When Plot 34’s head of secret tunnels was in nappies, he would perform the same routine every time we returned from a holiday. He would hop out of the car, run in the front door and hurry around the house checking that everything was still there — his toys, his bed, the sofa, the cat, the television, the fridge.
If you run an allotment, you will be familiar with this sort of separation anxiety. The first visit of the year feels a bit like returning from a trip on which you spent time worrying whether you had locked the windows or turned off the gas at home. Your immediate reaction is to rush around ensuring the worst hasn’t happened.
This time it had.
Where were my overwintered crops? The allotment appeared to have mislaid them.
In October there were 50 winter Roscoff cauliflowers and 50 celeriacs — the former were waist-high and leafy, the latter putting some girth into their part-submerged roots.
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The square-shaped cauliflower bed looked like the Alamo — after the battle. Five scutty survivors were arrayed around its perimeter with a forest of bleached sticks inside. Had somebody dropped napalm? One sad little grapefruit-sized head was all that was left of the year’s cauliflower efforts. I grown them from seed, watered them, fed them and, one summer’s evening, picked about 300 caterpillars off them.
At the celeriac patch there were no stalks, corpses or husks . . . there was no sign at all of the 50 plants that had been growing nicely the last time I saw them. If they had been stolen by man or rabbit (it happens), there would have been tell-tale holes in the ground. But there was nothing.
I suspect it was the brutal winter and the hilltop positioning of the allotment that relieved me of almost 100 food plants. Brassicas (pre-flowering) and slow-growing root crops are among the vegetables considered most resilient to snow and ice. However, last winter was the worst in a generation, with temperatures reaching -18C in some parts of the country.
After six years at this game, I expect to lose about a third of my crops to disease, birds, weevils, slugs, snails, rabbits, adults or unruly children (mine and other people’s). You win some, you lose some. But you obviously win more than you lose, or you wouldn’t do it.
Last year had been my worst growing season so far. I’d been waiting on the cauliflower and celeriac to balance my books. I had lost the carrots to flies, the gooseberries were pilfered by birds and the raspberries got mould. The broccoli bolted because of the Easter drought and the lack of water at the allotment and the rats nesting under next door’s compost box accounted for most of my peas.
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In my deposit account, there had been bumper crops of tomatoes, onions, salads, cabbages, berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackcurrants and redcurrants), apples, cucumbers, courgettes, garlic, herbs and chillies. But 50 celeriacs and 50 cauliflowers make for a lot of nutritious eating over a long period (the cauliflowers can be stored frozen, the celeriacs in situ). Their loss meant that, overall, I had lost more of my crops than I harvested.
Then to make matters worse, there was no water in the tap.
The council, which has tripled our allotment fees this year, can’t seem to provide us with the basics on our complex — there’s no water for much of the growing year, no proper loos and it won’t allow us to have sheds. The water is a big issue as we typically get a drought around Easter, also the crucial period for seedlings.
The first good news came with the rhubarb — the first crop of the new year. This spring’s was the best harvest yet. I just wish somebody in my house would eat the stuff.
More cheer was unearthed in the unharvested half of the potato patch. Spuds take heavy ice damage, so I expected my King Edwards to have been mushed back in December. But the fork brought up healthy tubers and, before long, I had a couple of stones of healthy, if sprouty, King Edwards. Plenty for dinner for a few weeks and enough to provide for all of this year’s seed potatoes.
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Better still, the soil was nice and friable after its freezing. The horrible winter also seemed to have put paid to some persistent weeds. Bugs, weevils and carrot fly should have taken a battering too.
The friable soil and lack of weeds meant I got three beds prepared in a day’s digging. Normally at this time of year, with the ground likely to be mucky, a bed a day is more likely. With the clocks having just gone forward, my first trip to the plot in 2011 was the most spectacular day of the year so far.
Finally, with the day’s work done and hands throbbing with familiar nettle jabs, I sat for a while in the old mahogany chair, listening to the songbirds, looking at the city below and watching the sun go down behind the hills. I had been softened somewhat, but not soothed.
I returned home with a few stones of potatoes , three rhubarb stalks and a single tiny cauliflower. “Gorgeous cauliflower,” said Her Outdoors over dinner. It would have to be, I thought.
Plot 34: Blood, Sweat and Allotmenteers, by Mark Keenan, is published by Brandon Books