Pipe down

My sincere commiserations to anyone who has ever been fucked over by HMRC as I appear to have been done, and in particular the piece-of-shit wankers at the Stoke on Trent office. Despite my employer giving the tax office all the relevant information by the required date each and every year they miscalculated my tax to the extent that they say I now owe them several thousand pounds going back to 2008-2009. They do not seem to understand the concept of 'sorry' and 'we'll give you planty of time to pay it back seeing as it's our total fuck-up', preferring instead 'where is it you little bastard, give it to us or we'll send the heavies round'. Nor do they take very kindly to 'fuck off you morons'....in hindsight, perhaps not the wisest end to a telephone conversation i've ever come up with!


Anyway, before I get sent to prison I suppose I'd better tell you what i've been up to on the plot. Very little if truth be told. I've started emptying out the sand barrels for the parsnips but it's taking longer than it should because I'm making even deeper wooden spacers and lining these with plastic sheeting so they last longer. It also gives me another 6" depth but my drums are now quite high and what with me being a dwarf means the hole boring should be fun. I also need to get a longer crowbar to do the boring. This photo shows the wooden spacers from last season....I'm using 10" wide scaffold planking this year.

I've also laid down plans to grow a few more long carrots in pipes in the greenhouse. I tried this method with just 8 tubes last season as an experiment really and I ended up pulling some heavy specimens although after about 18" down there were quite large side shoots going off everywhere. I decided this was probably due to a lack of water from mid-July onwards when I lost interest in them a little bit. However, it persuaded me that I really want to try and perfect this method for when i'm older, as emptying out and refilling several tonnes of sand each year is getting harder and harder to contemplate, let alone do. A builder friend has acquired me some more one meter sections of 6" diameter plastic tubing (can't afford to pay for anything now!), and has promised more to come so I hope to be growing about 28 in total in this small section at the end of one greenhouse thus.

This isn't ideal in many ways. Ideally I'd want them going round the edge of the greenhouse in single file to make watering easier. As it is I'll have to reach the back ones through the mass of foliage once they're all growing away well. It also means I can't pick and choose which one to pull come show time...the ones at the front will have to come up first whether I like it or not so getting a matching set may take more 'pulls' but we shall see. I've made the front board at the bottom removable so if necessary I can excavate the thin tap root at the bottom first and get as much as that up as I can. I shan't be getting too clever with the mix as it is mainly an exercise to try and master the watering. Last year I used sieved peat from the previous season's potato bags mixed 3 parts to one part vermiculite and a handful of Q4 and calcified seasweed per pipe, all mixed separately as it does take several litres to fill each one, far more than you would need for a borehole in sand. That's another drawback. Swings and roundabouts I think they call it. Which is roughly how I'm considering paying my tax bill.