I have found the perfect plant to grow on my allotment!
While wandering round the garden centre the other day I broke – as usual – my golden rule of not impulse-buying plants and picked up these two lovely specimens for a fiver.
Naturally, eagle-eyed horticulturalists that you are, you will know what they will grow into, but for the benefit of casual passers-by, I will explain that you are looking at a couple of horseradish plants.
“Ah Drooling!” I hear you sigh, satisfied. “I know exactly why they are tailor-made for your plot”. You’re right, of course. But again, for the less well informed reader, I shall explain their all-round super-suitability:
1. They aren’t exactly beautiful. The back garden is a popular place in the summer, and the plants that live there have got to look as tasty as they….um…taste. Neither of those babies in the picture is going to be covered in delightful flowers or aesthetically pleasing foliage. So being tucked away on the allotment is ideal for such modest plants.
2. They’re pretty big. Each of these tiddlers is going to grow into a bushy specimen about 1m by 1m. Again, in the back garden that’s about 500 bags of salad, two crops of radishes and all the swiss chard I can eat (which, I grant you, ain’t much). So again, the wide open spaces of the allotment beckon.
3. No-one else except me likes them. And even I won’t be using them much. I don’t really know what you use horseradish for apart from, well horseradish sauce, and with the best will in the world I don’t eat industrial quantities of that. But again, that’s the joy of the allotment: Even though they take up loads of room and I will only eat a small part of just a few of the roots, the allotment gives me the room to indulge such foibles
I can now grow big ugly plants like these on the offchance that in about six months’ time I might decide that, hey, I’m too good for that jar of processed horseradish sauce, I’m only going to eat it fresh from now on.
Wonderful!
The drooling vegetable 
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