30.4.24

in the soil

The sun is warm and the wind slight and there is little to do so I spend an afternoon pulling apart the compost bin by the hedge which is far too large for my half-plot and too deep to easily dig over and turn and ugly to boot, a mass of matt grey plastic, and I begin to build another with stakes and bits of planking and hazel twigs, packing it into the surrounding earth for stability. There are little more-or-less improvised structures like this all over the site built from this or that, wood scavenged from skips or kerbs or previous sheds, lengths of metal from wind-razed greenhouses, bamboo canes, nailed or screwed or tied or lashed together with wire, to hold compost or protect cucumbers or support climbing beans, they rise and fall with the seasons, the fruiting bodies of the allotment; the archaeologist two plots down erects every year a stone circle, for what reason I do not know.

in the kitchen

I pick a great mess of greenery, a bag full of nettle tops, a bunch of bushy fennel, a handful of lovage, the first artichokes still hairless and crisp, the first two (two!) spears of the asparagus I have been nurturing for years, a bunch of the oregano or possibly marjoram that appeared self-seeded on my plot among the blackberries and which I transplanted to the herb bed, a chubby not-quite-bulb of green garlic which for me is the main reason for growing garlic rather than just buying it; not enough of anything to make a dish by itself but enough for one intensely green dinner in which admittedly the asparagus gets somewhat lost among the curious numbing sweetness of artichoke and fennel, the healthy musk of nettle.

on the page

I read David Crouch and Colin Ward’s The Allotment which is very interesting on the often radical history of these spaces, half-rural enclaves in urban wastes. I have lent my copy away so I cannot now quote it but a common theme – besides the resistance of the landowning classes to the people who do their work for them having any degree of independence or joy – is the general reluctance of the allotment gardener to accept anything which might homogenize the site or force them to do things the same way as everybody else, even where it might make life easier for everyone, the allotment a strange mixture of the communal and the private, a public land where nobody can tell anybody what to do.