Growing Potatoes in Tyres, Bags, Barrels

Growing potatoes in bags seemed to be a popular thing this year. Our sack of eaters we had from our farmer were already ready to sprout when he gave them to us -we could always palnt them, he suggested.

We haven't grown much veg the last couple of years, for one reason or another, and we never did grow spuds; all those blight susceptible things just seemed too problematical. However, when there seemed to be a lot of talk about potato bags, I thought I'd try it. We always overbuy on compost, so we had plenty of that about, and the aforesaid sprouty potatoes, and then there are these woven plastic sacks which the Royal Mail in the UK sometimes generously and unnecessarily supply us with, usually with an already perfectly adequately wrapped small parcel containing a book inside. They've always looked like they ought to be reusable, but we hadn't yet thought what for.

So all the components were already in our possession. I put some straw in the bottom ( another thing we still have in abundance from our long-past days of keeping hens), a layer of compost, five or six of the most promising sprouty spuds, and then more compost. I watered them well and stood them on the terrace.

After a bit some green plants came up. You let them grow and then earth them up with some more compost, unrolling the bag top as you go. This bit always reminds me of a family anecdote about an old Norfolk man who saw someone somewhere whom my parents knew earthing up his potatoes and asked ' Are ye moulderin arn her up?'

Here they are at a fairly early stage of their growth.

I repeated this maybe four times, then left them to grow. When the plant, it's called a haulm, goes manky yellow and dies back, after two or three months, you can harvest them. Which we did today.

Large quantities of compost were shaken out into the wheelbarrow, with nary a sign of a tater, but then towards the bottom they started to show themselves. In all there were just on two kilos, four and a bit pounds, which wasn't much for all the volume of compost, but they were clean and look good.

See the full article here: http://box-elder.blogspot.com/

HAARPing On About Haiti

Some folks on the conspiracy theory circuit are attributing the Haiti earthquake to the HAARP project.

Although I keep an open mind, I haven't really see any credible evidence for HAARP being the fifth horseman of the apocalypse: http://bit.ly/6XfC7A . If the putative western capitalist running dog conspiracists had made such a technique 'weaponisable', surely they would have used it on Moscow, Kabul, or Beijing.

Sovereign states are sovereign states: Haiti could have chosen to ally itself with the US, with Cuba, or with other stable administrations. Their history is desperately sad, but like us all, they have the opton of choosing their destiny. The fact that they have had a completely useless government for generations is not the fault of the west, although arguably we could have done more to stabilise such an utterly disabled government.

It is pretty sickening to see the opportunist mis-speaker Hilary Clinton making political mileage out of the situation - but how would the Haitians feel if no politicians turned up to publicise their plight?

As to the implementation of martial law, I can see it from the Haitians point of view: why didn't those first helicopters bring in medical supplies rather than armed troops? However, had they done so, in all likelihood the supplies would have been raided in a New York minute, and been used for the benefit, not of the most needy, but of the most violent. Such is the nature of humanity in extremis. I too, in such a situation, would do pretty much anything to obtain water and food for my children: my British 'all for one, one for all' philosophy would go out of the window, and I'd even jump the queue for the Number 19 bus to Pimlico.

It's great to sit in a comfortable apartment and criticise what is being done: but what would you do? What could you do? Admit it: you'd do pretty much the same - face with a million people faced with starvation, disease and death, prepared to do anything to get hold of whatever supplies you can bring in, you'd have to set up a secure fortress from which to distribute aid, and keep people at a distance until you'd set up a line of supply.