Picture of Dorian/grey time for Scottish rugger

After the England Rugby team quite magnificently turned up in Scotland's back yard and trounced them at the weekend, my thoughts have turned to doing a similar thing at Malvern in September with peas. Whilst I shall be attempting to grow the variety everyone has to beat, namely Show Perfection, if I'm being honest I have as much chance of benching peas at a late September Show as coming across a tax collector with an eye socket you don't want to stick a knife into.




Therefore, I have purchased a packet of the variety Dorian which I have grown before and which Ian Simpson reckons is very mildew resistant. It has absolutely no chance of winning tickets at a National but my main aim is simply to get a set onto the benches so I'm probably going to give this one a go. Dan grew it last season and he was picking fresh pods with 10 peas in well into September just by letting them grow naturally with no tying to canes or pinching out the tendrils etc. so it may be worth a shot. If any breeder manages to cross this variety with Show Perfection the mildew problems of that particular variety might become a thing of the past for anyone south of Glasgow with an aversion to smiling and who doesn't own a beard the size of a badger's arse.

Last weekend we had several inches of snow meaning the sand emptying of the parsnip drums came to a complete standstill. With several nights of freezing weather forecast I am now well behind compared to last year but as the National was in late August and this year it's the very last weekend in September I'm not too worried. The first decent weather weekend means I shall have to get cracked on and complete the task so that the sand has time to settle. Invariably you have to top the barrels up with more sand and I have known the surface drop by up to 6" so you need to have the job done several weeks before you bore your holes. If you bore your holes straight after filling then the bore holes get distorted as the sand drops and gives you roots with a bit of a kink in them, although they are uniform kinks nonetheless. Believe me, it's happened to me!



As long as I'm in a position to bore my holes by mid-March I'll be happy. As I chit my seed indoors I will be placing seed that has already germinated by late March and green leaves are generally showing by early April, bang on target. Sowing in situ, very often in very cold weather means the seed can just sit there doing nothing for several weeks. Chitting buys you up to 4 weeks in my opinion and takes the worry out of wondering whether your seed has simply rotted off. I need to buy the compost and fertilisers for the mixes in the next couple of weeks so I can be getting on with them. However, my attempts to buy a cheap concrete mixer for the task off ebay has failed. Even the shittiest, most caked-up, second-hand mixers are fetching big money and seeing as my friendly taxman has decided it would be hilarious to extract all of my money from my wallet via my rectal passage I shall have to make do with mixing by hand again this season.