Paul Sheehan, and for the next column, how about the ten top gardening tips for backyard gardeners seeking the answer that lies in the soil?

(Above: artist's impression only. However you may try these at home. A key part of a soundly based, 'the answer lies in the soil', Tamworth diet).

Here's the thing.

Captain Grumpy aka Hanrahan "we'll all be rooned before the year is out" aka Paul Sheehan appears to be obsessed by food, and regularly writes about it.

His latest vision, as outlined in Next shock will be high food prices, comes down to this:

Grow local. Buy local. Eat local. The market gardens around Sydney are precious resources that need to be preserved from further obliteration by housing development. Rethink the back yard and the front street. Because food shock is coming.

Uh huh. We'll all be rooned before the year is out, and that's a fact, and there's nothing like doom laden fear mongering on a Monday to get the juices flowing, but here's the thing.

Not once in his column extolling the joys of growing local, which is to say in the backyard of your apartment, does Sheehan mention his own garden and what he's currently growing.

I mean go to Gardening Australia at the ABC - go on, I dares ya - and you'll find endless talk of gardens with a productive edge.

So where's Sheehan's talk about how his tomatoes are coming along at the moment? How's he fighting the birds as they get amongst the grapes? (Damn you Indian mynah birds, damn you all to hell).

What's he think about jerusalem artichokes, or even worse the hideous choko? Oh dear absent lord, how we suffered for years, as my father planted chokoes each year, yet refused to plant garlic - the foreign devil - which is the only way to flavour up and swallow down a choko, unless you follow the link above to discover a decent Tamworth recipe for choko chutney (oh the horror, the chutney horror).

Does Sheehan have a crop of beans growing (perhaps the purple climbing variety you won't find in a store these days)? How are his chickens making out? Are the squabs contented before they head off to the grill?

Is his favourite show the BBC comedy The Good Life, and is he still secretly in love with Felicity Kendal?

Does he love to get the feel of soil under his fingernails - the answer always lies in in the soil - and where's his nearest supplier of cow manure (which is of course much better than horse manure, and impeccably better than the manure offered daily by The Australian)?

So many questions, so few clues.

Is this a clue, as found in A flour blooms - and a family classic is toast of the town?

When the new bakery opened near my home two weeks ago, there was just one product in the window: a row of large, round, dusty sourdough loaves. The miche loaf. They looked so alluring I bought one even though it was a hefty 1.7 kilograms and $13. As I carried it home the loaf was still warm, fresh from the oven.

Thirteen smackeroos for a loaf of bread. Talk about food shock. Talk about sticker shock. And how about this?

I've made the pilgrimage to Poilane in Paris, and its famous miche loaves, similar in appearance to Sonoma's but quite different; I've trawled the boulangeries of France and the farmers markets of Tuscany and the great sourdough bakers of San Francisco, such as Acme Bread Company. But this was different. This was part of something much bigger.

Now that's what I call shopping locally, purely so you can of course sound like a jaded, world weary gourmet traveller of course. But hang on, talk about airline ticket shock.

Can we deduce from this that Sheehan might on occasion be a 'don't do as I do' columnist, and rather more of a 'do as I say' scribbler, as he lathers himself into righteous excitement over back yard gardens:

The floods will thus provide food for thought about deep trends. Few people outside the Greens would agree with Mobbs's desire to end all coal exports but, in another way, he has started something less drastic and more attainable that would help abate food shock: tapping the potential of our mostly urban population to grow more of its own food.

Uh huh. Urban Australians out in the backyard, with Paul Sheehan showing the way. Talk about future shock. Talk about the apocalyptic end times rapture mind set ...

To balance the books in his column, and forestall all the anxiety generated by the talk of ending all coal exports, Sheehan also turns to David Evans, a rigorous technician and sceptic, because, he alleges, the subject of climate change attracts such religiosity. Well at least in Sheehan's own religious lunch time ...

David Evans? Well a cursory search might lead you to The Australian's War on Science XV, which features David Evans, or perhaps you might be drawn to Who is 'Rocket Scientist' David Evans?, which discusses the factual basis for the sensationalist header Rocket Scientist: No Evidence CO2 Causes Global Warming. Evans is active in the Lavoisier Group (President Hugh Morgan) and has his own web site here, which explains how his background in mathematics, computing and electrical engineering has allowed him to discover that the western climate establishment is corrupt.

Yep, it's another Paul Sheehan column, citing impeccable sources in his usual way.

And along with it comes his standard bout of fear-mongering. There'll be sticker shock, and no, we're not talking about the sticker shock of thirteen bucks for a loaf of ecstatic bread.

There'll be food shocks, and there'll be food riots. The trend in the FAO's food price is worse than 2008, though why we should pay attention to a bunch of bureaucratic do gooders and United Nations black helicopter worshippers with the indecency to head their site with a petition titled 1 billion people live in chronic hunger and I'm mad as hell escapes me.

Isn't the UN responsible for all this global warming malarkey? What would they, with their bloody religious religiosity, know about all that, up against David Evans and Paul Sheehan?

Did we mention there'll be food riots? Well the food prices will keep going up but so will the price of cotton. No more five dollar cotton T-shirts from China for you. Shop local. Get an Australian made cotton T shirt, and good luck in the hunt.

And then there are energy prices which will go up, and oil prices will go up, and so will fertiliser and transport, and so will food, and it's all the fault of the supermarkets and the amount of fertile land is shrinking, and there's increased global demand ... and there's no way around it, it has to be said, and said often, "we'll all be rooned before the year is out", and quite likely the world will end by 2012 ...

So get out into those survivalist gardens, and make sure you're well armed because soon enough the food thieves will be stalking Sydney streets in search of backyard feasts ... What next? Soylent green as the best backyard crop?

Gee, and they say climate change alarmists have kittens before breakfast. Captain Grumpy has his first set of alarmist kittens before his morning kipper (purchased locally) on stone ground bread made from verbal stonings (ground locally).

Confronted with this dire vision, there's nothing else for it. I'm off to get a decent coffee, and a nice loaf of bread for thirteen or more smackeroos.

Like any decent epicurean dedicated to the epicureanism of Epicurus, I'm going to go out in style. What's that you say about Epicurus?

He lauded the enjoyment of simple pleasures, by which he meant abstaining from bodily desires, such as sex and appetites, verging on asceticism. He argued that when eating, one should not eat too richly, for it could lead to dissatisfaction later, such as the grim realization that one could not afford such delicacies in the future.

Oh no. Epicurus is just Paul Sheehan in disguise.

Sob, okay, it's out into the backyard and tearing up the paving and growing my own from now on. The people next door in the apartment block might have a little trouble, but hey I can sell them the fruit of my toil, or if worst comes to worst in the coming food riots, let them bloody well starve. The dingbats. Didn't they know they had to be rich enough to afford a decent Sydney house with a large back yard?

Yep, come world's end, 2012, I'll be alright Jack, in much the same way as Paul Sheehan will no doubt switch back to a humble subsistence lifestyle, and keep the company of his humble soul mates, the chooks, and indulge in deep philosophical discussions with his feathered friends (they too like to cluck when a fox is in the hen house), and possibly make us suffer through more Good Life outbursts of the kind we witnessed in Neglect of food sources has the chooks coming home to roost back in 2009.

All we need now for the vision splendid to come to pass is handy gardening and chook keeping tips from Sheehan in his weekly splenetic column, derived of course from his daily personal experiences of backyard gardening and growing, as he keeps learning how the answer lies in the soil ...

Anything to avoid him writing about climate change, because as he'll no doubt advise us one day, nonsense and any associated manure is best left in the soil.

(Below: not old enough to remember Kenneth Williams, OTR and the answer lying in the soil? The answer lies in the internet archive, and even though it was a terrible show, ain't it grand some episodes have found a home there in the full to overflowing intertubes. Williams is bottom left, the photo found here, and a major contributor to camp British culture, more likely to have been seen by some in the Carry On films. Paul Sheehan and Kenneth Williams, and the answer lies in the soil, who'd have thunk it).