HOW TO TITILLATE AN OCELOT

My partner Jeni has two jokes. One is how do you titillate an ocelot? – the answer of course is that you oscillate its titalot. Which leads me seamlessly to You Tube gardeners. One of the oddities of life today is that the You Tubers. My daughter, who is a teacher, says that being a You Tuber is the preferred career choice of the yoof of today – it’s real cool miss. My idea of cool when I was a yoof was scoring the winning goal in the cup final or being like Marlon Brando. I’m afraid my footballing skills never went further than the local park, and Marlon Brando ended up being old, miserable, and vastly overweight – at least I’m not overweight, give or take. Anyway, my daughter is a teacher in Bolton, epicentre of Gideon Osbourne’s northern powerhouse, so perhaps it’s a northern thing.

Back to gardening You Tubers, one I look at is the Allotment Diary by the Ingleton Potter. A couple of weeks ago he was waxing lyrically about his new favourite tool, the oscillating hoe – I got there eventually. His video demonstrates the hoe gliding effortlessly over the soil, slicing off everything in its path. I’m always one for making life on the plot easier, so maybe I’ll give one a go.

A big plug for the shop. There are still autumn plating onion sets available at very good prices. For example Marshalls seed catalogue sells 75 sets for £3.99 – other seed catalogues are all similar. We sell Shakespeare in the shop at £3.90 per kilo. A kilo is approximately 180 bulbs, so 75 works out something like £1.60, much less than half of the catalogue prices. Put another way, planting a row on the plot at 6 inches apart would take around 20 bulbs, or just over 40 pence. A veritable bargain.

Garlic is also still available, as are spring bulbs – all at very competitive prices.

The October special offer is our own bagged fertilisers at 20 percent discount. Having a quick look on amazon the price online of Bonemeal is £8.99 for 7kg, and Fish, Blood, and Bone £12 for 10kg. That’s £1.20 per kg for Bonemeal and £1.28 per kilo for FB&B. We are selling in the shop Bonemeal at £1.44 for 3 kilos after discount, and FB&B for £1.52 for 3 kilos – so it’s 48 pence per kilo for Bonemeal and 50 per kilo for FBB – that’s 60 percent cheaper than amazon prices. I hope I haven’t lost everyone with the sums – the message is at these prices queues should be forming outside the shop.