The Scent of Summer

The far left corner of the allotment must have been lovely at one time. Gooseberry and currant bushes peek out through the brambles and the dry grass. Blackened Comfry, rogue Jerusalem artichokes, squatting weeds, they're all fighting for life. Despite the faded charm it's got to go, all of it. Trying to save one particular plant would be too hard, like playing pick up sticks but with added gnarled roots.

It takes a day, but I clear the ground. Armed with near-useless secateurs and a pair of tree-loppers I snip my way through the tangle of limbs. I'm accompanied by the sounds of a Police helicopter circling above, my Turkish neighbours digging and bickering, and Radio 4 drifting on the wind. Eric plays the station all day, until Gardeners Question Time comes on, when he promptly switches it off.

My tree-loppers gradually seize up. I have no oil or WD40 in the shed so I reach for the only thing I have to hand that might lubricate them; some Piz Buin suntan lotion, factor 30. It works, though the afternoon is punctuated with sense memories of last summer's holiday in Kos . Despite the cold, and repeated snags from the gooseberry thorns, I find myself thinking of blue skies and Greek cheese pie.

Bloom and revulsion

The late afternoon sunlight highlights plot detail. Artichokes glow silvery and sculptural in the waning light; fading cosmos flowers drift, their lush foliage weighing them down to one side. Wind blown, they grow horizontal now, flower heads tilted upwards towards the light, nodding in the breeze, like half-asleep park-bench drunks.

I take my time cutting flowers for home, enjoying the quiet warmth of the evening sun on my back. My heart is still racing a little from the shock of discovering a mouldering rat in the far corner of the shed. Despite knowing it is dead, I half expect it to pin those black eye sockets on me; twitch, rise up, and dart out the open door.


I must think about building a new shed soon. This one is home to so many invaders.

Summer Passed.

Summer rattled past in a blur, a steady cycle of planting and weeding that at times felt like a long train journey; one where neither the pleasant, ever-changing view from the window, nor the good book I'd brought along could ever fully hold my attention. After a time I would inevitably find myself flitting between one thing and another, not achieving much of anything, just feeling the miles and the hours slip by.

I blamed this feeling in part on Lou, and the compost bin fiasco. Sure enough, the wood he built my compost bin from had been stolen, from various sites around the allotment. But the one who noticed and complained (loudly) was the normally quiet, contemplative plot-holder Jorge. I felt terrible about the situation, and in doing so my cherished feeling of allotment calm totally vanished. Jorge told me stories of Lou's thieving and scheming in great detail and I couldn't help but be both amused and alarmed by them. For a man in his eighties, Lou, it would seem, has an incredible amount of energy "He's not right in the head," Jorge surmised. "He's also drunk half the time, he's got to go..."

And go he did, though not without a fight, or a screaming match with Jorge. The committee voted him out, for as the sign on the gate of the allotment states 'THEFT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED'. This eviction process took six weeks, however. When questioned about the stolen wood used for my compost bin Lou replied "What wood? What compost bin? I never even built one!"

Despite being booted out, I hear Lou still comes around. Apparently he cut a hole in the chain link fence and hopped in at dusk one evening. He was seen leaving that night with two large bag fulls of... Who knows...

With his departure came the return of calm and of my vacationing fellow plot-holder, Mohammad . I was quietly weeding, listening to the radio when I heard "My friend! How are you?" It was wonderful to see his smiling face, tanned from spending the summer in Morocco with his family and grandchildren.

"I've missed you my friend!" he called. "I would like to give you a hug."

He motioned to me with his open arms. Hugging him, I smiled to myself, realising Autumn was upon us.

That Sinking Feeling

After repeated toppings up, and constant draining away, it would appear that the water level in the pond now holds (for a while at least) at about nine inches at its centre. In the middle it looks quite pretty and habitable; clear water, bulrushes and a water lily or two.

But at the sides it all turns a bit dark; a foot of black puckered pond liner slopes down to a shallow bank of muddy water filled spongy olive moss and something that looks like green felt, the bright baize playing surface for a gathering of skittish, water skating insects.

The green felt is actually blanket weed, grown fat from all the nitrates and phosphates in the tank water we've been using to top the pond up. I fish most of it out and add a little rain water that's been collecting in a bucket, thinking "when would be the best time to empty it all out and fix the leaks?"

Whilst I ponder this, peering into the water looking for newts, my eyes adjust and I realise that what I thought was the back of a water lilly bud is actually the frog, from two posts ago, still with us. He's clearly been riding the rising levels, feeling out the falling ones, whilst the bulrushes above him bend in the wind and sway with the breeze.

The Compost Bin

I am now the owner of a part built compost bin, thanks to a neighbouring plot holder, Lou. Yesterday he interrupted my weeding reverie by calling out that "We had a meeting last night, and all the plot holders must now have a compost bin; which, I see you don't."

He paused, gently kicking some tufts of grass, and asked "What are you going to do about it?"

I explained that whilst I didn't have a compost bin, I did have a compost heap, which was a step in the right direction; and that I had two pallets at home waiting to be converted into a compost bin: I just needed two more. He then surprised me by offering to donate the two pallets needed, and assemble them for me, to which I agreed and thanked him. "That's really kind of you Lou. Thanks."

As I look at it today, the compost bin is now five pallets strong, and growing. The tidy, uniform side of the pallets faces in, the irregular, shabby side facing out. The pallets are held together with various planks of wood, some of questionable ownership. As far as I can work out (as Lou is hard to interpret sometimes) a fellow plot holder made off with some of Lou’s wood, so Lou stole it back and is now building my bin from it, for which the charge will be “fifteen pounds for the wood, ten pounds for the labour”.

And I thought it was just a friendly gesture.

As I appeared to be paying for it I thought It would be OK to contribute some thoughts about the design.

"Can the three sides be the same height please,” I asked, “and can the tops be level? And can the front section come off, rather than be nailed shut?"

These may seem simple requests but having taken a minute or two to inspect Lou's compost bin, they were important points to clarify.

After much rumbling and protestation about what was needed, and what he considered pointless, Lou wandered off and returned with a nice new gate/fence panel to use as the bin's front. This made me feel much better about the fifteen pound charge for the wood, but i couldn't help but wonder, what was I getting myself into here? "Lou,” I said, “I'm not going to find myself in the middle of something here, am I?"

He stopped hammering for a moment and pointed at me with a galvanised nail. "If anyone asks you anything, you tell them you built it yourself! Or, to mind their own bloody business!"

"I won't be doing that, Lou,” I said, “ I'll say a friend built it, if a stranger asks. But look," I said, pointing at someone walking past, "Other people have seen you building this for me today. There's no secret here." He laughed and motioned me away with a wave of his hammer, loudly muttering, as he returned to his work. Malcolm, the chairman of the allotment committee approached us, his eyes taking in the scene: Lou, the compost bin, the planks and the offcuts of wood strewn across the public path. He looked at me seriously, and, touching my arm, whispered in my ear: "If he bothers you at all, you will let me know, won't you?"

A Glimpse Of Newt

The Leaky Pond

I think the small pond on my plot is leaking. Last week I topped it up with 240 litres of water (that's 24 watering cans worth; and a lot of tottering to and from the watering tank) yet yesterday I saw that the water level had dropped again to just a couple of inches. Why could this be happening? Bull rushes grow in the pond alongside water mint, speedwells and ornamental grass. 'Could they just be using all the water?' I wondered. It seemed unlikely, but I thinned the plants out to a third and then paused before starting to refill the pond: I had seen a rapid movement in the water.

I'd been looking out for the newts as I worked but thought that maybe they'd been and gone, business completed. Peering into the pond I spotted a small frog, wide eyed and cautious, one rubbery hand gripping a green stalk for stability.

I topped the pond up with water, bucket fulls of it, putting in a small exit ramp for the newts, just in case they were still about; and over the course of the early evening I watched the water level sink slowly down, along with the summer sunlight.