GROW YOUR OWN FOOD WITH DIRTY NAILS MARCH, 2ND WEEK CARROTS After half-a-dozen or so mild days on the trot, the soil is tangibly warmer. This pleases Dirty Nails, who has been patiently biding his time as far as outside planting is concerned. This week he has been sowing carrots. There are carrots for all seasons and soil types. For an early harvest on rich, loamy soil he plumps for a variety such as Jeanette F1. This Nantes hybrid produces lovely cylindrical roots, ripe for pulling from July onwards. Well before that, however, the thinnings will serve up the sweetest of treats either munched raw, Bugs Bunny style, or lightly steamed. On poor shallow soils he would be tempted to try his luck with a stump-rooted variety.

Carrots are fun to grow. They like a well worked bed, preferably manured the previous year. Dirty Nails forks in leaf mould to lighten it up, rakes to a fine tilth, and marks out his rows with canes and string a foot (30 cm) apart. A drill is made with his finger directly under the string to a depth of ½ an inch (1½ cm), and the seeds sown into this. Carrot seeds are pin-head sized ovals with ridges running length-ways. For ease and accuracy of handling, Dirty Nails empties some of the seed packet contents into the palm of one hand and takes a small pinch from this with thumb and fore-finger of the other. Each pinch is sprinkled thinly into the drill. It is easy to drop in clumps of seed by mistake if done in a hurry, so he takes his time to do a proper job. Even-sowing of seed now makes for easier and less wasteful thinning out later. Thinning is an essential ongoing job with carrot cultivation, but for now Dirty Nails is content to cover over the drills gently with the back of his hand and water well with a rose on his can.

Developing carrots are prone to attack from the dreaded carrot fly, whose grubs will bore into and damage the roots. Whenever earth around the necks of growing carrots is disturbed these insects will sniff them out and lay their eggs in the area. Dirty Nails solves this problem by growing spring onions adjacent. The strong aroma from onions keeps the flies away and these crops grow well together as companions.

SPRING ONIONS Spring onions are not space-hungry, so Dirty Nails sows ‘Ishikura’ and ‘White Lisbon’ varieties in between his rows of carrots. Again, a shallow drill and even sowing is the order of the day. He uses a slow and steady hand to deposit the shiny black seeds. Spring onions do not require later thinning so the aim is to get them in evenly, not too thinly and not too thickly.

EXTRACT FROM DIRTY NAILS’ JOURNAL: WINCOMBE LANE LOOKING EAST “I am sitting beneath a hedge bank at the edge of Wincombe Lane Rec looking out towards Zig Zag and Breeze Hills. The sky is blue. White fluffy clouds move as slowly as the hands of a clock from right to left. A patchwork of fields lay before, studded with huge creamy-grey ash trees, hedges thick with briar, thorn, greenfinch, robin and more, looking ‘mid-March gorgeous‘. Tussocky grass as befits pasture set aside for future building of homes and gardens, driveways and service roads, but presently adopted by half the town’s dog walkers, is a jungle of pale green and yellow tufts stretching away like a wind-whipped sea.

“An island of four limes stands proud in the middle, lending to the pastoral scene a thicket of sucker growth beneath their majestic mature forms. More hedges and oak trees in the middle distance, with white plastic bags snared amongst the thorny windbreaks every now and then.

“Mother Nature pays no heed to the condemned status of this piece of Southern England. As she threatens to roll out her lush and vibrant carpet of spring in front of us all, despite the chill wind, the darkness of the winter hedge lines is lightened a shade by billions of buds at the cusp of bursting. This is the reality of here and now, squatting in a hedge hollow surrounded by wild garlic, great tits, crisp packets and beer cans.”

A Vegetable Gardener's Year by Dirty Nails (ISBN 978-1-905862-22-1) is available from www.dirtynails.co.uk and good bookstores, rrp £12.99 Copyright, March 2009