Potatoes, Alice Neel, drum and bass Spinal Tap

But mainly potatoes

Hello everyone!

Last week on the show someone let me know they’d recently taken over an allotment, and asked for some tips on what to plant now. I’m by no means a gardening expert, but I have been helping my dad look after his allotment for the last couple of years. I go over there every week - it’s quite a long way from where I live in London, so I can’t go much more frequently - and act as a spare pair of hands and an enthusiastic ear. My dad is definitely a gardening expert. He grew up on a farm in the Somerset countryside, and has had the allotment as long as I can remember. It used to be a real chore to go, except for the annual bonfire (which is actually illegal to do now, I suppose rightly) when we would bring tin foil to wrap potatoes in, and cook them in the centre of the bonfire. I have no better taste memory than that of charred potato skin with butter and salt on an October afternoon. But other than that, there isn’t much excitement to be had on an allotment for a less than outdoorsy 8 year old. 

Now as an adult I love going. Learning how best to cultivate asparagus or how to prune an apple tree is an amazing way to spend an afternoon, and I feel very lucky to have access to the plot. They’re kind of fascinating places, allotments. I can’t think of another example of leasing land like that, in a relatively communal set up: there is usually a volunteer-led committee who do administrative work, as well as things like stocking the on site shop, if there is one. The people who also have plots on our site are a hugely varied group of people and accordingly their approach to gardening varies a lot. The plot next door to ours is leased at the moment by a young couple who are both scientists, and they’re always experimenting with more radical gardening methods. They’re really into the whole no-dig thing, and are always growing things under bits of corrugated plastic. The plot on the other side was old Harry’s, who was there my whole childhood until he wasn’t, who was anything but experimental. Some mad things have happened at the allotment: like the time someone unearthed an unexploded WW2 bomb and the site was closed for a week, or when the police raided a huge plot that was being used to grow cannabis (somehow, outside?), but generally it’s a sedate place where people trade tips on how best to avoid rotting strawberries or black fly on broad beans.

Although they’re a wonderful thing, allotments, they have kind of a messed up origin story. They were offered up as an appeasement to the citizens of Britain from whom the common land was stolen and privatised during the enclosures. I see people’s eyes glaze over in the pub when I say I’ve been reading a leftist history of gardening in the UK, or I try to explain how allotments can arguably be thought of as a method of social control (as the ruling classes of the day thought they would be a good way to keep the working man out of the ale house and thus out of trouble) so I won’t go into it too much here. But there's plenty of material on the radical potential of gardening, or the criminal history of the enclosures online - or if you want to read a book on it, I think ‘The Story of Gardening’ by Martin Hoyles is a great place to start.

My absolute favourite thing to do on the allotment is to grow potatoes. Traditionally you grow them in rows, and you need a lot of space. But Dad and I have experimented with growing them in pots, to great success. Ideally keep the pot outside, either in the garden or balcony if you have one, but you can also do this inside, as long as you have the pot somewhere with a lot of light. You’ll need a sprouted potato, a big pot of any material, and soil. I’ve put the method at the end of the newsletter.

On to some new music I’ve been listening to - I’ve had this Jouska album on repeat loads this week. Jouska is a solo project of Norwegian musician Marit Othilie Thorvik, and this is the first music I’ve heard of hers. I think it’s very good pop music! My favourite tracks are Death Sentence and Fragrance. Top tier pretending-you’re-in-a-film music, which is my favourite genre. Also, this brilliant shoegaze song, Close Lobsters, and this Ukranian gem called Зачароване коло from 1979 that a listener sent in to me, along with a load of other wonderful Ukranian music to listen to.

Television… I haven’t watched much this past week, as I’ve had a lot of work on. But when I have needed a show, an ongoing rewatch of 30 Rock has been my choice, or unfortunately the most recent series of You. At the top of my to-watch list is an episode of Storyville a chatroomer suggested during the show on Wednesday, Casa Susanna: In the 1950s and 60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskill mountains, there was a small wooden house with a barn behind it called Casa Susanna, a holiday home for one of the first clandestine networks of cross-dressers in the US. Back then, Diane and Kate used to enjoy weekend visits to the house with their wives and friends. Now in their 80s, Diane and Kate tell a forgotten chapter of some of the early days of trans identity. I’ll also be watching Fleishman is in Trouble next, maybe over the weekend, as I greatly enjoyed the book (although if you asked me for a single detail of it I would be unable to give you any) and I heard the TV version is good too.

I’m so pleased so many of you are enjoying Driving School (I tried watching the new version, by the way, and it’s much less good) so I will offer something in a similar aesthetic vein this week: this amazing documentary about drum and bass legend LTJ Bukem and his management, which is sort of like dnb Spinal Tap. Highly highly recommend. If you can find a better quality version of it send it to me!

Alternatively, perhaps you’ll enjoy this beautiful short film about the wonderful Alice Neel, a painter I adore. I love watching her talk about art and the world - I could listen to her for hours. There’s a huge show on at the Barbican now of her work, if you’re in London. I saw it last week: here’s a few photos of my favourites from the exhibition. It’s not cheap (no major exhibitions here ever seem to be anymore) but it’s expansive, and I felt really inspired after seeing it; her relentless commitment to what she called ‘anarchist humanism’ and rejection of abstraction in favour of focusing on humans, and human connection, resonated with me. Also her paintings are really big which honestly I appreciate.

Some other little things that made me smile this week - obviously Anjuhlah Bassett did the thing / Jill Sobule playing guitar while undergoing brain surgery / nature being EXTREMELY metal / new Caroline Calloway doc (if you don’t know who this is already, do not click on this link and forget you ever saw it, but if you do, the video is worth your time and FWIW made me think differently about her) / a fantastically simple but effective recipe for cauliflower gratin. Also, a brilliant idea from a lovely listener if you’re feeling a bit blue: buy yourself some daffodils. I heeded their advice and got my mum some this afternoon, £3 in M&S, and she was very happy: £3 well spent.

And now…. how to grow a potato in a pot. It’s pretty simple as you would expect. I have dug out (see what I did there) some photos from when I did it last summer too. I’ll sign off here for those getting off the train now: thanks for reading, till next time xxx

!! POTATOES !!

First thing is to get an old potato, one about the size of a large egg, and leave it in a cupboard. It’ll eventually sprout - this is known as chitting - and then it’ll be ready to plant. Some people don’t think you need to chit potatoes (one of my favourite people on Youtube, this lovely Yorkshireman, has a good video on it if you’re interested) so it’s not totally essential, but it’s the way we do it. Here is the platonic ideal of a chitted potato:

Then get a large pot, or tub, with drainage holes in the base. Get a bit of compost in the bottom, the depth of your hand or so, and put the potato on top, sprout reaching toward the sky. If you have multiple sprouts, put the biggest one to the top. Bury it in another hand height of compost, water it, and wait.

Eventually your potato plant will emerge as in picture 1 below. Keep it well watered, but not waterlogged else the potato will rot. When it’s 3-4 inches tall, bury it, leaving an inch or two out. Repeat this process over a couple of months till you get to the top of the pot. Then the plant will grow and grow and grow, and the stems you buried will become swollen with water and eventually turn into potatoes underground. Magic! Harvest after a few months in the summer time. You should get a fair few - I got about 15 small potatoes. Even if you only get three I cannot emphasise enough how fun it is to dig up potatoes, and how delicious a boiled new potato fresh out the ground is. This is more about fun than bang for the buck: also, I think the mighty potato plant is as beautiful to look at as any flower. And you can’t eat geraniums!

A potato story in four parts

So potato heavy today. No more on this subject for a while.