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Perenially on the move
Filed under GeneralSep 8I grew up in a place that not only have many people have never been to but a place that, given the chance, most wouldn’t even contemplate going to. Some say they’ve passed through it, some may have watched a rugby or cricket match there but most find it is a town best avoided. I feel the same about many places I go to, I try not visit Swindon much, Luton isn’t in my top ten and neither is Didcot.
I can now add one more place to the list, a place both myself and Ellie found so dire we both said we would actually prefer to spend a week in my home town of Northampton rather than an afternoon there. The town I am referring to is Bridport in the South West of England. It’s hard to put your finger on why it was so bad, the people aren’t rude but then again they aren’t really friendly either. The town centre wasn’t full of boarded up shops or blokes with dogs on chains but what was there was pretty uninspiring, the usual chains mixed in with charity shops and banks. We wandered in to what was supposed to be a veggie friendly cafe for lunch and I ended up having a supermarket bread roll with a few raw bits of pepper put in. What it was supposed to be was quite beyond me! I could have walked into the Coop and made it myself for a quarter of the price they charged.
I can only presume people choose to go on holiday there so they can leave. It’s a place to base yourself and move on rather than stay. Most must go to places like nearby Lyme Regis (well worth a visit, especially in low season), down to the coast or walking around the countryside.
However, if you don’t drive a car you don’t have that choice, you can’t get up and leave when you want to. There is a bus going into Bridport and out again but the timetable for it seems to be more of a ‘serving suggestion’ than anything else. It’s just a rough guess, a stab in the dark at the approximate time it may turn up but little more than that. This seems to be universal with the First bus company wherever they are in the world. The conspiracy theorists often claim First are deliberately running a bad service as they are owned by an oil company and they really want everyone to drive a car. For once the conspiracy theorists might be right!
So this bus, the 31 service from Weymouth to Axeminster seems to run on its own timetable. It’s hard to say if it is 10 minutes late, half an hour or, when on the rare occurrence it seems early, it is really so ridiculously late it is actually the bus from an hour before masquerading as an early bus. I even contemplated the idea that the evening buses didn’t show the times they were due to set off but the year they started trying to complete the Weymouth to Axeminster route. So the 19.05 actually set off in the year 1905. So by the time it anyone with the sense to try and get out of Bridport it had been though two world wars, watch the beetles form, disband and die* and had seen Simon Cowell somehow become one of the highest paid individuals on television.
Part of what made Bridport such an uncomfortable experience is I was carrying a Yacon plant with me. I had been given the Yacon at Monkton Wylde Court (Thanks to everyone there if any of you are reading this), a community we had decided to go and stay with as B and B guests for a few days (well worth the visit). It’s amazing really we seemed to leave Schumacher College (where I work and sometimes seem to live) for a very similar place just a few miles North East. Anyway this large plant, in a large pot made everything a bit of a chore. What made things worse is I couldn’t really complain about what a chore this was as Ellie is now carrying a seven month foetus inside her. So there we were both struggling with our chosen and not so chosen weights with us wandering around Bridport. It made an imperfect end to a perfect holiday.
I now have the Yacon in my porch at home and I’m wondering what to do with it. It’s a root crop which will act as a perennial if you don’t dig out the roots. Trouble is I’m not sure where I’ll be living perennially. Ellie and I would like to buy a house to set up home in but the bank seems to have other thoughts, it seems they will only lend us enough money to buy either a shed in Devon or a two bedroom house in Hull or the Rhonda Valley. There are various self build schemes going on in Devon but these are slow moving and seem to come with a very long list of requirements or rules we don’t always match or feel comfortable with.
So where do I plant my perennial root crops? Am I doomed to be a nomadic gardener? Only ever planting brief annuals or at worse briefer salad crops? I don’t know but I do know one thing, there isn’t a chance in hell I’ll be buying a place in Bridport!
*The good half anyway
2 Responses to “Perenially on the move”
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Your yacon will accompany you happily for a few years in a pot. It’ll die off at the end of the year when it gets cold. Tip it out and eat the fat storage tubers, keep (and divide) the growing tips at the top, keep them frost free over winter and replant in the spring, and do the same thing all over again. We grew our first year’s yacon in pots and the crop distorted the pot so I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with them! Main problem I think we see people having is letting them get too cold esp early in the year. You can also grow extra plants from stem cuttings, so you can divide up your stock for “insurance” too.
Then you just have the trouble of finding something to eat the blighted stuff with…
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dave said on September 9th, 2011 at 9:11 am
Thanks Vanessa, it looks like I have another house plant then!? That solves a lot of problems.
“A bit like water chestnut” is the kindest way I’ve heard the flavour of Yacon being described. The more I look into alternative crops the more I realise why we eat what we do, potatoes aren’t too bad really
