GROW YOUR OWN FOOD with DIRTY NAILS MARCH, 1ST WEEK PREPARING FOR POTATOES When it comes to planting potatoes, Dirty Nails likes to have the ground well prepared beforehand. This means getting the planting site ready now. He plants his spuds in trenches with well-rotted manure, grass clippings, compost or leaf mould mixed into the bottom.

To this end, he has been marking out the rows with canes and string, then digging the trenches to the depth of one spit (the length of a spade-head). He piles the soil carefully to one side. When working on sloping ground he always puts excavations to the top side. This will make ‘earthing-up’ throughout the summer less of a strain. Organic matter to nourish the hungry growing spuds is then forked in to the bottom of the trenches. Early potato varieties appreciate 2 feet (60 cm) between rows. Maincrops need a bit more at 2 ½ feet (75 cm). Dirty Nails plants the chitted tubers of Earlies a foot (30 cm) apart, and Maincrops at 1½ feet (45 cm) intervals.

With spuds being such an important crop, another advantage of preparation well before planting is that he can work out exactly how much of the veg patch will be devoted to them in the coming months. It’s quite a big job, but easily accomplished when tackled methodically, a little bit at a time. With March being the unpredictable month that it is, Dirty Nails could be bending his back whilst sweating in a t-shirt, or wrapped up in a coat and scarf as sleet and snow falls around him. Whatever the weather, this job has a drastic visual effect on the garden. The ridge-and-furrow earth workings are a physical sign of the labour of love in progress.

PREPARING FOR KALE Now is a good time to sow kale indoors. Also known as ’borecole’, this brassica is a traditional and reliable cropper which provides rich pickings of deeply crinkled leaves throughout the winter months. Treated like a cabbage in the kitchen, it tastes slightly more earthy than its cousin (not quite as sweet). Kale is extremely tough and hardy, well able to recover from cabbage white caterpillar predations in the summer and the harshest winter weather.

Dirty Nails sows his seeds singly to a depth of ½ an inch (1½ cm) into 3 inch (7 cm) pots of moist compost. He gently firms in the small round brown seeds. Young kale plants will be planted outside around the middle of summer, ideally with 1½ feet (45 cm) spacings. Dirty Nails is a big fan of kale, sowing Pentland Brig and Westland Winter varieties now, then Dwarf Green Curled and Thousandhead (a prolific, smooth-leaved type) in April.

EXTRACTS FROM DIRTY NAILS’ JOURNAL A BAD NIGHT FOR FROGS “Warm and damp weather with thick mist shrouding town and lolling about in drifts out in the country combine to make it a bad night tonight for frogs and toads. Mildness and moisture brings them out. The slick wetness of tarmacked runways proves an irresistible lure as they answer the instinctive call of their ancestral ponds and ditches. These are ancient creatures for whom evolution has not equipped a knowledge or fear of such unnatural environs. And so they sit there, gulping and blinking on an endless black lily-pad waiting, as only frogs do, for something to happen. And of course, something is always happening on the roads. The pause is only fleeting, a calm to be smashed by the four-wheeled storm that is crashing along even now with blinding illumination and a choking backwash.

“Main roads and local neighbourhoods alike are littered with tiny shattered bodies squashed flat or laid out on their backs with little legs grasping thin air. Many more sit and wait their turn as wildlife-friendly drivers swerve or slowly pass right over the top, willing the travelling princes to get out the line o’ fire.

“This evening a toad walks slowly in front, belly held high by warty legs as he strides both gingerly and determinedly at the same time. And why not? He, or she, is not designed to deal with these human atrocities. That the scale of massacre is not sustainable year on year, night after night, seems plainly obvious with a little simple arithmetic. How long have these amphibians been evolving to perfectly fit in with their world? Compare that with the speed of motorised technological advancement. They just do not mix well with traffic. When a horse and cart crushed frogs with every step, back-along in another time down the lanes in villages like Steeple Aston, or clopped their kin wherever the bye-ways were thick with heaving soft amphibious bodies at certain times of the year, the scales were weighted very differently.”

"How to Grow Your Own Food" by Dirty Nails (ISBN 978 1 905862 115) is available at www.dirtynails.co.uk and good bookshops, rrp £10.99.

Copyright, Dirty Nails March 2009