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05/06/2009 22:54:00

I don't know about you, but I'm quietly allowing myself to begin to get excited about the prospect of a Good Summer.

People who grow their own are obsessed with the weather. I'm not just talking about the way British people in general like talking about weather.  I do reckon you could hypnotise 100 British people, convince them that they're spies and then set them a task of spending a whole evening together without revealing ANY personal information and they would probably manage fine - as long as they were allowed to discuss the floods of 2007, hosepipe bans and the relative merits of the route they took to get to the hypnotist in the first place (and whether there were any roadworks). There's a reason it's a cliche, there's a shedload (excuse the pun) of truth in it.

But start growing your own food and your preoccupation with the weather takes on a whole new significance. Maybe it's because for many of us who are lucky enough to have a quarter century buffer zone between our lives and wartime deprivation, we like to secretly fantasise that if our parsnips don't germinate, the nation might starve. We might not be digging for victory in real life but when we're out there by ourselves with a garden fork, it feels like it.

Growing food gives you a free pass to a club where membership allows you to feel a special degree of entitlement to a moan about the weather. People need to understand that you're NOT moaning just because you're fed up of drying your clothes indoors, or having to wear a jacket on the beach or any of that "trivial" stuff which "ordinary" people complain about. Not you. You're simply expressing a "scientific" concern about potato blight, or that your sweetcorn will miss their pollination window. Honest.

So that's my excuse for being a tad obsessed with the weather. After two summers of almost no tomatoes, no damson jam and not a parsnip in sight, I am silently crossing my fingers at the Met Office's tentative predictions of a barbecue summer.

So how about you? Gardener or not, what are your hopes for this summer?

Stay well

Joanne

PS The Met Office's summer forecast can be checked here if you're just too anxious to wait! http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/summer.html