SEnine Soiled A
HERBACEOUS
Herbaceous is fully aware that the answer lies in the soil. The only problem is that he can’t always remember the question.
rustic companion from his rural days, however, always had the
answers when it came to the brown stuff.
He boasted he was able to tell an area’s soil type and fertility by the trees and kind of farming going on.
His fame became such that he was invited to write a book describing what he saw from the carriage window on his regular journey from Exeter to Waterloo.
The book became a best seller at the time, perhaps a sign things were a bit slow on the entertainment front just after the war. On a quiet evening recently, Herbs dusted it down and decided he has a bone to pick with him.
It turned out his companion reserved greatest contempt for the ‘spewy sands, gravel and clay’ of suburbia which
were only fit for housing, preferably in ‘blocks of flats ten stories high all in a row’.
Citizens leaching ‘ town- ear ned money’
should
build their houses on these poor soils and not on land which philanthr opic farmers could use for churning out milk, meat and crops to a hungry world, he wrote.
The emerging ‘green’ movement was viewed with similar bombast. Green welly bird-spotters from the towns he clobbered as ‘sentimentalists who worry
that farmers might spoil the lesser nit- wit warbler’s nesting ground’.
He also laughs up his sleeve at suburban gardeners who spend vast resources improving their soils to grow plants which right thinking countrymen consider to be weeds, for example, rhododendrons.
Most of these points now seemed aimed at Herbaceous’ vital organs, not least the ‘spewy sand, gravel and clay’ on which he’s built his allotment career and would defend with a pitchfork from anyone trying to build a ten storey block of flats on it.
Herbs has decided that, should his old friend come calling, he might invite him to Plot 72 to take a look at the soil from close-up.
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Branches also at:
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51 - 53 Passey Place, Eltham SE9 5DA Tel: 020 8850 2868
Never stop trying 43
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