…in County Ramsey as a yoong lad; loife was guid.<\/p>\n
Of cairse, we were coovered in scabs and coal dust and usually doused in me Da’s vomit – he drank a wee bit – but loife was guid.\u00a0 We lived oof the boonty o’ the land – the scallion, the arugula, and o’cairse, the staple crop – the tomato.\u00a0 Acres ‘n acres o’ them, the staff of loife.<\/p>\n
Oy remember as a lad, we had tomaters for ayvery meal; tomato toost for breaykfast, boiled tomayters for loonch, tomato bisque with a shot of whuskey for dinner.<\/p>\n
Then?\u00a0 Then came the Greet Tomato Bloight of ’09:<\/a><\/p>\n Yes, the same virus that caused the six-year Irish Potato Famine has struck our own tomato crops. Indeed, said blogger has actually found blight on her plants<\/a>.<\/p>\n The late blight has also shown up in the UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n More here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, the cold and wet summer we\u2019ve had isn\u2019t the best weather for tomatoes (or peppers), but it\u2019s great for a lot of fungi and virus that attack these plants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It got all the tomayters; the ‘ayrluims, the Bootcher Boyos, the Big Boyos, all of ’em.<\/p>\n We troyed.\u00a0 We ate endive, mint, even jicama.\u00a0 But eventually, we couldn’t goo on.<\/p>\n So we emigrated, by the millions.\u00a0 We sailed to Oirland, where the tomatos practically grow on plants.<\/p>\n And every year, for Saint Barack’s Day, we get droonk and have a parade and vomit in the streets.<\/p>\n But sometoymes oy woonder aboot those oy left behoyd…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (MITCH ADDS:\u00a0 Yeah, yeah, I know: I can do dang\u00a0near every Commonweath accent there is, down to different neighborhoods in London.\u00a0 I can even tell Cornish apart from Welsh, for crying out loud.\u00a0 But I can’t even speak<\/em> a halfways convincing Irish accent, much less write it.\u00a0 So I know, I know, it was\u00a0all Scottish.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n But it was lowland, <\/em>dagnabbit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …in County Ramsey as a yoong lad; loife was guid. Of cairse, we were coovered in scabs and coal dust and usually doused in me Da’s vomit – he drank a wee bit – but loife was guid.\u00a0 We lived oof the boonty o’ the land – the scallion, the arugula, and o’cairse, the staple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}