Spring is just around the corner! The snowdrops are out, and any day now the daffs will be blaring out their annual Voluntary.. We can always tell, can’t we…

But I have always found that a more accurate gauge of when spring is due is the arrival of the First Backache. And I had mine two days ago after planting 40 Rocket early spuds and a handful of two-year-old garlic cloves, and most  of the Sturon onion sets.

No, not outdoors; don’t be silly. In the polytunnel. If it had been outdoors, I don’t think I’d have developed such a backache, as a field is big enough to allow you some leg/back/leaning/twisting room. But in a cramped and low polytunnel it was all the stooping and leaning and trying not to get tied up in the hosepipe that done for me. Every damn thing seemed to be in the wrong place, or on the wrong side, or both.

The onions were in a plastic net which was always going to be trouble for my nancy flipping fingernails which rip at the quick at the first opportunity. Plastic netting slices them up like a light sabre. So I used a knife. Smart, eh? But then I found I could hold only about a dozen of the slippery little bulbs at once, as I leaned across to the far side of the bed, right up against the plastic of the tunnel. In in in in…. then a tricky one… push curse push wobble push AH! IN!…. in in …. and then a heave and a twist to get back for another handful. Yes, of course, I should have tipped the whole lot into a seed tray, Yes.. I know. But the seed trays were back at the house and it was now raining.

So, back and lurch and twist… off balance! Woooo…. And one boot straight onto the pastic net full of onions sets. Slight squishy feeling. Yeuch… Never mind; only a few damaged. Get on with it. Meanwhile, the soil was so dry that the hose sprinkler just formed little globules of grey marbly wet-stuff on a great bed of dryness. Poke and stir it with a rake. And again. More wetting. More poking. More leaning.

Then more cursing as I forgot my sensible knife-plan and used my hands to rip open the net with the spuds in, and along with it, the nail on my middle finger. Grrr….. Now you may think this no big deal, but I do  like to mess about on my guitar, and one missing nail on a plucking finger completely ruins what I laughingly call my ’style’. One damaged digit out of four… it’s a bit like a greyhound with a wooden leg. Not much use, and frankly laughable to anyone within earshot.

Anyway…. spuds now mainly in, done, and partially dusted, so to speak. And for the next few days I’ll be ooping and yahing every time I need to bend or twist. This includes sitting on the bed to put my socks on. Oh, the shame… Wife no help; smirks, mainly, plus innocent comments on when am I going to start doing my yoga again? Grr…

So.. spring is nearly here, and you, dear reader, still have your first backache to come. At least I’m ahead of the field. Ow! AArrr….

Hi there bloglander….

Have I mentioned that I’ve been waiting for months to get my new book up on my website? Can’t remember. Anyway, I’m still waiting. I think my webhost must be ill or has emigrated. No word for weeks.

This is a shame as I spent months working on the formatting of Guide Yourself to Happiness for release as an ebook well before Christmas. But surely there must be some action soon? I’ll keep you posted… not that any reader of The Good Life Press’s publications will need any help with finding a little happiness. It’s a fact of life that you never meet an unhappy gardener.

Actually, I did once meet a possible candidate, who converted a brambly corner of his allotment into a very deep hole. He must have gone down a good six feet before he was gently escorted away by a council official. Not not really ‘unhappy’,  I would say… just a little over-stressed. Personally, when feeling over-stressed, I prefer to set fire to a public library sit quietly in a corner until the feeling has passed. But we’re not all the same, are we?

Now then bloglanders….

What do you call ‘early carrots’? How about September? Quite early. OK, so how about…. June? Eh? OR….. how about January?

Yes, I’m delighted to report that for the past couple of weeks we have been harvesting carrots from our polytunnel. You may remember that back in August we engaged the help of a couple of friends and a brown dog, and got our tunnels re-covered. It seemed a shame to leave them empty till next spring so we dug out as many packets of old seed as we could find (including one of parsley from behind the computer. Don’t ask. The discovery did at last explain the unusually sprightly aroma the PC was giving off, as opposed to the usual faint stink of over-heated paint.) We had mainly carrots, of several varieties, cylindrical beet, bits of lettuce and similar, radishes, a few peas, and a dozen or so Swiss chard seeds. In they went; watered; forgotten. Most of them came up, although the lettuce and radishes took a hammering from five baby rabbits who should have been refused entrance to the tunnel, but who had somehow foiund their way in. I suspect The Mother. No, really I do.

Anyway…. they grew, slowly but steadily until late October, I should think. Then they just sat there. Never mind; they’d had a go, and that’s what really matters. Then came December and that dreadful endless frost. Remember? Cars became urban tumuli…. magpies’ squawks froze in midair and crashed to the ground where they shattered and tinkled…. and that unfortunate man in Rochdale  got caught short crossing the park and had to be rescued by a fireman with a bright red door-smasher, who shattered the awful icy guy-rope tethering the poor man to mother earth. Hard days.

We thought all the plants would have been frozen rigid, and indeed most of them were. The beet were up to 4 or 5 inches long, but ruined by frost. However… no early frost, and we’d have had a modest picking or two. The peas gave up immediately, poor dears. However, the lettuce sort of held their own, and the carrots definitely did. Again, up to 4 or 5 inches occasionally, though most of them were really tiny and too small even for a stir fry. The chard, of course, stood up to it all. We had several pickings before the frost, and are now looking forward to the huge burst of new growth in the spring.

So… the moral of the piece is… even in late summer it is worth sowing something fast growing under protection. Maybe with bit of extra fleece at night? We’ll certainly be doing it again next winter.

Have a great day           Chas

Hello again, dear reader…

Time flies, don’t it? It’s over a month since I wrote anything here. Lots of stuff’s been going on though. I guess that’s why I’ve been too busy to write.

Mainly, we got the tunnel skinned. It took five of us most of a day to do the job. Stella trashed the weeds with an industrial strimmer so we could actually get near the job; Doug and Raymond  began digging out the trenches; Anne gently lowered the New York Muscat vine from the spine of the tunnel so we could tape the tubing against hot spots developing; and one of us, the feeble one, lumberingly wielded a fork and a Swoe on the soil below. Despite a lot of hacking, scything and digging, there were still a lot of weeds to get out before the skin went on, and I knew from exhausting experience that a bit of hard work now was a much better option than trying to do the job when the skin was on and the temperature went tropical. ‘Seren’, the brown dog, pottered about amiably as brown dogs do, sticking her nose into every crevice (human and otherwise) and wagging fit to bust. I’ll try to attach a couple of snaps if I can understand how to.

On the writing front, I’ve been learning more things than I ever wanted to about ebooks, PDFs, Print On Demand, hyperlinks, page formatting, and far too many other tekkie things. I’m still overwhelmed, actually, although I’ve definitely made some progress. At one point I was wrestling with four separate programs, each of which seemed to be stubbornly incompatible with the other three. And, of course, each of the four was more or less totally incomprehensible to a normal non-tekky human being. The ‘Help’ files could only help if you already knew what you were doing. Word once warned me that there was a ‘Section 1′ error. Did I want to continue? Well it would have been helpful to know how to make a decision, would it not? Did Word offer an explanation? Of course not. Worse yet, there was no mention of ‘Section 1′ in the entire ‘Help’ file. How do they get away with being allowed to sell such sub-standard rubbish? I guess ‘monopoly’ is the answer.

Open Office is worth a try, by the way. It’s FREE!!! and seems to work at least as well as Word, although the Help is still beyond my understanding. One good thing is that it will make PDFs for you, and it seems that any would-be epublisher needs PDFs.

Somebody pointed me at Primo, also FREE!!, which allows you to make four different sorts of PDF. Oh Lordie…. One is hard enough to get my head round…. But having said that, it does seem to work. I need to be brave and try it again.

The last program was Scribus, a  FREE!!! Desk-Top Publishing kit. I’m sure it works well if you know how to use it, but it has been designed by geeks for geeks, rather than for people. Totally unintuitive. It took me 25 minutes to even get some text onto the screen, and that was a fluke. Help was an endless string of jargon: easy for people who already understand the jargon, and who will thus already know how to use it. Amazing… but absolutely typical of computer programs. This is the main reason I always look for FREE!!! applications. Past experience has shown me that bought programs are incomprehensible, so I might as well be baffled and irritated to the point of scrabbling round the ceiling, screaming, for free. (One honourable exception is Audacity, the free sound recorder and editor. I always feel I’m in with a chance with Audacity.)

Handy tip: if ever you, dear reader, should feel the urge to make millions of £££s, all you need to do is write a few little books explaining to the average human how to use some of these powerful but incomprehensible programs. All you need is a very thorough Glossary Box, lots of screen shots and examples, and a series of progressive projects, gradually introducing the applications available. Add plenty of cross-references and revision/tests, and there you go… A huge service to humanity, and millions in the bank for you to squander on ice-cream and polytunnels.

The book I’m working on is called Guide Yourself to Happiness. I wrote it because I am a happy person, and am distressed to see so many other people who are clearly not happy. I’m thinking here especially of the all the young drunks and dope-heads out there, who prefer oblivion and spreading STI’s to companionship three nights a week, and five if possible. But not just them. On a writing course I once met a millionnaire businessman who told me he had huge royalty cheques drop on his doormat every day of the week. He arrived in the biggest Bentley you’ve ever seen and spent most of the time drunk and took no part in the course. He hated his children. About a month later I heard that he had killed himself. I guess that was when I first got interested in Happiness and how it has nothing to do with money. We in the UK have never been so rich or so unhappy, according to endless surveys.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what Happiness is and how it relates to how we think , and wrote the book.

My agent liked it and tried placing it a couple of years ago. All the publishers he approached liked it too, but nobody bought it. One said that they had ‘filled their quota for the year’. ‘Quota’? Box-ticking comes above quality? Worse… two others said they couldn’t accept it as the author ‘did not have his own radio or television show to launch the book from.’

I already had a pretty low opinion of the publishing world from past experience, but this was grotesque. Such laziness… such narrow-mindedness… 

So that’s why I’m wrestling with how to put Guide Yourself out there as an ebook. I’m going to offer it for free, as I think it might be of some use to a few people, and that’s good enough for me. Will I survive the upcoming reams of gobbledegook and jargon I’ll have to trawl through before pressing three buttons and seeing the job done? Will I live long enough? I will report progress…

Oh yes.. and while digging out the trench for the polytunnel Seren the brown dog found my little blue pencil. I retrieved most of it.

Have a lovely day     Chas G.

Well.. I tried three times to put up a couple of photos, but as ever, the ‘instructions’ were simply too baffling for my poor rational brain. Why do they do this every time? Does nobody ever try out their flashy new system on a couple of real people before imposing it upon us? Answers on a postcard, please.

Both our ageing polytunnels finally got their covers blown to bits last year.  This was due to a series of storms, you understand, and nothing to do with me spilling diesel into the  compost .

The weeds loved all the new freedom and free rain, and flourished as only weeds can.

We have finally found the time and energy to contemplate re-skinning. We have even bought the plastic. But first… the Preparation. I’m a great fan of Preparation. I reckon every hour spent on preparation saves at least two hours of wasted time later. Thus, I load up a wheelbarrow with every tool I think I might need and cart them all over to the point of work in one trip. This saves six or seven trips later to the toolshed/ kitchen/ blue barn/ office/ bedroom later to track down the crosshead screwdriver/ nail punch /muck fork /elastoplast  or whatever.

I once took a full socket set with me when  pruning a climbing rose and yes, it did come in useful. I found that if I stood the sturdy tin box on end, and leaned it against the apple tree that the rose was climbing up and over, then I could reach a slightly higher branch. ‘Be prepared’, see. However, on this occasion I had forgotten the crepe bandage, so had to hobble back to the bathroom to strap up my ankle after falling off the narrow edge of the box when the rose wrapped a tendril round my wrist and wouldn’t let go.

The first stage of Preparation for the re-skinning has been a trial, as all my Ten Minute Jobs seem to be. All I wanted to do was to take a few measurements of the doorframes. They are at least 25 years old, and, from what little I could see through the thickets of six-foot high nettles, fireweed and thistles, parts of them had rotted quite badly. Replacement seemed likely, so new wood would be needed. Hence, measure everything in sight.

To my surprise, I found the steel tape easily. Normally, finding the tape is a day’s work in itself. Great. Now all I needed was the little pad of scrap paper we keep by the phone, with a pencil tied to it.  Got it.

After the usual palaver of trying to decide whether the reading I had just carefully taken was in inches or centimetres, especially when read upside down, I eventually got a reliable reading of 189.5cm for the lintel. Absolutely no doubt. Out comes the notepad, pencil swinging on its string. A model of efficiency that would be the envy of Ismabard Brunel.

The pencil is a sad stub of a thing, forced into an old pentop to give it a little extra length and hence a little extra life. It works fine. Ah… but it’s gone all round and shiny on me. A dum-dum pencil, leaving a faint grey smear on the paper. No good for a civil engineering job like this, where neatness and precision are all.

I’m a bit of a penknife festishist and usually have at least two about my person. Not so today, apparently. The little Pakistani yeti-skinner is not in my trouser pocket where it always lives. This is because I changed my trousers this morning after an unfortunate moment with a bowl of soup last night. Forgot to transfer the penknife to the new pocket.

Back indoors.. straight to the bedroom. No. Trousers gone. Oh surely not in the washing machine? No.. just in the Ali Baba basket, awaiting. Knife found. Rinse under the tap. Back downstairs, wellies back on.. trek back to the tunnel. Out with the pencil and….

Penknife so blunt it wouldn’t cut flour. Back to the kitchen; rout out The Drawer which contains all those gadgets and bits of kit that get used once a year or just the once ever (asparagus slicer; melon squeezer; you know the sort of stuff I mean) and find the sharpener thing. Fine. A final strop on the stropper… and back to the tunnel. So far only about ten minutes into the job, plus another ten minutes wasted. Pretty good….

The pencil is still on its string, hooked over the lintel. I am standing on a trampled stretch of soft grass. Pencil in right hand. Knife in left. The first cut of the knife does bite into the pencil a treat, but it also pulls the pencil out of its penholder socket. Ah. Pick it up. Start again.

No. No trace of the pencil. The grass is not deep, maybe two inches, and the pencil is bright blue. There is no trace. I say one rude word and start poking in the grass. Not  a dickybird. I poke about for a few more minutes then lose all energy and the will to live. It is utterly impossible, but the pencil is simply not there. Impossible. The God of Small Jobs has struck yet again….

I say three more rude words and go back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. A ten minute job that has so far taken a good half hour, with absolutely no result.

As I sat with my coffee it started raining, and I was glad.

More on the tunnel later.

Have a lovely day, Goodlifer… and if you should bump into the God of Small Jobs at any point (possibly when trying to get an urgent photocopy done with a cup of very hot coffee in one hand) give him a quick jab with your penknife. He deserves it.

Good Morning, good-lifers…!!

So far, so good. Now what?
Perhaps I should introduce myself properly.
My name is Chas Griffin. I used to be a teacher of languages and communication until the early 1980’s when I ran away to Wales with my young family to see if we could set up and run an organic smallholding from scratch.

We could and we did, until I was flattened by ME and I could no longer lift a shovel to poke a pig with.

So I began writing about our experiences, and self-published Scenes from a Smallholding. This was picked up by a proper publisher who commissioned a sequel called, in a flash of cosmic inspiration, More Scenes from a Smallholding.

That was in 2006, I think. Since then family duties have occupied me until very recently. Meanwhile the ME fog has gradually cleared. I’m almost normal now, but of course older. Damn.

Over the past twenty years of inactivity I have become increasingly interested in why science refuses to investigate the paranormal, and set myself the task of finding out why. To my great surprise I have found out why, and a great deal more en route. Over the past two and a half years I have been writing all this material up into a book which I’m calling A Candidate for Burning (an explanation of this title will follow if anybody’s interested).

Several people who have read my Smallholding books have asked me if there is going to be another sequel (possibly to be called Yet More Scenes from Blah Blah Blah). Unfortunately, that would not be possible as I’ve already written everything there is to be said about our personal adventure.

However…. I have picked up a thing or two about growing veg, and thought my bit of knowledge might be of use to someone else. Hence, I’ve written a little book to be called

Scenes from a Vegetable Plot: Growing Organic Veg is EASY

which The Good Life Press is going to publish sometime in 2011, I think. Perhaps you’ve already seen the trouble we’re having in deciding which cover to go with. Your views would be very welcome.

Hence I’ve been offered this blog, and am duly thankful. I will try to write something more or less regularly, but life seems to be more busy these days rather than less.  Anyway… I’ll do my best. Whether you will want to read any of my disjointed ramblings is something else, of course.

I have been writing a very erratic blog on Blogger for a couple of years, but they have recently made a complete hash of transferring this to Blogspot. Now my ‘archive’ seems to be on Blogger, and the Blogspot is active for new posts, but no readers of Blogger will ever know this, thanks to Blogspot’s inept management of the transfer.

But you don’t want to know all this.

I guess this is the sort of trivial nonsense I might be posting in future:

Incidentally, I wonder how much Specsavers are offering for the video rights to England’s second goal against Germany?

Right. Time to go. Stuff to do. Have a great day, fellow good-lifers, and, unless you decide to hack it back, may the gorse be with you.

Chas G.