This blessed plot - Life on an allotment
Knowing what you're eating means knowing what's seasonal and where it's come from. I've had an urban allotment for over eight years and it's an oasis of sanity in a busy life.
First among equals
On an urban allotment, age, salaries, and status all count for nothing; what matters is how well you work your plot. We seethe and backbite about people whose soil seems so fertile you could make soup with it. We note ruefully that their beans are better than ours, and we slyly lob our slugs and snails onto their plots after dusk.
Offices have water cooler moments; for allotmenteers, it’s the water butts. As we fill our watering cans we talk about soil temperature, the weather, and the advance of the dreaded tomato blight. We can see the Shard glistening to the north from our position high on a hill, and hear the siren song of South London, as ambulances and police cars storm the A205.
The first bite is the sweetest
The first treat of the year is purple sprouting broccoli, sown almost eight months earlier. Around harvest time the evil pigeons sit on the protective net in large numbers, their combined weight sinking it enough for them to peck through and eat much of what we’ve worked for. The sprouting broccoli that escapes is briefly blanched before being mixed with anchovies, garlic, dried chilli, a splash of cream, and penne pasta. It tastes better than anything you could order in a restaurant because you grew it yourself; you waited all those months and it’s fresh, just an hour off the plant.
Some you win
Joy and frustration go hand in hand on an allotment. The latter when the slugs destroy almost every lettuce overnight, or a squirrel gets to the sweetcorn and eats the lot. Carefully tended tomatoes suddenly begin to show signs of distress and the fruits become black and plants must be torn up and burnt. A late frost wipes out all the courgette plants in one stroke. You stand there as if at a crime scene, unwilling to take it in.
Joy comes with the new potatoes; insert fork under plant, lift, and golden potatoes are cascading everywhere and you scuttle to collect them, already imagining them cooked, lightly broken and smothered in butter and your own chives. The early broad beans, first eaten as entire pods, are used to scoop up soft goat’s cheese, then later in their short season the emerald green beans are scattered through a risotto so that each little bean is a burst of flavour.
The garlics have now just come in; we’ve made the best use of their mildness by roasting the cloves whole and squeezing out the luscious paste onto warm ciabbata. French beans and mange tout are in abundance, but sadly someone has lost a whole row of spuds to thieves of the two legged kind. Around the water butts dark plans are hatched for vigilante justice. On the urban plot the struggle never ends.
More Grow Your Own things
The incredible edible English town
Comments
Be the first to comment
Do you want to comment on this article? You need to be signed in for this feature