Never take a bet on gardening. Above all never take one over cocktails when you are inclined to show off. I know because I took one about four months ago. It became serious on July 14, the anniversary of the Parisians' assault on the Bastille. The partner to my wager was not letting me off. She was inviting me to challenge the ramparts of her garden-armoury and prove that I can grow vegetables even better than she can.
We have just met to resolve the bet but I will keep you in suspense about the outcome while describing the other participant. Sylvia Jay is not only the wife of our former ambassador to France, she is now the head of Food From Britain. Her job is to promote British produce and you may be surprised to hear that our exports are actually rising. In 2004-5 we even exported more than £50m of potatoes. Food From Britain has a budget of about £6m and leads the drive for exports and the government's Sustainable Food Strategy, which may or may not reassure you.
You see why I could not resist the chance of comparing my results with the official champion of British produce. I also foresaw a pleasant skirmish on organic territory. I am an apostle of inorganic gardening. I cannot see the coherence of the "organic" alternative, especially when exponents merely limit the chemicals they are prepared to use.
Both approaches rely on making chemicals available to growing plants. Nature simply does it less effectively than I can with the full scientific force of Monsanto behind me. What matters is whether a vegetable is fresh or not and whether it has been reared in sight of open country. I refuse to accept that "organic" vegetables taste any better than my home-grown potatoes, which have been enhanced by artificial phosphates. I also suspect the missionaries for "organicity". They usually turn out to be religious, believing deep down that their God's creation should never be modified, helped along or improved. I think they are inefficient.
The bet was really very simple. The two of us would meet in early August with our respective boxes of produce. Not for nothing has Sylvia Jay had a shrewd civil service training. She had identified a local pub that merrily offers free drinks to any customers who come and hand over their home-grown vegetables to the kitchen. It promised to be an economical outing. We would hand over our boxes and get quietly drunk on each other's entitlement of free beer.
I have to say that the inorganic issue never even smouldered. Sylvia Jay is a busy and highly efficient woman and as a result she freely admits that she relies on supporting labour to keep her productive vegetable beds up to the mark. She certainly has the right idea about the sort of soil that our dear God gives us "naturally". Her vegetable beds are all raised up from the ground and edged with old railway sleepers. She has filled them with bag upon bag of specially processed compost.
She is no more stubbornly organic than I am. My philosophy is never to be organic at all and never buy anything that says it is. She is more flexible and accepts that she is organic until something starts going wrong. Then she sprays as gratefully as the rest of us. Over two or three years, her results in Oxfordshire are extremely creditable. She greeted me with vegetable marrows of a commendable size in this very sunny summer. Courgettes have plainly been no problem for her but she also had some neat radicchio and some yellow-coloured miniature marrows that would be pretty even if you never wanted to eat them. The cucumbers in the pest-free greenhouse were more questionable. They were rather short and she seemed to have found a variety with unacceptable spikes and lumps all over the outside. She assured me that she peeled them before giving them to our former ambassador.
She has also sent me some fascinating graphs of British vegetable exports and their destinations. To my great surprise we have sent about £60m worth to Ireland in the past three years, although they hardly need our potatoes. Italy has somehow taken about £25m although the vegetables in Italian markets are a living mockery of the produce that our supermarkets cheerfully call Class A. We even export some cucumbers and nearly £10m of lettuce. It cannot all go to Iceland. Food From Britain is clearly doing a good job in focusing foreigners on "the very best of British foods". We are about to have British Food Fortnight from September 23 to October 8.
The message from the market is that customers are most keen to buy produce that can qualify as "regional". Have you ever eaten a Worcestershire potato? Before long somebody will have branded them. After all they branded the Surrey chicken. This still appears on menus although I have hardly ever seen a chicken within sight of daylight in the whole length of Surrey. The past masters of regional produce are the French but even they take nearly £20m of British vegetables. They are harder to escapeon holiday than you might think.
Now for the crunch. In our own little regional exercise, Jay scored high marks for volume and for consistency in a dry season. She has been obediently watering by can only. The imported compost has produced good beans and there is even a sign of two medium-size aubergines in her greenhouse. My strategy had been to reduce her to surrender with some fresh Florentine fennel of the F1 hybrid Victoria, which claims to give "excellent yields of quality pure white bulbs with an enticing aniseed flavour". I would make a talking point of my canary yellow Yellowstone Hybrid carrots. I would throw in some celeriac and finish off with a few Oxfordshire lettuces, reared on a coulis of Miracle-Gro and set in a dusting of slug pellets.
I have to admit I turned up empty-handed. I have had a total crop failure on all fronts. Carrot fly attacked the Yellowstone carrots. The Victoria fennel bolted in the drought when I was still marking undergraduates' essays. The celeriac was a silly choice as it has to have plenty of water and never really makes a big solid root until autumn. I am blaming the water company but my only excuse is for the failure of the Dynamite lettuce. I bought it because it is supposed to be "the world's first greenfly-resistant butterhead lettuce". It is tolerant of lettuce mosaic virus and is even said to have "a high level of resistance to tipburn".
The trouble is that the breeders forgot about badgers. In mid-June a black-and-white stripey visitor came and uprooted the young row of lettuces simply for pleasure. Sylvia Jay may be running Food From Britain. I am running Food For Badgers - and not enough of it is drugged.
She was awfully nice about it all, being a trained diplomat. I even had a free drink on the strength of her massive cardboard box of produce. But it is quite shaming and it is no use telling myself that my cut flowers would have been better than hers.
More articles on gardening at www.ft.com/lanefox
