Digging my potatoes

This weekend I have been mostly enjoying the garden...

Well. Almost. Growing up and life was always full of chores. Helping mum on the milk round meant trips around endless villages, often baked to a crisp, but mostly wind blown and freezing, perched amongst the crates in the back of a Morris Minor pickup. Or down on the farm with Dad, mucking out, straw carting, shovelling dusty feed or muddy beet, rounding up the cows in a four in the morning frozen fog, and getting crapped on in the milking parlour. Joy.

At home too, the work continued. Fighting the dusty outwash sands that favoured hot nettles as a crop, helping double dig in thousands of tons (or so it seems) of the same slimy muck brought home from the farm. Planting vegetables to feed the masses - sacks full of potatoes, inedible kale, slimy cabbages, poisonous sprouts, maize for the rabbits, beans various and green, carrots like parsnips, and parsnips like the tree trunks we felled and cut for firewood with Uncle Oscar's old two man saws. Equally woody.

So. I've been digging the garden. De-weeding, spreading compost, and preparing to produce a few of my own vegetables on a far less grand scale than my growing up at home life demanded.

Followed by a bike ride with the kids to a local art exhibition a couple of villages away, glass of fizzy wine, home - beating the wind and rain - to the garage to nurture an engine back to health for the Sedan.

Tired, grubby, dreamless sleep.