The Man Who Boiled His Garden – from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’

The grey-green Yorkshire hills were lashed by an easterly wind so vicious it was blowing chickens backwards, but in a sultry greenhouse near Huddersfield filled with two thousand onion seedlings, the face of Donald Kaye rose though a gap in the trays like Blashers from a swamp, stroking one upright with a quivering middle finger before laying it down as you would a slumbering babe.

This outwardly-normal Environmental Health Officer had set his heart on winning Harrogate’s annual Kelsae Onion Festival and he knew that just one of these little angels, which today wouldn’t make a motorway side salad, could become the eleven-pound beachball to lift the prize and bring peace and serenity to Chez Kaye which has been beset with three years of reversals that would have broken lesser mortals.

There are hobbies, there are obsessions and there is prize onion growing, and in the annals of this particular British affliction, the name of Donald Kaye will be writ large as The Man who Boiled his Garden.

Four months before, he’d sown a lawn of 17,000 seedlings; now, with 15,000 given away or swapped with other aficionados for strain improvement, these Chosen Ones would soon be whittled to eighty-four finalists, re-planted in plastic tunnels to be irrigated, fertilised, cosseted and willed to victory. That was the plan. But little had gone to plan since that fateful day in 1988 when he wandered into the Festival, fancied his chances, and gained third place within a year.

To the stunned cognoscenti, it seemed only a matter of time when this new boy on the block would pull off the Big One – £850 and the title. But disaster struck in 1990 when his finalists, swollen to eight pounds, yellowed overnight and just keeled over.

It was the same story the next two years, and in 1992 when worried friends thought he might follow suit, Donald ordered a post-mortem by a Sheffield biologist who confirmed his worst fears – it was Eelworm, worse than the F-word in the onion world, and Donald decided there was only one course of action to take against this pestilence which had blighted three years of his life. He would boil his garden.

And so it came to pass on a mellow evening in October, 1992, he filled a three-gallon bucket with soil, ignited two gas rings and, in the absence of recipes for cooking gardens, boiled for twenty five minutes till it reached 50 degrees. (Eelworms expire at 41 degrees, but this man was not in compassionate mood). Then he tipped the boiling soil into a polythene sack and repeated the process till darkness drove him in.

Eight weeks and five hundred and forty buckets later, he’d done the deed and eleven thousand litres of worm-free soil was returned to its original home. The Kaye back garden was back.

But on a June evening the following summer he noticed familiar yellowing leaf, then another and another until he could no longer deceive himself; the curse had struck again. Numb with shock, he sent an afflicted sample for another analysis, this time to the Ministry of Agriculture who declared the culprit not Eelworm but the fusarium fungus which could be killed by cooking, but only at a higher temperature.

It was news that would have broken lesser mortals but this is Yorkshire where men are men and onion growers don’t cry, so when asked how he felt when he heard the news, he moved to the kitchen to make tea, took a breath deep enough to fill his chest with a novel, and murmur, “I was quite disillusioned.”

The pause that followed grew into a wake, broken only by an insensitive budgie in the lounge and you realised Donald Kaye culled words the way he did onions.

His wife Eileen quietly departed to work on her soft furnishings; at times like this, curtains and loose covers can be a comfort when living with a man of such single-minded dedication, a release only exceeded in the darkest hours by repairing to her Yamaha electric organ and playing a calming rendition of ‘Lullaby of Broadway’.

“I reached the point where I didn’t know where to turn.”

You looked around the kitchen, thinking for a moment this must be the budgie’s stream of consciousness, but it was Donald finally coming on song.

“I could have boiled the garden again at a higher temperature. I could have changed the soil completely but I used to grow mushrooms and I know fungi give off millions of spores which can stay in the subsoil for years….years. Then there’s the formaldehyde they use in the onion world, but it’s carcinogenic so that’s out…. Maybe methyl bromide gas, but that needs specialist contractors with breathing apparatus costing hundreds…. Possibly the gas that some tomato growers use, but it’s in the cyanide family, like the one that leaked at Bhopal….”

And just when you suspect he’s considering carpet-bombing or a light nuclear device, he revealed his chosen liquidator – a French fungicide which at £32 a litre was little cheaper than Chanel No.5, but what’s money when there’s £850 and a title at stake?

He looked out the window as the rain snapped at the polythene tunnels.

“It’s not the cost, is it? It would be another year wasted. I’d be really sick. At the moment, I’m not thinking of defeat – you’ve got to be single-minded as there’s a lot of good growers out there and the lengths they’ll go to is… well, unbelievable.” (None has actually boiled their garden, but this is not the time to halt the flow). “I won’t say it gets nasty, but there’s little asked and little given. Not to say it’s reached the level of leek growing where there’s thieving and slashing and even talk of broken arms and seeing-to’s. They say it’s an obsession with me but I still think of it as a hobby, just an ambition. Of course, there are sacrifices – it keeps me out the pub and I do like a drink. Eileen probably thinks I’m mad, but she doesn’t say so.