Gardening

‘Be Off Oiks, Or I’ll Set The Wallabies On Yer!’

Culture, Gardening, General goshdarned cuteness
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I was very tempted to have titled this post Bouncing In The Borders. Or maybe Leaping in The Lupins, or Jumping On The Jasmine, or Hopping on The Hostas or Boinging in The Buddleia …. I could go on and on.

So I thought the The Times was remarkably restrained with the headline on its report that shire landowners are are increasingly choosing wallabies as pets:

Home-grown wallabies hop in to help gardeners keep their lawns trim

Thousands of miles from their native Outback the marsupials are replacing sheep, horses and geese in scores of country gardens and fields.

All prospective owners need to keep their lawns clipped are half an acre of land, a lot of grass and a large fence.

Oh, is that all. Let’s all get one! They’re pretty expensive though, in addition to the land requirement:

The wallabies cost £150 for a male and £600 to £700 for a female, while the sought-after albino wallabies fetch £1,000 for a female and about £500 for a male

Ah, so it’s posh people buying them then? Thought it might be.

On a waiting list for wallabies is Richard Sheepshanks, who lives at Rendlesham Hall, near Woodbridge, Suffolk. He has 10 acres of land.

“I have a wife, four children under the age of five, and we already have a menagerie with seven dogs, five sheep and four peacocks. I could use sheep to keep down the grass but they are messy and stupid,” he said.

He added: “We have a walled garden separated from the main house which has a 25-foot outer and 10-foot inner wall but it’s a bit wild and the grass needs keeping down.

That’s not a trend, it’s just J Random Posh Bloke who has an unusual pet. Typical Times puff piece. But who cares, wallabies are cute and not at all aggressive either. Just the opposite.

They would be useless as security guards, though. Mr Lay said: “They’d run a mile from a burglar or stranger. They are timid creatures and really harmless but adults will growl if their young are threatened. And they don’t like dogs.”

(They don’t like pigeons much either.)

It’s almost a shame they’re not aggressive – I do like the ridiculous mental picture of an irate, tweedy, posh bloke threatening to set the attack wallabies loose.

If they were, and wallaby ownership were an actual trend, then given the propensity of suburban landowner wannabes to ape the gentry, it wouldn’t be long before marsupial ownership percolated down the social scale from the shires to the stockbroker belt to aspirational Barratt home land and thence to the outer ring estates. Given the price of wallabies, before long pitbull-wallaby breeding farms’d pop up and we’d see drug dealers pimprolling along with snarling wallabies in studded collars bouncing threateningly by their sides. Or what if they escaped? Imagine hungry, feral wallabies attacking beloved domestic pets before bounding off into the dark.

Good job they’re herbivores, isn’t it?

A Spot Of Gardening Leave

Gardening, New Labour, UK politics
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It’s another glorious day, as it was yesterday, but yesterday I missed most of being at the hospital tethered to the dialysis machine. So today I’m staying outside to bask in the results of all the work I put into the garden last year and listen to Radio 5’s coverage.

At the moment Tony McNulty is on trying to spin the 177,000 increase in unemployed workers since February (if that’s the actual figure) as less bad than expected. It was ever thus).

McNulty’s the Employment Minister and the man who claimed a second home allowance to the tune of 60 grand to pay for his parents’ house, 8 miles from his main home in London: now he’s touting Gordon Browns panic measures on MP’s expenses as an example of labour’s commitment to transparency.

He wasn’t exactly sympathetic to the new wasted generation, he was only interested in justifying his theft from the taxpayers and in claiming the protection of the very laws he ignored himself to prevent his wrongdoing coming to light.

He also signally failed to mention that the door of his constituency office was grafittied with the words “that’s £60,000 you owe me Tony” last week.

Pathetic. Unlike my clematis.

Gone to seed

Gardening
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Over at The Guardian, they’re noticing a lot more people are growing their own vegs:

Call it the new dig for victory. Rising food prices and television lifestyle shows are turning Britons into some of Europe’s leading home vegetable growers, with increasing numbers of gardeners digging up their flowering borders to replace them with veggie patches.

Leading seed companies yesterday said that UK buyers were shunning their traditional summer orders for flowers such as sweet peas and cosmos in favour of tomatoes, lettuce and other crops to grow at home.

“Five years ago the split between vegetables and flower seeds was 60:40,” said Tom Sharples, the technical manager of Suttons, which distributes nearly a third of seeds in the UK. “This had switched by last year to 60:40 in favour of vegetables and now in some places it is at 70:30 vegetables.

“There has been a pattern building for a few years now. The growth in vegetable seeds used to be related to health concerns, especially about chemicals. It’s shifting. Now it’s care for the environment generally, and people wanting to take control back of what they eat and [reduce] food miles.”

Thompson & Morgan, another major seed merchant in the UK, said there was “a definite shift” towards vegetables. “We are selling more vegetables than flowers now and there is a real boom in the grow-your-own effect. Sales of seed potatoes are already up 10% on the year and sales of other vegetable seeds continue to grow year on year,” said Clare Dixey.

The burgeoning slow-food movement and growing interest in local, seasonal produce are factors in the rise of the vegetable patch. But the seed supply firms also say that food and fuel price inflation is helping to drive the shift to vegetable growing. Following last year’s poor summer crops and a doubling of many commodity prices, food prices have risen 10%-20%.

Which is nice if you actually have a substantial garden or allotment, but that’s largely a middleclass priviledge these days. For those of us with a postage stamp for a garden, or living in a council flat, growing your own is really only possible for herbs and such, not so much substantial crops. Of course, you also need both the time and inclination to garden properly. So in part this trend is just another consumerism fad, “The Good Life” v2.0, but as the article also mentions, community gardening projects are also on the rise.

In a way Britain here seems to follow the example of Cuba, which driven by need started large scale urban gardening projects in the late eighties/early nineties following the collapse of the Soviet Union and accompanying loss of subsidies. As Monty Don shwocased in the first episode of his Around the World in Eighty Gardens show, Cuban gardeners have transformed vacant spaces in Cuba’s cities into vegetable gardens to feed themselves and their neighbourhoods. There isn’t of course the same urgent need to do this in rich western Europe, but communual gardens like this might be one part of a post-cheap oil future.

Aren’t My Geraniums Doing Well?

Climate change, Gardening
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More fun with the cameraphone: here’s a view of one of the windowboxes.

I went mad with the pelleted cow manure and we’ve have a nice mixture of rain and sun recently, with the lush results you see before you. That scarlet almost seems to glow after the rain. Time to do some cuttings soon, I think.