Ditches & Hoes

I realise as i write that headline that the ‘2.0′ suffix is now a bit 2006 and now we are balls deep in social networking that i should really be looking for a twitter related pun… well i can’t and anyway, its 2k9 its all about ‘the cloud’ and i fear that any pun on that would be so convoluted that it would make me want to stop being the only reader of this blog… and thats not good in an opening headline.

Now you realise how much agonising thought goes into a headline you can imagine how much thought i gave to the idea of starting a blog, about growing vegetables. You see, it seems, at first that the two are a perfect match, the multimedia of the interwebs meets the good wholesome earthy fun and bright colours of the allotment – in fact just look at Gardeners World on BBC, jaw dropping photography combined with convivial hosts = GARDENWIN!!11 so doing a blog should be easy right?

Well no, there is a problem, this allotment revolution has been bubbling along for a few years now with the outcome being that i really should start the blog with “Hey get those preconceptions out of your head, allotments aren’t just for 30-something mac-using, guardian-reading, humourless vegetarians, there are some old fellas with flat caps hiding from their wives for the best part of 40 years down here to!” There is also the problem that if you are successful on your allotment, you will invariably come across as a smug self-satisfied twunt whom the reader will start stalking with the eventual aim of dead-heading and thinning out. And if you are shit… well then that just makes a rubbish blog. And finally, it can be kinda dull.. it doesn’t happen in a way suited to social networking, zOMG, gotta update my twitter to “CHITTING SEED POTATOES!!!!” while people log on to check the compost-cam.

But the fact is that it is an interesting subject and one that is perhaps, right now, worthy of a blog – there are good blogs out there, some very good, but just like allotments themselves there are those that are lying in a sorry state of disrepair with bits of carpet flapping about in the wind… I discovered this when looking for a name for my blog: allotment.blogspot.com and allotments.blogspot.com (listen, all my creative thoughts were used up on the gardening 2.0 headline) are lying fallow, and these are no means the only ones, over at blogs.allotments-uk.com we find what is possibly the electronic equivalent of marestail as a monumental pile of porn-spam seems to be filling up the blogs… its just like finding an old bongo magazine in the hedgerow really.

So welcome to the blog, if shoehorned gardening similes and puns around words like ‘chitting’ are your thing – you’re gonna be in some kind of heaven