First - clear up the manure...

I find it deeply ironic that the start of this blog, coincides with the BBC's 'Dig in' campaign, "the campaign that makes growing your own 'grub' cooler than a cucumber in very cool shades, possibly riding a motorbike". Because growing vegetables is well known to be embarrassingly unsexy. At least until the arbiters of cool hit 35, drop a couple of sprogs, move to a property with some adjacent earth then start to worry about the lack of antioxidants or omega 3 from supermarket veg affecting the offspring's chance of passing entrance exams. Then they take to it with the tedium of every other kind of born-again zealot.

Thus goes affectation of bourgeois peasantry, at least in my life time. But lo! Now they have another incentive, the Credit Crunch. Apparently it's "super cheap". Whenever I come across one of those 'How to...' Sunday Supplement articles, how to be a urban peasant turns out to be work out as surprisingly expensive.

This isn't a terribly positive start to what was meant to be simply a record of my aim to grow fruit and vegetables; I'm inclined to start another blog to challenge some of the bovine-derived-organic-soil-improver being aimed at the aspiring public, probably in an attempt to fiscally stimulate the over-blown garden-centre-visitor-life-style-experience industry.

Perhaps I should save the edge of my sarcasm for another outlet, but the patronising tone of the BBC's campaign really does move me to anger. It patronises just about everyone; people of my parents' generation, who had to 'grow their own' to supplement their meagre diets through the industrial poverty, the Depression and following war years and learned the horticultural skills derided by the original generation of cool though necessity; it patronises all those from from Asia and Africa and elsewhere who have revitalised urban allotments which had become derelict in the wake of uncool; it patronises just about any adult too, though maybe not the ones who genuinely believe sprouting seeds in a jam-jar is going to lower the food bills and be their first step to joining the CLA.