GROW YOUR OWN FOOD WITH DIRTY NAILS MARCH, 5TH WEEK TENDING GLOBE ARTICHOKES This week Dirty Nails has been giving his over-wintering globe artichokes some tender loving care. Having defeated the worst of the weather aided by a thick leaf and bracken mulch (horticultural fleece is fine, too), they are growing strongly again. With an ever-present ear towards the weather forecast, Dirty Nails has raked the frost-proof protection away and consigned it to his compost heap. He has also stripped off a number of tatty outside leaves that were browning or wilted. Each of these plants looks fresh and vibrant, sporting lush crowns of silvery-green leaves.

PLANTING FIGS Late March or April is an ideal time for planting fig trees. Dirty Nails has been doing just that this week, although for maximum fruit production it is not quite so simple as plonking a healthy young specimen in the soil and watering. If planted like that, figs are apt to throw out considerable growth of limbs and leaves but not a lot in the way of fruit. To concentrate the tree’s energy in to reproducing (fruiting), it is essential to restrict the root-run. Figs also relish plenty of warm sunshine to ripen the young fruit-bearing wood, so Dirty Nails is growing his as a fan-trained specimen basking against a south-west facing shed wall. Brown Turkey is an excellent variety which will produce succulent brownish-purple fruit ripening during August and September.

The planting-pit should ideally be 5 feet (1½ metres) long and 3 feet (90 cm) wide and deep. Because of the position of permanent paths on his veg plot, Dirty Nails has had to adjust his hole to make it longer and thinner. He has lined the pit bottom with two over-lapping layers of roof slates, and a further 6 inches (15 cm) of rubble to aid good drainage. The sides are lined with corrugated iron sheets, and the pit ends with thick wooden board-walks. Whilst replacing the excavated soil, he has trodden it all down at regular intervals to make it firm and solid throughout.

The young fig, as always sourced from a reliable and knowledgeable nursery, should be planted in a hole large enough to accommodate the spread-out roots and deep enough to ensure that the soil level aligns with the soil mark on the stem. Having worked the growing medium in amongst the roots with his fingers, Dirty Nails treads it firm.

Figs are thirsty, especially in late spring and early summer, so need to be watered well during this time. For the first season after planting, fertilisers and manures should be avoided whilst the tree establishes itself.

EXTRACTS FROM DIRTY NAILS’ JOURNAL CRACKING UP “Emergent grass creates a soft carpet of green on the arable where Cole Street meets St. James’ Common. By the tumbledown barn, clayey surface soil dries daily, contracting and cracking, a maze of enlarging fissures defining the fault lines, like a map gone crazy. Where I walked with wellies calf-deep in mud in the youth of this month, now I travel in shoes and gather barely a clod. It has been cold and dry for nigh on three weeks now, barely a drop of rain save a few fleeting, apologetic flutterings of snow a few days previous.

“And still the trees suck up vast quantities of water to power their immense, god-like forms and functions, even now developing billions of leaves and flowers within loosening scaly buds. The pink dotted pimples on thorny twigs of hawthorn promise a magical display of scented blooms come May, a crucial source of sustenance for the busy horde of insects that will emerge, seemingly from nothing, and be on the wing at that time in the future.

“We need rain to turn the mud back into a soft textured medium ideal for the house martins that will be using it for nest building soon. In a few short days, rooks will have hungry and demanding nestlings to feed. The fields, caked hard and unforgiving, will be of no use to them if they cannot thrust those great dagger-like, grub-catching beaks of theirs into the moist earth and extract essential food for youngsters.

“Right now, the rookery by the prison is a-throb and a-heave with the breeding season in full swing, and great oaks that stud the pastoral hedges hereabouts carry their share of active nests too. But rooks don’t lay eggs and raise their babies in spring for no reason. The ingredients of warmth, wetness, increasing light, and burgeoning life are intimately tied in to their breeding success. And they need water, that most important and precious commodity on which all life depends, conspicuous by its current absence, as the cracking fields and crispy husks of muck-spread farmyard manure on pasture up towards Foyle Hill testify.”

How to Grow Your Own Food by Dirty Nails (ISBN 9781905862115) is available from www.dirtynails.co.uk and good bookshops, rrp £10.99 Copyright, March 2009