Episode: 2116
Title: HPR2116: Duffer Gardening
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2116/hpr2116.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:31:28

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This is HPR episode 2116 entitled Duffer Gardening.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 12 minutes long.
The summary is prior to a Duffer cast recording short column,
in Sylas and Night at a Conversation about Gardening.
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Now how do we kick this off?
Well, we're going to talk about some of our Gardening experiences this summer.
I think you guys are proper gardeners from what I gather.
Whereas I'm just a guy with a garden who looks at stuff growing in it.
Well, I have a fairly large garden, but not all of it is taken up with vegetables and stuff.
Personally, I find that the most interesting thing is the vegetables and the fruit trees and stuff like that.
Michael, you used to have a very large garden, but now you have a smaller garden.
Yeah, well, not very large.
It was about 2,000 square meter.
Now I have just a small plot.
I live in an apartment house, but there are like garden plots just one minute walk away from the house.
So about four by four meters.
I deliberately bought this house with a back garden, which is about the same size as the front garden,
which is it's got a garage in the back.
So it's sort of the length of a car and a bit more on the end of it.
And it's just grass and there's enough room to dry your clothes and that's it.
So that's the entirety of my gardening I'm afraid.
In our vegetable garden here, and I live in Hungary, so it's a fairly warm climate.
We have two large raised beds at the bottom of the garden, and that's where most of the vegetables come from.
That and we have a small poly tunnel, which is maybe four meters long, something like that.
So a kind of an arch covered in poly thing.
And then we have some ground just that we grow in various things like we grow sorrow and rhubarb and stuff like that outside.
So that's kind of what we would use for growing the vegetables.
But the other side we have a lot of fruit trees, so we have grass and then we have peach trees and pears and different things.
And you're, since I fully, both on GNU social, I see pictures popping up every sort of, you have some quite high cropping trees there.
Have you seen peaches this year, for example?
Yeah, the peaches, well, it varies from year to year.
You can say what's happening in Sweden this year, what's done well, but different things varies.
The peaches we're not brilliant.
I don't particularly like spraying the trees I will if I'm absolutely must, but I don't really like using pesticides or fungicides.
But some things did well, but they were more like zucchini or courgettes to be more accurate.
They grow, they're still growing like weeds.
What else is growing particularly well?
We have quite a lot of apples.
We will have a lot of pears, no doubt, because we always have a lot of pears.
There's two large pear trees, so we'll end up with boxes and boxes of pears.
What's growing well this year in Sweden, Mikael?
Well, it varies a lot in Sweden from north to south and if it's on the coast.
So I lived not in the forest south, but in the mid-south, so it's not like...
Well, on my plot I have a black current and some raspberries and some zucchini.
I have just started harvesting the zucchini, so I don't think the total harvest will be quite small.
And kale, the hipster plant, and broad beans.
And let's see, our lavender, it's not really edible as far as I know.
But calendula, what do you call that in English?
Flower, calendula?
Not sure, I'm afraid.
I don't know, it's a common flower, a garden flower.
Let's see, garlic.
I harvested some garlic today, which were quite small because I had to plant them in the spring.
And the best with garlic is the plant, like in August and in August, at least around here.
But with the climate is colder than in Hungary, that's for sure.
Depends on where you are.
I mean, I even heard someone had a walnut tree somewhere in this town, but that's pretty rare up here.
Oh, you have a walnut tree.
We have a walnut tree in the garden.
And we also have a fig tree, which is a very interesting plant because it has an internal flower.
I'm not really sure what Dave, you can tell us what's the proper way to describe that.
But it's a very interesting thing.
It just seems to be that the fruit grow from the junction.
So there's the difference between the far north and the warmer, the warm south of Hungary.
Yeah, that's quite interesting, actually.
Yes, I was brought up in Norfolk on the east coast of England.
And it's a great agricultural area.
But people never tried to grow things like that in the gardens.
I mean, my dad was a keen gardener, but it thought of growing figs.
I don't think you'd have ever tried that.
Even things like garlic and zucchini were never really tried, except in a greenhouse.
You know, just out in the...
I guess it's a... Although it's fair bit south from you, Michiel.
It's probably quite a cold area for a fair bit of the year.
I don't really know.
So local climate differences can make quite a big difference in what you can grow.
Yeah, it can make big differences.
I have some tomatoes on my balcony, but they are still small and green.
It's not the optimal.
But my brother who has a small summer house in this town, two and a garden, he has grapes.
So in the right spot, it can be quite enough for more warmer climate type of plants.
Yeah, it's quite surprising.
Yeah, yeah.
I visited Oslo in Norway one year and was amazed how hot it was in that part of Norway in the summer.
I think it often is.
So, you know, we in Britain tend to think that to get to that sort of latitude, it's cold all the time.
It's certainly not true.
Yeah, and if you're in south of Sweden in some areas, it can be really the same garden climate as quite far up north along the coast.
So the latitude is maybe an indication, but that's all.
Yeah, I noticed that another Mikael in how do you pronounce it?
Umia in the foreign, well, not far north, but quite far north of Sweden.
He had on his balcony a lot of tomato plants.
And I'm looking at them and I'm thinking it's such a difference between how far along in Hungary.
And this chap in the north of Sweden and how far along his plants are huge difference.
Yeah, it must have been Umio.
Yeah, and if you have a balcony with the facing south and that makes a big difference too, I suppose.
I don't know what he has, but he has to make an episode about gardening to reply to this episode.
Oh, very good.
Yes, you definitely have the HPR mindset.
That sounds very impressive.
So I'm not sure what what we'll do with with a lot of the produce in the garden here.
A little interesting fact is we end up with a lot of pairs.
So we'll end up with more pairs than we can we can we can possibly use.
So I'll give them away to some of my neighbors, no doubt.
And then the previous years they've made palinka and palinka would be.
I am Schnaps, like in German, some kind of hard spirit.
And that's quite legal, you know, for your own purposes, you can make that here in Hungary.
So some of those pairs will go to these other people and they'll make some distilled liquor out of it.
Wow, that's impressive.
So do people have stills in the houses then?
They do, yeah, and it's legal.
It's not illegal if it's for your own consumption.
So you can do this personally.
I don't really like it, but if you put honey and it's all right, but not particularly to my taste.
No, it's in the same sort of class as stuff.
Is it calvados that they make in France?
That's an apple.
That's an apple spirit, isn't it?
And I think there's a pair one that's similar.
I can't remember the name of it.
Those are pretty good.
They're quite strong and a bit raw, I think.
Never tried them personally.
Make your hair go curly.
Don't ask it.
You said that about honey and in that liquor.
Do you mean you put it in when you drink it or when you're producing it?
No, no, no.
When it's finished, it's the only kind of way that I would really like to drink it.
I could perhaps think of it as like two thirds alcohol and then one third honey.
And then my mother-in-law put in a number of prunes into it as well,
into the bottom of the bottle, which was kind of unusual.
And that was quite entertaining, really.
So that's good.
My late boss was famous for...
He always went to France to Brittany for his holidays.
He always came back with gallons of aquavit,
which he used to make all manner of fruit infusions with.
So if you've ever got invited to his place for dinner,
you've always got served some fruit or other,
some berries, you know, with this aquavit over the top.
Very, very powerful stuff, but rather wonderful.
Oh, yeah.
So on the garden front, I have this tiny plot.
But the back of my garden used to be a stream bed.
When they built the houses in this estate,
there was a sort of a little stream that ran along there.
So they put a field drain where the stream bed was to make it look dry.
But of course, that meant that the soil was like a clay,
because, you know, it must have been there for hundreds of years,
this little stream.
And so I planted turves on my back garden,
you know, make a nice lawn.
And gradually, it's been converting itself into a bog.
So I have all kids growing in this back garden,
and rushes, and all sorts of plants that you'd expect
to find beside a river or in a boggy land.
So that's the extent of my gardening.
I just let it grow a bit, and it looks interesting.
And my kids say, oh, wow, that's amazing.
Dad, you should leave that alone.
Don't cut that.
And so I don't.
That's excellent.
I'm sure you get some interesting insects as well.
Yeah, not as many as you do.
But yes, it's definitely in it.
It's full of frogs and mice and stuff,
much to the delight of my cat.
Well, when they start looking like three feet,
so you should be worried.
Yeah, I'm watching out for that.
When that happens, there's going to be trouble.
Should we presound ourselves?
I think we should think about stopping
because we're coming up till the 9 o'clock.
Okay.
That's good.
That was interesting, guys.
Thank you.
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