Rainy day musings

Lush countryside around Auchterhouse

Really heavy rain yesterday morning prevented all activity in the garden, but we were going out in any case to a family occasion in Derbyshire so I would not have had time.

I have been researching my family history over the course of the last six months or so, a subject you perhaps tend to get more interested in as you get older. Specifically, I have been delving into the background of my mother. She was a very private person and only mentioned it once or twice, so I thought it was time I cracked the mystery.

One of things I know for definite is that she was born at 10 Glebe Street, Dundee, a holy grail address for fans of the Broons cartoon characters. They have lived at this tenement since first appearing in print in the Sunday Post in 1936 and I am now the proud owner of Ma Broon's Cookbook, the inside of which contains an illustration of a postcard addressed to the Broons at 10 Glebe Street, Dundee. I am now officially Oor Andy.

The other thing I know is that my mother's mother, the maternal grandmother I never knew, was the daughter of a ploughman. He and his family moved around farms in the Dundee area from the 1880s onwards and I had the pleasure of visiting Auchterhouse, one of the villages where they lived, during a visit to Scotland earlier this year.

Quite what Charles Stewart Christie would have made of my puny efforts in the garden, I will never know. But I like to think there is something in the genes.

A potty day

I'm still unsure whether my tomatoes are going to work out this year. I've three varieties on the go, Lightfruit, Harbinger and Yellow Pear-Shaped, all from seed packets acquired as a gift or because the price was knocked down in a sale. The few plants outside had to be dug up and destroyed about a week ago because of blight while the indoor plants have yet to ripen.

They are showing nice bunches of fruit and have grown and spread out noticeably in the sun of recent days, so much so that I returned home this lunchtime from a morning out to discover that one of the pots had toppled over and taken two or three of the others with it. A quick rearrangement and a few new stakes have stabilised them, but the basic problem is that this year I eschewed growbags in favour of pots and I chose too small. I think also that nine pots is a step too many for the space I have in our conservatory.

I'm not quite sure at this distance why I decided against going with growbags this time. They worked perfectly satisfactorily last year and gave me a bumper crop. Think on for next year.

I took a photograph of the Lightfruit tomatoes, a name I sniggered over at the time I was given the seeds. They are in fact quite heavy and promise to be productive.

Back in business

The blog is resuming today after a short break when I didn't feel like doing it. I felt at the time that the writing was not very good, that I was spending more time than I really wished on the blog and that it wasn't adding anything to the good of the world.

I'm in a better frame of mind now, have decided to come out of anonymity with it, have added a photo of the real me and will be writing a proper personal profile. What the hell, it's only a diary that I don't mind other people reading.

Gardening has continued, albeit it in a lazy and half-hearted way in comparison to other people. I've recently come across two websites which have inspired me to get back on track with blogging - one called UK Veg Gardeners and the other My Tiny Plot . Both are run by a woman called Gillian Carson, the latter site being her personal blog and the former a social site for veg gardeners in general.

All I've got to do now is grow some bloody veg (puts on his Michael Caine voice).