The plot

Fern Hollow is a council allotment site at the end of a lane: about forty plots, a water trough that freezes every January, a communal pile of bricks, and a committee that meets in the shed with the kettle.

I have plot 14, a half plot of roughly 125 square metres, since March 2025. Before that I grew tomatoes in a yard. Most of what I know comes from the people on either side of me and from getting things wrong, both of which show up regularly here.

This journal started on a free blogging platform in the first spring and moved to its own address in the autumn of 2026, when that platform started putting adverts in the middle of the posts. Everything here is written on the kitchen table, usually on a Sunday evening with soil still under my nails.

There are no adverts, no affiliate links and nothing for sale. If you want to send seeds, the committee runs a swap every February.