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.

A New Day

Some Velvet Morning

An ugly mass of black fly, as thick as velvet, has settled on the Cardoons. As a result, ladybirds are on overdrive, settling in for the long stay. As I watch them go about their business of feeding on these ebony interlopers, fighting, feuding, getting to know each other a little better, it feels like I'm viewing a scene from a Frontier town on a Saturday night. The ladybirds' backs glow bright and glossy, as if in moonlight, as they stagger around, from stem to flower petal, like a gang of gaily-attired drunks.

In places the black fly are so thick that all plant detail is lost; silvery Cardoon leaf and stem smothered by their powdery black bodies. I think of aging flock wallpaper, when the velvet print begins to fade and flake and see these patterns in the stricken plants before me.

I go to the shed and return with a paintbrush and a bottle of BUG-BE-GONE. For the next hour or so I brush off all the black fly I can, carefully avoiding the bright clusters of yellow eggs I hope will survive to become the new lady bird brawlers, out on the town...

That wonderful Bird Table Book...

For Pests.

My current allotment reading is 'The Gardening Year', by The Readers Digest Association Ltd, published in 1969. It's a book almost too heavy to read standing up, and smells of dusty conservatories when you turn the pages. It's waxed, linen-look cover feels like sun bleached oil-cloth and it's a rare day at the allotment that I don't find myself sitting on the grass, skimming through it's chapters before settling on the month of May's 'Vegetables: Guide to Cultivation' chart.

Dinocap
Paraquat
Simazine
Dalapon

The names of these ancient weedkillers appear like arcane gods again and again. After the bedside manner of more modern gardening books by the likes of Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh this heavy use of pesticides seems renegade, lawless. But this book seems to suit the allotment, the strange poetry of it. I often see my neighbouring plot-holder John with a tank on his back, spraying his paths, trees, fruit bushes, anything goes...

His wife Wilma regularly brings me bits and pieces from their plot: asparagus, cauliflowers and yesterday the first of the seasons strawberries; deliciously sweet, mis-shapen and red to the core. She also brought with her a leaf on which a small black, furry looking beetle sat, it's back marked with yellow splotches, one front leg feeling the breeze as we looked on. "This," said Wilma, "Is a baby ladybird. Just in case you've never seen one before."

I looked for them as I weeded between the rows of puntarelle, spinach and peas, smiling as Mohammad called to me "You look like a scientist!" He wheeled his barrow to my plot and stopped. "Such straight rows. You're like a, what's it's name? An Archaeologist, on a dig."

A truely golden day at the allotment.

Illustration by Robert Gillmor, from the wonderful 'The Bird Table Book' by Tony Soper.

Frost damage.

A harsh unexpected frost a few weeks ago has wiped out the fruiting plants on the plot. Tiny blackened plums, wizened burnt-orange gooseberries and shrivelled currants litter the ground. Skeletal clusters of grapes, blackened on the vine, are like charcoal scrawls against the pale sky, dead sweet peas rattle in the breeze, bleached white as beach flotsam.

It's what happens.

My friend Mohammad raises his eyes to the heavens and says, "This is the way - it's nature." He takes me on a little tour of his plot to show me the damage to his trees. "The apple's OK, the plum maybe not so. Just a few, look here," he points, "to the top" where I can see a branch with a few good sized fruits forming. We weave through the vegetable beds, stepping around cabbages and over seedlings until we reach his cherry tree. He smiles and presents it with a small theatrical flourish. It has a simple, heavy black steel frame erected around it which is shaped like a giant staple and draped from the top bar is a builders green mesh sheet. This swaddles the tree and is tied around the trunk, nipped in like a dress at the waist. Through the open weave of the fabric I can see the tree inside is covered in fruit. Every branch. He gives me a serious look and nods, "The birds, we'll beat them this year, no?"

She shoots...

She seldom scores.

Six weeks of throwing rocks, stones, smallish pebbles, mis-shapen eggs of concrete, broken shingles, buttons, fragments of tile, and snapped, worn-smooth bottlenecks into a small black bucket have told me that I am never going to win the carnival game.

I don't need to throw a flimsy, plastic dart at an under-inflated balloon to miss the shot. Or launch an over-inflated basketball towards a too-small hoop to familiarise myself with failure.

Sometimes the bucket is close by, occasionally it's far away but the result seldom changes; I nearly always miss. Strangely, this doesn't bother me and I smile either way. It's good to know that if i absolutely had to bet, my money would probably be on the other guy.



I

Peas, mice and praise for the Chillington hoe

I stand dazed, in an untouched, overgrown allotment bed, as weeds, swaying grasses and nettles brush my knees. They've shot up, thick and fast, and the prospect of weeding them out, which seemed manageable before, is now daunting. The last stretch of gooseberries and currants that hug the tumble-down -fence are choked with brambles, comfrey, and tall grass, the wanted and the unwanted knotted together. A harsh twist of dark spiked leaves grows out of a gap in the thicket, the stems trailing behind, like lines of abandoned bunting snagged in briars.

I shake myself out of my reverie and remember that the allotment shop opens on Monday afternoons. I go there, (it's a large green portacabin in the nearby car park) and have a long chat with John the shopkeeper about gooseberry mildew, (which my plot has) and which size of bamboo canes to use for what peas. He also introduces me to an implement known as the Chillington hoe, a viciously efficient agricultural weapon, which I duly buy and use all afternoon to rid one whole bed of knotted weeds.

It's exhausting but satisfying and I feel like a cherry-red Grim Reaper in my bright poppy windcheater as I swipe the hoe across the ground, watching the vegetation fall. My compost pile is growing higher every day, looking more and more like a scruffy Jeff Koon's puppy.

At the end of the day I fall asleep whilst reading up on how to build compost bins. I dream of mice, eating the peas I've yet to sow, in the ground I've yet to clear.

Pond life.

A cold and blowy morning gave way to spring sunshine, and by noon I was digging out weeds and old potatoes from the ground in just my shirt sleeves, welcoming the cooling breeze. I stopped for lunch at one and lay down by the little pool in front of the fruit bushes, head resting on my elbow, peering into the water. The reeds and emerging Lilly pads were clearly defined, illuminated by the mid day sun. Dead reeds, dried blond in summer covered the pond floor like abandoned pick-up-sticks, their shafts unusually bright and golden. Suddenly, I saw a tiny hand grip one of the reeds, as if using a hand-rail for support. It was a young newt, holding on to the reed like a child clinging to the rim of a municipal swimming pool, nudging its head over the top to see what was happening on the other side.

I sat there, counting four newts, as I listened to a programme on Radio 4 about how the recent brutal winters in Scotland have made it difficult for native birds and wild life to find food and survive. A Scottish lord told of how he'd found a nesting box on his estate containing eighteen comatose wrens huddling together for warmth. He took them home to his kitchen, and revived them in the warm Aga, feeding them grated Parmesan cheese until they were strong enough to be released.

As I listened, I felt a strong desire to take a newt out of the water and examine him in detail: the beautiful markings on his back, the tiny eyes, toes... Instead, I finished up my lunch and went back to digging out the beds. It all seems to be about digging at the moment...

Suspects number two and three.

Suspect number two is Lottie (I think that's her name) and suspect number three her associate Gerald. There's something distinctly odd about them. I was at the allotment on Sunday at six AM and they were there, refilling their bird feeders. There's never a smile or a nod from them (which doesn't make anyone odd in my book), it's something other, something about the way they move; like sleepy insects. This is their shed, which I can't look at without imagining being inside, the sound of rain pattering on the roof, wind whistling through the rusted holes in the tin walls.

The Rhubarb thief?

Though it pains me to say it, I think someone's been helping themselves to the rhubarb on my plot. A small thing, perhaps, but obviously affecting me as I have had strange, allotment-based dreams two nights in a row. The pilferer is considerate; kindly twisting off the emerging flower heads so the plants can concentrate their energies on growing edible stalks. Those vanishing blooms are a giveaway though, the tell...

I cock my head in thought, mentally compiling a list of suspects; first to appear from my pen to paper this morning was Ondine, (above).

Meeting by the rhubarb

Line drawing; part of an allotment based dream I had last night

Saturday AM Brownies

Classic squidgy brownies; moist and bittersweet. Very easy to make, very indulgent...
No chocolate chips, nuts, prunes or Armagnac in these (though all good), just plain, rich chocolate.

Saturday AM Brownies.

• 225g 70% Cocoa Solids Plain chocolate
  
• 85g Unsalted butter
• 240g Caster Sugar
• 75g plain flour
  
• 3 large eggs
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla essence

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175C then butter and line an 8 inch square baking tin with grease-proof paper.
2. Place the chocolate and butter in a heat-proof bowl and melt over a pan of simmering water. (Make sure the bubbling water does not touch the bottom of the bowl) Stir frequently until the mixture is melted, then remove from the heat and set aside.
3. In a food processor, whisk the eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla on high speed for about 2 minutes until the eggs are light coloured, thick and fall in ribbons when the whisk is removed from the mixture. Then stir in the warm chocolate and fold in the flour
4. Pour the batter into the lined tin and bake on the bottom shelf in the oven for about 25-30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
5. Cool in the tin on a rack and when cold, remove the greaseproof paper and cut into sixteen 2 inch squares.

Early morning light on nets

Percussive sound

It's a beautiful warm afternoon with a keen chilly wind blowing torpedo shaped clouds out of the bird blue sky. I dig the weeds from the soon-to-be strawberry patch, my fork lifting and gently pitching the clods of earth into the air, catching them against the prongs before they fall to the ground. The noise is a rain-shower and a rattle; strings of beads being lifted from a polished wooden dresser. The forks prongs vibrate, a struck tuning fork that resonates in my rib-cage. I get lost in the sounds of this place, it's all percussive, like the rest of the band have yet to arrive and we're the only players here, warming up, testing our chimes, wood blocks, snare-drums, practising our hand-claps. The overhead cables strung between the electricity pylons are the musical score, lines drawn on a blue enamel sheet of tin. I imagine the sounds of our industry painted upon it and smile at the thought of it as music; can see the trumpet player listening, his bowed head gently nodding in time to the rythmm until it's his time to play.

I bend down and blow into a cloche made from a cut-off litre water bottle and the sound around me warms, like switching the old radio in the bathroom over from "Speech" to "Orchestra". I wonder if the little seedling housed inside feels it too, or if it's just me and the wind.