Taking on plot 14
The letter from the allotment committee came on a Tuesday: half a plot, number 14, available from the first of March. I had been on the waiting list for a little under three years, long enough to stop checking the post for it.
What I inherited is roughly 125 square metres of very honest neglect. A shed with no door, two water butts (one cracked), a rhubarb crown that has clearly outlived several tenants, and couch grass. Mostly couch grass.
The first three weekends
I did not rotavate. Everyone on the site has an opinion about this, and the loudest one is that chopping couch grass into a thousand pieces gives you a thousand plants. So it has been a fork, a kneeling mat and a lot of podcasts. By the end of the third weekend about a third of the plot is cleared to something I would call soil.
The rest is under black sheeting weighed down with bricks from the communal pile. The plan is to leave it there until late spring and let the dark do the work I don't have the knees for.
What is going in first
- Broad beans (Aquadulce) in the cleared corner, because they forgive almost everything.
- Two rows of shallots.
- A bed of onion sets, mainly so I can say I grew onions.
The rhubarb stays. My neighbour on plot 13, who has been here since the eighties, says it was planted by a man called Derek and that it has never once been fed. I'm not going to be the one to start.