Bare behinds and hopping mad

Forget spending your money one gardening fripperies like soil thermometers. If you want to find out if your plot of earth is warm enough to plant your first seeds of the season there are two tried and tested methods that have been around ever since God planted that apple tree and said 'Note to self - get the mongoose to stand guard against snakes.'

Firstly, you can drop your trousers and sit on the bare earth with your bare bottom and if you don't leap into the air immediately, cursing and swearing about your frozen tush, then the soil is warm enough for planting. Secondly, you can have a look for leaf buds appearing on trees and hedges, and the first signs of weed growth. If it's warm enough for weed growth, it's warm enough for carrots.

So, there I was first thing this morning, trousers around my ankles, perched on our new raised bed in the back garden and...no, no, I jest, I joke!! Too horrible an image to contemplate!
'Don't you believe her!' says Mrs Poo. 'I've got photographic evidence but I'm warning you that if you want to see it, I don't come cheap.'
'But you go cheep sometimes,' says Mrs Slocombe.
'Not since I was a chick,' says Poo. 'Now it's more of a 'bokk, bok, barkkkkk.'

Ignore them. They've had far too many worms these last few days and you know what an excess of protein did for Oliver Twist, don't you?

I reckon the raised bed is almost ready for some outside planting. The hens have done a fine job of breaking down the larger clods of compost to a fine tilth. All we need is some top soil and a bit of polythene to cover the whole bed for a week or two to warm it up a bit more and we can plant seeds straight outside. I went into the greenhouse and stared optimistically at the seeds I planted on Monday. They're catching quite a bit of sun today and I've even remembered to water them. But no sign of growth yet. Ditto the stuff in the propagator and the conservatory a.k.a growing facility number two. Am I being too impatient? Probably.

I've also been investigating the idea of growing hops. My family on my mum's side were Kent hop growers. Hops are supposed to be good for helping sleep. Many were the hop pickers who were given a swift kick by the hop farmer for falling asleep on the job, so soporific is this plant. I'm thinking, I could grow some hops and hand- craft Andy a hop pillow to help him sleep better. Or maybe a hop duvet, just to make sure the job's done properly. And now is the right time of the year to get them started. The trouble is that they grow extremely tall. We're talking 16-20 foot high. There's a 'dwarf' variety which grows 10-12 feet. In order to harvest hops you have to have either a very tall ladder, a trapeze or, as is more traditional, stilts. Now, Andy has a unicycle which apart from being too wobbly for hop picking, isn't tall enough. But I'm thinking, if I learn to stilt walk for the purposes of hop picking, Andy and I could start a circus act as a side-line. He could ride his unicycle and I could balance on his shoulders on my stilts! I bet that would draw the crowds in! We could do carnivals and the like, earn a bit of extra cash to go towards our small-holding. And we can both juggle - well, Andy can juggle, I can juggle if I concentrate but I tend to be a dropper and if I drop balls on Andy's head whilst I am balancing on my stilts on his shoulders whilst he rides his unicycle, it could go horribly wrong.

But then, if I learn to walk on stilts I could also start a hydroponic growing system for peas, cucumbers and tomatoes in the guttering on the roof! Hydroponics is the growing of veg using water only. You feed all the nutrients the plant needs and would normally get from soil straight into the water system. And then I wouldn't need to worry about whether the ground was warm enough to plant seed. All I would need to do would be to dip my elbow in the water to test the temperature, much as you would to test bath water for a baby. I could use my bottom, only I think it would get stuck.

And if there is one thing you must be able to do in the world of veg growing and that's to be able to tell your a**e from your elbow.