Helen’s Blog

Tweeting is something I decided to do rather hesitantly and very much in the slow lane, as a conscious effort to keep myself up to date with the various tools available to me as a writer. My previous post on the subject was perhaps a bit naïve – and managed to wash all sorts of stuff out into the gutter…. Now, having edged out into the middle lane, got a few Tweets under my belt and a few followers, I can re-asses things a bit.

Of course Twitter provides a too-often misused platform for those who want to get rid of unsavoury aggression or whatever – enough people are looking at that, so I won’t. And there are those compulsive but basically harmless self-publicists – I am learning to ignore those too. But for run-of-the-mill, salt-of-the-earth gardeners, Twitter can be a definite plus, I think.

A love of plants and gardens bordering on mild obsession with them, spending time messing around amongst and in them and writing about them can be quite a solitary thing. You can be out there all hours, twiddling or toiling or in my case a scatty mixture of both, and you think things, notice things – they can be appalling, glorious, or even be just jaw-dropping moments of realisation about something – things that you would love to share. But next door’s cat isn’t listing, the robin just shrugs his shoulders and the blackbirds have other things on their minds. So the random-thought-and-picture-tweeting, which is what I find myself doing quite a bit, is a neat alternative. (O how sad this sounds, but it’s not, I’m not, and I will press on…).

So heartfelt thanks, Karen Tolmie, who was encouraging after my previous post, and to fellow Tweeters for sharing your similarly random thoughts, pictures and enthusiasms, your RT’s, your Favouriting (you see, I am getting the hang of it slowly), which indicate from time to time that others ‘get’ what I get, which in turn makes me realise that we gardeners are all in it together and that in itself, dare I admit it, gives me a bit of a warm glow. And we have had a bit of a larf, too.

My unilateral declaration of ‘n vwls dy’ provided light relief on a sweltering day.

I shall be declaring ‘n vwls dy – th squl’ shortly…

A few weeks of Tweeting (I am still floundering with the subtleties of Twitterworld) leaves me somewhat perplexed – and in truth, rather inclined to back away into the undergrowth.

Why do we Tweet? Is it because we want to shout our thoughts/opinions or share interesting occurrences with as many people as possible – whoever, wherever?

Do we therefore pride ourselves on rattling out all sorts of random personal stuff, following everyone we can find just to make sure they listen?

Or do we home in on and follow people who are likely to know who we are*, may find our thoughts/opinions/enthusiasms etc. interesting, the less trivial ones even possibly thought-provoking – in the knowledge that they will pass some on to similar others.

Is it ‘mean’, therefore, not to at least follow everyone who follows you, as one very prominent and prolific Tweeter suggests? (You see, I am too pursed-lipped to even mention his/her name!)

Maybe the pursed-lipped shouldn’t Tweet.

Am I missing the point of it all?

Comments please below (or, in a sealed envelope, marked Private and Confidential, addressed to…)

Over and out.

*I tweet as one who, in a very,very small arena, admittedly, is relatively well-known.

Grow your own gooseberries

Today’s letters page in the print version of The Telegraph carries an abridged version of one sent to them by Kate Metcalfe – the very ‘my friend Kate’ who features in my Thorny Problems page all too frequently.

The single half-standard gooseberry bush she bought (from Ken Muir‎, and yes, it did cost quite a bit) has so far yielded 50 lbs of fruit in 5 years. So this year her goosegogs are ‘costing her 60p per lb, and of course getting cheaper every year’ (despite not going metric yet, she can do sums, because she is an accountant and has such facts at her fingertips).

I can’t understand why anyone would grow anything other than half-standard gooseberry bushes (i.e  those with short trunks, so that the fruiting branches are more-or-less waist-height instead of ground-sweeping), since they do make the horrid job of picking them a whole lot easier.

The two I have on my allotment, despite pretty savage pruning, are staggeringly prolific and provide far more fruit than I could possibly consume or freeze, so I have been known to prune off whole branches and give them away, laden, to friends. A pretty mean version of PYO, I suppose.

Amongst her many other talents my friend Kate is (unlike me) a pudding-maker par excellence and a generous hostess. Crumbles, fools, goosegog muffins, g’gogs-in-the-hole, you name it – half the village will have savoured it!

If gardeners want to buy-in mail-order bumble bees, please don’t try to put them off.

Normally I am pretty much a Ken Thompson fan, enjoying immensely and learning a lot from what he has to offer in the way of really helpful stuff for gardeners.

I would, however, like to register a bit of a protest about something Ken wrote in Telegraph Gardening on June 15 about the ecologically pointlessness of the gardening public buying-in bumblebee nest-lets to keep in their gardens and allotments – because what he had to say absolutely missed the point, I think, about why many gardeners (as opposed to commercial tomato-growers, for example) buy bumble bees in the first place.

It is surely all about the very simple pleasure the bees bring as they go to and fro from their little boxes (or their slightly twee ‘hives’).

Bombus terrestris, the buff-tailed bumble bee is our commonest species, apparently. And even though the little chaps we see around the place abuzz on the alliums or reeling drunkenly around on the sedums may not actually be ‘ours’, it is fun – and totally harmless – to imagine that they are.

And for households with children, a visibly busy bumble bee community can provide a useful reminder to the next generation of how important – and actually how gentle -are these charming little creatures whose presence we usually take for granted.

Only the silliest gardeners would imagine that by buying a box-full of bees they will be doing anything to save the planet or even much to pollenate our crops. And there are, after all, plenty of less responsible ways to spend money on your garden: on obtrusive garden lighting, extravagant and inappropriate ‘water features’ and colonies of nasty Chinese plastic meerkats and other atrocious nicknackery.

Nothing more to add. I leave everyone else to fight about the science.

• Bumble bees and their wooden ‘hives’ and lots of instructions for bee-ginners can be purchased from Dragonfli.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Gardening in Pyjamas, out on 11th April

As anyone who looks at this regularly must know, I have gone off blogging a bit – it suddenly seemed to be an ego-trip too far.

But I have just popped in because – as my helpful son points out – it just daft to miss the opportunity to flag my new book ‘Gardening in Pyjamas’, which will be officially available from April 11, published by Simon & Schuster , RRP £12.99 – less on Amazon, of course).

Essentially it is a complete re-vamp and up-date of ‘Gardening in Your Nightie’, which I wrote in 2000.

A modest book of words that pre-dated my Thorny Problems page in the Telegraph, ‘Nightie’, hit the spot for a lot of gardeners – those keen enough, daft enough, to get out there in all weather first thing in the morning (usually inappropriately dressed, hence the title) but didn’t quite know what to get on with and how to go about it – and why.

‘Pyjamas’ is updated to deflect criticisms about sexism, reflect 21st century wardrobe refinements and, more importantly, modern ‘greener’ gardening habits. It’s got no glamorous pictures, no ‘helpful’ pruning diagrams, minimal mumbo-jumbo, Latin and science. And, of course, the new book also benefits considerably from 12 more years of my own experience as a gardener and writer.

I’m really proud of it, and I hope you like it.

Helen

• Order a copy of Gardening in Pyjamas from Telegraph Books