Tag Archives: Gardening

At my allotment

21 Wednesday Jun 2023

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I can’t write about anything other than the allotment. Not a shop or a bread board or a country or a cafe quite invades me like the bike ride to a nondescript set of gates opening out onto a swathe of plots containing sunflowers, dwarf French beans, plush lavender, men. There are quite a number of men here, red-faced, brown-ankled, wrists the colour of Marmite. Their shirts flap open, all C&A and to the elbow, long shorts, dusty sandals. 

There are the usual suspects: my elegant, white-haired neighbour bending down behind her hollyhocks. She wears nifty three quarter length slacks that show off her malt-coloured calves and a pair of shoes in deep olive that seem too good for gardening. I wear jeans with the bottom hanging off, ripped in an accident to do with a door knob. I wear filthy shoes, a kind of ‘gardening white’. There is no point appearing jaunty or fashionable here, but it is nice to be relatively laundered. A hat is important and sunglasses which we take off in order to establish eye contact.

Sometimes I don’t want to be sociable. There is always a moment when I need to feel free to go. It could be after an hour, or after some sun and a nice conversation. I might leave with a collection of things: baby carrots thinned to make room for more mature, upstanding carrots, a handful of flowering thyme, stalks of pungent mint. Everything is dusky with soil, my pockets contain soil, my rucksack is sandy with soil, my fingernails etc. Or sometimes it is enough that I can stand in my windowless greenhouse and smell the tomato plants and look at the way the onions have collapsed into thick green ropes.

The allotment is in a suburb of London. It runs beside the train tracks and twice an hour the train hoots by. This is typical apparently because the men who worked on the railroad needed somewhere to grow vegetables, to feed themselves. This is why allotments tend to run along rail tracks.

This is looking like my last growing season here and my allotment is still a disgrace, it never made it into one of those amazing, potager-type plots, I never got the paths right, I never eradicated the bindweed, I still have a rat under my shed. Or whatever it is. Creeping buttercup, weed seeds, blackcurrants that got eaten as soon as they ripened, a dead bird. But there is something about being hailed by a late middle-aged man, and him saying, I was just going! as I get off my bike, my jumper snagged by blackberry thorns, knowing he wouldn’t now leave for a bit because who can resist a bit of a chat about radishes, about his trip to Rye? The place he always goes. I once gave him a pot of cyclamen as a thank you for all the tomatoes, but he refused saying his wife would think he was having an affair. 

Anyway, it is one of those magical places that is also ordinary. There were so many photos I wanted to put into this post, but I couldn’t find one that captured the feeling of standing in the midst of it all one afternoon and thinking, I made that. I don’t even remember putting it into the ground, but it has naturalised and now doesn’t need me anymore. Doesn’t even need watering. I quite like the one of the lettuce and the camera bag though, and I can remember the smell of the sweet peas I brought home and couldn’t find a vase big enough for.

The colour mauve

06 Thursday Jul 2017

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Already this is an entirely dated picture. A week in allotment time is six months in normal. The California poppies have collapsed beneath the weight of their stems, the central path has become powdery and yellowed under the harshness of the sun. Bees like mauve. So they are still feasting, swarming over the borage, the geraniums, the sweet peas and the lavender. What’s left, just, are the nasturtiums, redly hot and peppery, calendula, verbena bonariensis (I never got round to finding a replacement for my frostbitten lemon verbena, so I have mint tea instead, a few hairy leaves in some boiled water can be a virtuous start to the day).

The heat requires shade. I am growing, from a root cutting given me by an allotment friend, a grape vine which is still in its curly glossy beginnings. It went into shock at first, a state I know well. But it has recovered. The plan is to train it over a structure and then sit under it with a Pimm’s getting steadily drunk, with ice cubes. See borage flowers below for cucumber notes.

I  still find that the allotment works for me. It doesn’t stop anxiety, over-thinking, self-absorption, worry, but it diverts them into small achievable tasks. And before you know it, you’re semi normal again! You’ve just had a conversation with someone! You strung a sentence together. I find that time passes and at the end I’ve been delivered into my body again, for free. Well, £70 a year is quite reasonable if the brief is: grow vegetables and some fruit and find sanity.

I cycled to the allotment on Friday to pick something for dinner, sorrel, some parsley, a few gooseberries dusty in my hand; whatever looked easy and pickable. It was early evening, a time I find ripe with difficulty (what have I achieved today? Ever? Etc). I met two children on the path, five and a half and seven years old they told me, who came with me to help me pick. The boy was barefoot. I had never met them before but we became instant friends, not sure how this happened but they trooped over to my plot to help me full of chatter and questions. Do you have any pets? The boy asked. No. Not a dog? Not a cat? No. This worried him, I could tell.

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We picked some radishes and marvelled at their perfect spherical shape and hot pink colour. Do you like radishes? No, they both said. Too spicy. But they enjoyed washing them under the tap, revealing their perfect pinkness, glimmers of white beneath,  the pink shorn away by bite marks. Have a nasturtium, I said, and the boy put a petal in his mouth and instantly looked aghast. What were we doing eating flowers? He stood there, face shut in some internal torment of wrongness. I can’t eat this, he said quietly, and spat it out.

He was quickly diverted by the task of separating out equal bouquets of radishes to take back to their mum. I’d forgotten how ferocious this can be, making sure it was ‘fair’. The girl had all the big ones, so a reshuffle was required. As we walked back with our stash, this happened.

Boy to me: What are you going to eat with your vegetables?

Me: I think I might have some fish.

Boy (excited): So you DO have pets?

See what I mean? Diversion. Meeting people. Radishes. Pets. Children. Barefoot. Bike.

And then I felt normal. Happy summer holidays to you all.

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P.S These are borage flowers. They have the merest hint of cucumber about them. You can add them to salads and ice cubes to put in drinks if you fancy. They lack the kick and personality of nasturtiums but are very pretty.

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Clearing

25 Thursday May 2017

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I start on a bit at the allotment and clear it: along the border that separates my plot from next door’s, around the rhubarb, thick with last season’s nigella and bindweed, the rhubarb itself trampled by a fox or the man behind’s bulldog – a sweet, lolloping animal that often lies down beside me and falls asleep in the sun.

I edge. Then I collect stones. The earth is thick with them, almost like shingle or scree. I pile them up in flower pots as I go and the idea is that I will eventually pull up the central path that divides one side of the plot from the other and which consists mainly of couch grass and dandelions and fill it with the stones that I find. A crunchy path which will block out the light and suffocate all the weeds, so to speak. Other neighbours have done this and I know it works, and I love the crunch and sharpness underfoot. I am forever figuring out how long I can live with the path looking as it does.

The clearing starts to infect every area of my life – and the shed. The shed with its tiny mouse carcass and debris from two years back. Now it is clean and clear and in order – I have mugs and a gas ring and a kettle and tea. Otherwise known as ‘facilities’.

The shed is a small wooden room and makes me feel child-like when I go in. It’s also a good place to wee and spy on people. I wish I could sit at the table – above, under the kettle – and write and potter about, but the plot exerts a tyranny over me whenever I go because there is always far too much to do. I spend my days longing to be there, And then when I’m there I go at it with such force it’s as if there’s a teacher standing by taking the register and holding a stopwatch.

Today I followed a nice New Zealander to a fallow plot one over from me because it was full of disused timber and it needed to be cleared so it could be offered up to a newcomer. The discovery of wood – branches, planks, logs – has become a source of intense pleasure since I began at the allotment. I scour fields and woodland and skips for wood I can use on the plot. I prefer this to bricks but bricks will do or tiles at a pinch.

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I clear in order to fill the spaces again; I pulled up a small carpet of nigella, as I said, because it had become so wild, and then sowed other flowers – calendula, cornflowers – in its place. What was wrong with the nigella? It is an endless cycle of clearing and filling space and sometimes you have to stop; today I made myself stand up and watch as two butterflies with amazing black and red markings hovered over the herb bed, noticed bees alighting on the flowering angelica. A white moth. A single magpie. Sweet peas like huge green hands full of colour grasping at nothing. That kind of thing. And when it rains – always weirdly a relief – there’s the shed and the respite from going at it, a reprieve from clearing for a time.

Despite once being illegal to grow flowers on allotments, most plot holders now have an area given over to a swathe of nigella, dahlias, a drift of poached egg plants or nasturtium etc. I would just have herbs and edible flowers if I had my way but that’s not allowed. It’s easy and cheap to grow any of these from seed, and do it now: calendula, nigella, borage, sweet marjoram, parsley. They can all be sown direct into previously watered soil. Calendula goes very nicely in salads; scatter the petals, leaving behind the thick bits.

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Unfurl

06 Thursday Apr 2017

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Tulips, daffs, forget-me-nots, garlic. Wildly flowering blossom. It is so exciting to be at the allotment. Everything is happening. And yet I am still alone there. It won’t be until mid April that the regulars will come and so in the meantime I am here and it’s all mine. There are rat droppings in the shed and forgotten potatoes from last year have sprouted into the space where I have sown carrots, there is a carpet of grass in the greenhouse, the windows are filthy, couch grass pushes its roots underneath everything, it is everywhere, every day there are fresh sightings. Weeds flourishing is always the sign that it is time to start broadcasting seed. I can’t bring myself to start clearing and washing the greenhouse glass because there is no water yet, it would be a case of me a cloth and a jar of vinegar.

I like the mat of grass in there anyway. It gives off a dry rustling heat as I drag the greenhouse door along its clapped out runner and walk inside. I like it derelict because it reminds me of finding abandoned houses and setting up camp in them as a child far away from parental interference. Why does everything have to be clean? I imagine gardening in my bare feet and lying down in the earth under the sun’s rays. But then I’m aware this wouldn’t be suitable for Hampton, dormitory suburb of England. And I have an 88-year-old neighbour one plot over who would think I was dead. He’d worry.

The best time is morning. Early as possible before anyone is awake. I’ve been here at 4.30 when I’ve woken into darkness and decided to give it a whirl, the ground slick with snails, the slowest parkour imaginable; snails hanging upside down on the bins, leaning against leaves like Gene Kelly, nonchalant. A world of slime.

Anyone would think that given that I spend so much time there, that my plot would be amazing, full of verticals and ploughed within an inch of its life. My other neighbours, Russians with a small boy, do more in a weekend than I manage in an entire season. I saw them this morning, him on the roof of his homemade shed with a fag on, heard the boy, who was swinging a piece of fence, their place dedicated to blue gauze which they had hanging over big wooden struts, to keep out nature – slugs, birds, foxes. In the foreground were manicured clumps of flowers and fruit bushes. How did they manage it when they’ve not even been here? I am here all the time. I manage nothing.

I like being near to their industriousness though. Sometimes I see the dad out in the street or on the bus and we have chats about the allotment or about our various ailments, and because of this, there’s a quiet empathy between us which makes working there easy. I know they don’t expect me to hang around, we’ll wave and nod and exchange pleasantries but no cups of tea or too many anecdotes. It’s important not to become too attached to growers, to maintain independence; a chat can easily take up too much time, grow unwieldy and then the next time you feel obliged to begin it all again, and then you’re never alone. You’re talking about Brexit and Trump. It’s ruined then.

You find you’re there ever earlier, to avoid the inane chatter. Chatter is what I grab my bike and ride to avoid. This is not the same as being happy to see people, which I am generally. So this is the bit before. Before summer when I avoid the weekends and the loud free-wheeling manic-ness of small children. Sounds occur now but they are abstract in nature, a solitary laugh, the tipping of a wheelbarrow, stone and tin. The rest is a kind of busy silence, where everything is alive and beyond me, the soil dry, sun everywhere. A time to unfurl.

My favourite thing at the moment is the new sorrel – a tight bundle of lettuce-green leaves, ripe for picking every day. It is a year-old plant grown from seed and it should be bitter by now but is still tart and lemony, turning a muddy taupe when introduced to heat and disintegrating totally in soups. It is the cousin of the handsome rhubarb, both of them astringent and singular stand alone perennials. I have not yet eaten sorrel raw, except pinched between finger and thumb and eaten in furtive shreds, so I only know it as a flavour and not quite as a texture. It would be nice to have those shield-like leaves in a salad bowl and feel the crunch. I am still afraid of fibre, but I will get there.

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Sorrel Merge

I add sorrel near the end of cooking time and it merges with all the other ingredients lending a sharpness and depth. Recently, I made a carrot and butter bean soup to which I added the leaves of parsley and sorrel five minutes before the end and the stalks earlier. Please use the stalks. If you’re interested in having an unadulterated sorrel experience simply sweat some young leaves in olive oil until they break down into a purée and keep in the fridge under a film of extra virgin. 

Olive oil, onion/shallot, garlic, carrots cut into thinnish rounds, butter beans, parsley, sorrel, sea salt, a few tablespoons of yoghurt, butter for the brave.

I have deliberately not mentioned amounts. If you’ve read Julian Barnes’s book A Pedant in the Kitchen you’ll know how infuriating he finds this. Whatevs. You can combine butternut squash with the carrots and you can also add celery along with the onion. Really it’s a melange of vegetables made liquid by the addition of some stock or water. I like to add a knobette of butter to the vegetable mess near the end, but you don’t have to. I think it lends a velvety quality.

Gently wilt the onion or shallot in a small amount of olive oil, then after a few minutes in which they’ve had a chance to soften, add smashed up garlic, sliced carrots, chopped herb stalks, butter beans and stock/water. I didn’t add the whole tin of butter beans but a handful. Cook over a medium heat until the carrots are soft and then add a generous handful of parsley and a fist of sorrel leaves and the butter if you fancy. The sorrel will turn mud-coloured. Cook for a few minutes more, or mere seconds if you like it very fresh. Liquefy in a blender and add a tablespoon or two of yoghurt, some sea salt and a smattering of fresh parsley, sorrel or other soft herb at the end.

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Thanks, that’s heaps!

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Not only food, Uncategorized

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My allotment now has a utilitarian quality to it, the gates are metal, the fence discourages trespass. All I’ve got is oca, buried deep, and strawberries in leaf and shoots of garlic, pale and poking up. But there are moments when I experience a kind of non-being state, even now with the ground hard and the pools of ditch water; my mind stops chuntering through its list of grievances or worries. That tastes better than the vegetables. The soil under the fingernails, the body being worked, a kind of space opening up – that’s really why I do it. And because it means there’s somewhere nice to put my butter.

I am emerging from a period of intense focus/paranoia about food in general. This thankfully rarely filters through into my gardening activities. I tend to grow that which is easy and gives me most pleasure. I’m not going to start growing cauliflower because it’s hard. I will grow potatoes because they’re easy. And tomatoes too, even though I will rarely if ever eat them. But other people will, friends, family, Joe. Nightshades I ‘can’t eat’ but I’ve forgotten now why. I thought I couldn’t eat mushrooms either but apparently I can because they’re not part of the nightshade family, but I’m not going to grow mushrooms (although I could because they grow in used coffee grounds and I get tons from Waitrose).

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Can you already feel the spiraling panic that this level of food-patrolling creates? It reminds me of someone I shared a flat with many years ago when I was in my second year of drama school. Let’s call her Ruth. Ruth was thin; she liked to remain within a tight band of seven to seven and a half stone ideally. Everything about her attitude towards food upset and enraged me. I spent a lot of my second year at drama school sweating. This was due to huge amounts of period (as in country not menstrual) dancing, Laban, sword fighting and eating bacon sandwiches.

Ruth lived on brown rice, cooked apples and herbal tea and prescribed to the yin and yang school of eating. “Thanks, gosh that’s heaps!” was her regular exclamation when I had left the bag in too long of one of her Yogi ‘chocolate’ tea sachets. Thanks, that’s heaps! became a kind of watchword for me. She wouldn’t even go off-piste for a party she was giving. Everyone had to eat what she was eating, which was basically an enormous bowl of apple puree. This struck me as aggressively un-fun. She also told me that she would go to friends’ houses with her own food, because she didn’t eat wheat. Can I just say now that there was actually nothing wrong with her: she chose to do this.

Of course this was entirely up to her. She was a nice Quaker and I like Quakers. But I used to cook with my coat on and feel embarrassed about buying cheese. I would offer up some reason why it was just this once, and we’d have detailed discussions about why dairy was mucus-forming.

I was actually quite lonely at the time. Although I was busy, I didn’t know anyone in the Finchley Road area and my evenings were spent shelf-stacking at Habitat and occasionally spotting Pinochet in Waitrose (he was living in a safe house nearby). I wasn’t that interested in macrobiotics and feng shui – but I could have done with a friend.

So now when I see a nutritionist to help me with the symptoms of Crohn’s disease, I am thrown back into the thanks, gosh that’s heaps! world of self-denial and food as enemy/cure. Pretty much everything health-wise you are experiencing can now be ameliorated by drinking apple cider vinegar, sucking out the bone marrow from a grass-fed carcass and cutting out nutmeg.

I would just like to say, from the perspective of someone who was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease 25 years ago, that if it was simply down to food and supplements I would have healed myself many many years ago. I am not healed. I love food: food is everything to me.

Food is pleasure, it is there always, as succour, balm. It is the most creative thing you can do in a day, other than flying on the trapeze, painting a portrait, writing a poem, or loving someone. It is what makes me feel alive. It is part of what I love about the allotment too – food is part of that moment when I stare ahead and feel the muscles settling under my skin, feel the warmth of my breath inside nylon and think ‘tea’. Opposite me is Kieran my Irish neighbour, and both he and his daughter position themselves in their chairs after a few hours hoeing and digging and eat crisps. They have a shed full of crisps. Crisps and hoeing; what a combination.

This is not to take away from Ruth and her ilk – there can be great joy in a bowl of mashed apple. But it’s not that, it’s something else. It’s that however many diets (sorry, protocols) I go on, I know that inside me is a hoeing crisp eater wanting to get out. A sweating bacon sarnie muncher. A builder’s tea drinker. I am not from Japan and I don’t want to live on seaweed. I want to embrace pleasure and eat my fill. I want to eat heaps.

Weathered

25 Wednesday May 2016

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I seem to have a thing about shoes. Here I am at the allotment on a blissful May morning wearing shoes that are more hole than sole. It has taken me a while to get back here. I never thought it would take me this long but anyway here I am. I worked through the winter and it was just me and my allotment neighbour. There was very little to do because I’m not a fan of brassicas which tends to be the over-wintering vegetable family. I can’t quite remember what I did now; I think I walked around the perimeter edging everything which is a fantastic way to dispense rage. Having an edger slicing through the soil as if it was pizza is one of the great gardening devices and should be given out by the NHS. If in doubt, edge.

So, anyway, I had bowel surgery – ‘your op’ is how it has been renamed perhaps to make it more cuddly – so then when spring came along, I was unable to do anything except watch as weeds burgeoned, spreading over the formerly pristine and frozen bare ground. Finally, the plot became as I first found it: a wildly waving sea of green. There were no distinguishing features except huge rhubarb jazz hands, flopping ears of anemones, ragged tulips, molehills, dry and gorgeously rich. It reverted to its natural state as if I had never existed. Fair enough.

Now that I have been away, there is the temptation to do things differently. To be changed in some hard to define way that will express itself in my writing and in my day to day life, in the choices I make, the direction I go in. What I grow. There is pressure, coming I admit from me alone, that because I have ‘been through something’ – something ‘major’ – things will be different now. For a start, I’m off sugar and any kind of sweetener for the time being. This initially was hard, awful in fact because sweetness is a kind of basic primal need. I understand that carrots are sweet, but so is a slice of almond cake dripping in citrus syrup accompanied by a cup of tea, delicious and ordinary in equal measure. And I’ve never been someone who would take cheese over pudding. I wish I was a savoury person, but I have been known to stare at pictures of pudding for long silent minutes. I just gravitate there.

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The truth is I’m the same but my habits have changed. And carrots are sweet. And though there is something perversely satisfying about pulling out weeds, the long slow rip of threads of a root system, the harmless throwing into the next plot of slugs and snails that I can’t bring myself to kill, the bald earth free of stuff, the wild part of the allotment that remains is really exciting. It defeats me, just looking at it. It is hoary, hairy, it slumps and rises alarmingly. Fruit bushes are hemmed in by unknown green objects. The things I have planted nearby – my dwarf mulberry tree – look genteel and a bit prim. A bit Barbara Pym.

For now I’m going to let this second half of the plot be, there’ll be a bit of binary going on. There is the right side, which has now, thanks to some elbow grease and some dainty plantings of potatoes, French climbing beans, sweet peas, a renewed herb patch become respectable and will pass muster with the allotment manager. And there is the left side, a wild and unkempt mess of weeds throttling the fruit, a prairie of long grasses, dandelion clocks and nettles and clover. I can’t yet bring myself to rip it all up. It is doing a job.

And there’s no rush. I suppose what is to be relished here, at the allotment at 8am on a Monday morning, is that there is nothing to be done. Apart from the fact that there’s a lot to do and tricky, life-defining things happen and you’ve got to seize the day and we are all so fragile when you come to think about it. I love the allotment because it makes me feel so overrated. I know I should crack on, but maybe not today. Whatever, really. My aim is to live whateverishly for a while.

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The growing season

07 Sunday Jun 2015

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I have an allotment. It’s ‘five rod’ which is 125 square metres and it has known better days. Waving weeds, a broken greenhouse, a shed, three pairs of Wellington boots that are sprouting wild flowers or hold stagnant pools of rainwater. The wellies start from small, a three year old I’d say, to adult. And there is something sad about them, the way they are standing to attention against the shed wall. As if something happened that I’d rather not know about. Whoever she is, she left me some tomato fertilizer, a book on allotments, a watering can and a small parcel of the blackest soil replete with worms. There is also a gooseberry bush, raspberry canes, a mass of rhubarb and one of those barbecues you buy at the garage. It’s almost a friendship. And some bolting tomatoes.

Nothing more is known. Of course I said yes. We’ve been here eight months! I had put my name down, and then forgotten all about it; no one now gets an allotment. But here I am shaking hands with a tall, white-haired man in support stockings, and he’s telling me about cherry trees. About the trio of fruit trees behind the plot I’ve chosen which has similarly been left to grow wild.

There’s something incredibly exciting about a fruit tree. It implies permanence in a way that a line of onions or potatoes can’t. Also a tree is beautiful, its blossom giving way to the fruit. Every year it will come back. Fruit that can be pilfered and pocketed or guzzled round the back of the shed. You can sit under a fruit tree and drink tea and read a book.

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I threw some netting over part of the cherry tree I could reach, so that there might be some left after the birds and started pulling up weeds with my hands. I can’t yet draw up a plan. If I had a plan, then it would be a job, a task. And already with allotments, there is that whiff of tyranny. You have to maintain ‘your’ path which is always to the right of your plot. You need to decide whether to go down the route of mesh and bark chippings, or cutting it like a lawn. This made me sweat a bit, and so did their pack of instructions for planting from north to south, to dig or not to dig, rotovating, the price of manure. I was to look out for prehistoric flint tools. I was advised to plant spuds the first year. There is a man near me whose plot is all potatoes.

I was thinking more along the lines of thyme and lavender and nasturtium because it reminds me of those slopes in LA rampant with their dusty colour and floppy leaves. Sorrel. What else: fruit that can be picked when ripe (blackcurrants!), a swathe of colourful Califormian poppies for ease and because they like neglect and a dusty ditch. Tomatoes that can feel the sun. Basically I’d like a mulberry tree.

But first it’s a place to come. At the moment there is a wicker chair which when you sit on it gradually subsides so you are actually just sitting on the earth – from here I can be quite invisible and watch the woman mowing her path, the couple bending over their plants. The train rattles by. The man who said something disparaging about my grass is hiding behind a wigwam of sweet peas. I am using a child’s digging fork at the moment. I may or may not get back to work.

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Roasted rhubarb

This is from Mark Diacono’s book A Taste of the Unexpected. He’s the one who tells you to plant Szechuan Pepper and quince and something called Oca. His books are glorious and so are his recipes. He also says ‘you can be a neglectful, even abusive, carer of rhubarb. It is quite hard to kill off.’ Result.

500g rhubarb (trimmed & cut into 5cm pieces)
65g caster sugar
Zest and juice of a small orange

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Put the trimmed and chopped rhubarb into a roasting tin, toss with the caster sugar and the finely grated zest of the orange. Arrange in a single layer and then pour over the orange juice. Cover the dish with foil and roast in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Then remove the foil, give it all a good stir and put back in the oven (sans foil) for another 15 ish minutes until tender and syrupy and starting to disintegrate. Lovely with Greek yoghurt or cream or ice cream and an ‘independent crumble’ – see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for this.

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Roses and kale

07 Friday Nov 2014

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We have moved into our flat in Hampton (hence the silence, sorry) and I am thinking of getting an allotment. We went to Bushy Park Allotments on Sunday, to see if we could get in and at least get a good view of them, and there was a couple opening the gate carrying in a compost bin. We stood a way off looking at all the plots; they were untidy, shabby even, but there were also a lot of trees, and it looked both unkempt and rather beguiling; little portions of garden side by side as far as the eye could see.

The gentle hum of an engine, and I looked back at a man in a very low open-top car, with a bucket in the back and heaps of pink geraniums. He too looked unkempt and rather beguiling. He hadn’t sounded his horn, just sat in his very low down slightly rusted car waiting for us to move. He had shoulder-length sandy hair and was what people used to call rakish. My grandmother would not have trusted such a man; she would have said something about him being ‘freelance’. But there was a glamour about him and that he’d given us just the right amount of smile, to show he didn’t think we were in any way an irritant, made him alright.

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The car rattled through the gates and disappeared into the thick brush of trees and stalks and general vegetable matter. That’s when we could have gone, but the couple smiled at us now and so I went up, leaving Joe to loiter, and said hello. Can I put my name down for a plot? (‘Put your name down!’ ‘Have you put your name down?’ has been a mantra of my mother’s since childhood). “Yes, you put your name down,” the lady nodded. And then they gave me advice along the lines of: make a nuisance of yourself, wear them down, and eventually someone will break and give you a piece of earth. “You need to not be afraid of hard work”, she said, looking me up and down in the way people do, thinking they’re being subtle.

They didn’t have much to do; it was cold and rainy and a few minutes later they’d emerged. ‘Put your name up on the gates and ask if anyone wants to share a plot’, the lady who was called Roz now said. I have to put my name up now as well as down. She said they’d picked some roses and they had some nice kale and they were done for the day. It seemed rather a bleak enterprise; coming to pick kale. I like roses but it wouldn’t occur to me to grow them on an allotment.

I think if it was me, I would take my lead from the freelancer driving through the gates and plant things with colour, a bit of rakishness, and some sweetness, some fruit, otherwise it all gets a bit Eastenders. A bit Arthur Fowler.

When I started this blog in LA I wrote about lemon curd. The curd was made from the very few Meyer lemons I’d eked from the tree we’d bought from an extremely rakish garden nursery on Fairfax and Santa Monica. We were promised ‘lemons in abundance’ from  the nice stoned man and although the tree was initially heavy with fruit, it never fulfilled its promise. As Joe Queenan likes to say, it wrote a cheque it couldn’t cash. But the sweetness of those lemons, their strange hybrid flavour and the thin mellow peel, started me off. I loved the colour too, a happy, acid yellow. I was never devoid of fruit thereafter. I fell in love with fruit, probably because there was an awful lot of it about in LA – orange trees mainly and their rampant, swooning blossom – and it was the first thing I genuinely liked about being there. It was growing, it was nature, it was beautiful to watch.

Perhaps I have not got the point of the allotment quite. Although I would be happy to share a plot and I wouldn’t be shy of digging, I’d need to insist there was a splash of colour, some orbs, some blossom, a cage, a tree, some espaliered plums and some brickwork to keep them warm. In the meantime I think I can live without kale, a terrifyingly healthy leaf.