GROW YOUR OWN FOOD WITH DIRTY NAILS MARCH, 3RD WEEK FIRST EARLY POTATOES The potato planting season has arrived in Dirty Nails’ veg patch. Although traditionally Good Friday was the day when workers countrywide got their spuds into the ground, he staggers his planting dates to accommodate different types of potato. It commences this week with Concorde, a First Early variety which should yield a heavy crop of oval spuds, creamy and moist inside with a smooth yellowy skin - a beautiful potato!

With the ground already prepared, it is simply a matter of placing the individual chitted (pre-sprouted) tubers on the bottom of his leaf mould lined trenches at 1 foot (30 cm) intervals. He puts them all out along the rows, which are 2 feet (60 cm) apart, so he can see clearly where he is going to be planting. 6 inches (15 cm) is a good depth. Dirty Nails then employs a broken spade handle with a rounded end to make a hole to the desired depth, and carefully nestles a seed spud at the bottom of each one with the stout dark chits facing upwards. The holes are filled in and a little extra soil is pulled into the trench with a swan-necked (or ’draw’) hoe. Potatoes are both hungry and thirsty. Goodness worked into the planting trenches previously will feed them. Because there are often extended dry spells in spring these days, Dirty Nails gives them a jolly good watering too. Trenches are good for this. Not only do they accommodate a lot of compostables deep down, but they also ensure that liquid will be concentrated where it is most needed as his potatoes become established.

PEPPERS AND TOMATOES Peppers can be planted now in the greenhouse with a little heat, or on a kitchen window-sill. Dirty Nails cultivates Ring o Fire, which is as hot as the name suggests, and Long Red Marconi, a juicy sweet-tasting pepper. He pops the flat round seeds into pots of moist compost to about ½ inch (1½ cm) depth. Peppers need warmth to germinate, so he covers the pots with glass or bubble-wrap to increase heat and humidity. Patience is needed because it can take some weeks for seeds to split open and that first pair of leaves to loop up and out of the soil.

Tomatoes like similar treatment. Although widely available for potting-on at markets, Dirty Nails always grows his own from seed. There are loads of varieties. Two of his favourites are Gardeners Delight and Britain’s Breakfast. The former produces long trusses of sweet cherry tomatoes. The latter grows larger, juicy fruits which are fabulous sliced and fried for the first meal of the day. Kept warm, seedlings will emerge within a fortnight.

Peppers and tomatoes crop well in a greenhouse and Dirty Nails will pot his seedlings up in due course into grow bags.

EXTRACTS FROM DIRTY NAILS’ JOURNAL IN THE ROOKERY “The temperature has lifted and wind dropped. In the micro-climate of this scrap of woodland it may even be described as faintly mild, approaching the latter days of March. My back is to the prison, facing the wooded peaks of a creamy Duncliffe and that Saxon hilltop town away to the right. A twin-bladed helicopter sweeps in front and behind out of sight, barely off the ground and thunderously overbearing all else as it steers a course, resembling a giant deformed mechanical insect. Even now, minutes later, the chunter of those heavy rotary blades echo from away over yonder like the continual rhythmic rumble of distant thunder.

“Then soothing cries of communally nesting rooks fill the air again. They sit atop the spindly branches of smooth-barked ash and sturdy-armed oaks, clinging to the twigs, rocking back and forth and bouncing in a gentle breeze high amongst a mass of football-sized nests secured and artfully woven into goblet forks and junctions. As I pass beneath the colony of handsome, pale-faced black crows they rise up in a loose and disintegrating crowd, noisily cawing and squawking at my alien presence. The birds soon rest again minutes later, confidently roosting and chatting amongst themselves. I park myself underneath, on a bare thorny bank spangled with the pebble-dash of their olive-and-white spoil, alive with emerging green star-like leaves of bluebells and tufts of honeysuckle bursting from the elbows of dead-looking stems.

“Time passes slowly, while all around life is bursting forth at the seams. So fast that within a few short weeks this wooded lane will be transformed into a lush green place that throbs and heaves, filling the senses with movement and dance, and yet so slow that all a human-orientated timescale consciousness can register is the energy of busy rooks and stuttering staccato notes of chaffinches from within the thicket. A blackbird exocets by, fast, direct, at head height down the middle of the ride. He curves round a corner past the clump of reed mace and screeches his arrival with such urgency that a magpie over in the fields is set off. The machine-gun repeat of this charismatic black and white bird mixes with the country chorus for a moment.

“I rise to my feet, sling bag over shoulder and tramp on as the rooks again have lift-off, to noisily circle and quarter as I disturb their fleeting peace. They will have all alighted once more well before I get to the metalled road, turn left, and follow my nose downhill then up again.”

A Vegetable Gardener's Year by Dirty Nails (ISBN 9781905862221) is available from www.dirtynails.co.uk and good bookstores, rrp £12.99.