come to shove!

I decided to take the plunge and get the strawberry beds up and running. I had what I though was plenty of “spares”, most of which had wintered well and I’d didn’t really foresee too many problems with what’s always been a pretty straight forward job, although my loyal reader may remember the fiasco I had last year, when I bought some spares, only for them to arrive in very poor condition. Any road up, one of the beds seemed to be in far better condition than the other, which did seem a little off, given their environments are exactly the same. Over 30 plants in the one bed were no longer attached to the root, in fact the root was mostly non-existent. I couldn’t find any evidence of a parasite but the growing medium was very wet, possibly from sitting under a leak in the roof which leads me to believe I’ve suffered root rot. I ordered a mix of spares (5 varieties x 6), which turned up reasonably quickly and I’ve planted them without giving them any more water, hoping that I haven’t had an infestation of root weevil. Time, as they say, will tell.

Self explanatory, but the disappointment of the strawberries was more than offset by the welcome sight of healthy looking new growth on both the established vine and the newer on, which has now reached its almost optimum length. I’m guessing the grape harvest will be plentiful, although we have discussed the possibility of hard pruning, early on, to try to minimise spoiled fruit and maximise bunch sizes. Knowing us, we’ll probably just leave things as they are, at least for this year.

The half weeded bed, from the greenhouse. The peas, mange-tout and broad beans were tight on the right hand side last year and planted too closely together. This time around we’re putting six stitches of potatoes in the right hand (10 feet long) bay. Les legumes will be planted in the central bay, with a further five stitches of potatoes in the slightly smaller left hand bay. Cumberlands’ own crop rotation experts at work, here.

The combination of the new window, the blocking off of the holes in the shed wall and the heated propagators has seen early and pleasingly abundant results with both tomatoes and leeks, the peas are moving more slowly, although there are signs and the climbing beans have just been potted. The smaller pots (in the middle) are some flower seeds I’m trying to bring on for a neighbour. These also are showing signs of sprouting well.  It’s early days, I know, but the signs are more than encouraging (despite the odd setback) in just about every department. I can also report, although I neglected to get a picture, that the rotovating of the main house is now complete, the fertiliser’s in and a goodly amount of nettle water’s been applied. I’ll need to be harvesting nettles as soon as I possibly can.

Apropos of nowt, really, but I got a pleasant surprise this last week with the arrival of my old pal (the innkeeper of the Firkin Fox https://going-postal.com/2019/10/a-short-postcard-from-the-firkin-fox/) on an unannounced visit to make sure the rumours of my impending demise were slightly over-exaggerated and, as he put it, “to help get me back in the game”. We ventured into Keswick on the Tuesday night, the weather was foul but we managed to find our way to The Keswick Brewery Taps. He was more than pleased to see the brewery logo and, as a consequence,more than several beer mats were spirited away for delivery to Essex as the evening progressed. The “flight” rounded off the first part of the evening in decent style, before we venture out into the driving rain to find a bite to eat. All in all, a very welcome distraction from my ongoing self pity and a pleasant evening all round, despite the weather.

You might’ve noticed that the narrative’s changed slightly. No longer are “working people” the number one priority and primary focus for our government. Now, all of a sudden, it’s “ordinary people”. I kind of get it, let’s face it, we’re all more or less ordinary in our own individual and unique ways, aren’t we?

To be honest, I wouldn’t even have thought about mentioning this seemingly innocuous shift in semantics if I hadn’t seen some of the video clips of the “ordinary people” amongst the MILLIONS who chose to join “The Together March” in London over the weekend. It would be easy to turn a mocking spotlight onto some of the “ordinary” multi-coloured hair brigade, or the “ordinary” deluded men wearing woman-face, or the “ordinary” ostensibly devout Muslims who marched alongside them, no doubt making plans in their heads about what they’ll do to right any blasphemies once the Caliphate is realised. It’d be even easier to mock the leaders (more than a couple of them sitting MP’s), “ordinary” grown adults who expect the citizenry to take them seriously (and even vote for them), as they spout their “love over hate” platitudes and “tax the rich” battle cries whilst prancing round on a stage, dressed as teenage rebels, surrounded by posturing drag artists & gyrating men in leather chaps.

There’s a serious side to all of this though, because, in amongst all of these disaffected and lost souls, who turn up to these events simply because they’ve often got nothing better to do and they know that they’ll be amongst their own, there were thousands of people who you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed them in the street (you might almost call them “ordinary”). People who seemed more than happy to go along with the support for Hamas and the Iranian regime, the open displays of overt sexual “freedom” and the calls to violence against those of us that they classify as “far right fascists, whilst, at the same time (and unironically) professing love for their fellow man. You’d wonder how such people, many of them (at a guess) employed in the public sector, can become so detached from reality that they’ll blindly and unquestioningly buy into something that they must know, deep down, is antithetical to their whole way of life, yet they wholeheartedly do (at least at the weekends).

There are lots of things going on in the world right now that I don’t understand. I’m neither a philosopher nor enough of a student of politics to be totally sure of my own ground on the subject of what’s “ordinary” and what isn’t. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and Dave Paulden, Zara Sultana, Mothin Ali, Lenny Henry, Jeremy Corbyn et al speak as much for (and to) their “ordinary” group of British people as Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe do. I’m just musing here, but I get the distinct feeling that, should the rhetoric continue to ramp up and the dividing line between the two “ordinaries” grow ever wider, it’s unlikely that our once mostly ordinary, hum drum lives will ever be as simple again as they once were, back in the olden, dare I say, ordinary days?
 

© Colin Cross 2026