In The Beginning

Last year, after a nine year wait, I was finally given my own allotment. Now, I live in a top floor flat so my allocated space was going to be more than just a vegetable patch, it was going to be my oasis. I wanted a lawn with a deckchair, somewhere I could throw down a towel in the blazing sun, smell the herbs, reach out and pluck a berry while watching my venture into self-sufficiency come to fruition. 

So the day I unlocked the gate, walked up the path and took in my 250 square metres of weeds in South East London, I nearly passed out with excitement. At least I think it was that because someone did mention I looked peaky the day before. It borders on the nice part, Blackheath, where I live and the awful areas beyond, came with a creaky old shed full of rubbish and a compost heap the size of Porthmadog, which apparently, is also a compost heap.

Now, if like me, your background in gardening was helping your granddad, and trying not to cry when he explained the two big handfuls you were holding up were not in fact tree marbles but his entire crop of young tomatoes, an allotment is going to be an education.

Test the soil first, someone said, it might be lime, it might be clay, it might be riddled with nancies.  Well I’ll have a crack at that at some point but task one was chopping down a field of seeded onions and thistles that had grown to eye level. My excitement, luckily, overruled the dread of the daunting amount of work needed before I could even start gardening, so I got stuck in without moaning, ignoring the aches and the long days and concentrating on the fact that I was going to grow it all, except for beetroot and radish because in my eyes, they should be extinct.

Before I arrived, my allotment belonged to an old man who died. He was very popular, so much so that every single person who walked past my allotment told me so about a hundred times while saying it was a shame it was no longer his but anyway, I was welcome.  I plan on putting up a tall fence to block those people out. I’m here to garden not fill people’s empty lives with chitchat.