I saw this in the news today and thought of you all. 😉
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Hell in earth
The current grow-your-own trend has sparked a new wave of interest in allotment owning. But before you get swept up in the trend, the BBC’s Paul Reynolds, has some words of warning.
An allotment is a piece of land you till and toil over yourself. You do not get your gardener or under-gardener to do it for you.
What the Queen has is an old-fashioned kitchen garden. All country houses used to have one. Buckingham Palace has such huge grounds that it almost qualifies as a country house and now it has a kitchen garden. It is an admirable thing to have.
But it is not an allotment. The Palace spin doctors, who recently unveiled the garden, have scored one over the media on this.
I know about allotments because I had one in the 1970s. It can best be described as hell in earth.
At the time, there was a grow-your-own trend, as now. It was the age of The Good Life, the BBC TV series in which Tom and Barbara Good turn their suburban
garden into a vegetable and pig patch.
I got my allotment in 1974. The Good Life series began in 1975. It ran until 1978. My allotment did not.
Kingston council had plenty of spare allotments down by the by-pass – they had not come back into fashion quite yet – and was only too pleased, if a little surprised, at being asked for one.
It turned out to be a serious piece of land. The old chap who had the one next to mine (full of good green things and even roses) was cheery but he looked a bit puzzled. He was right to be puzzled.
This is what you have to know about allotments:
NATURE IS YOUR ENEMY
You become locked in combat with a tenacious and devious opponent. My allotment was covered in what I thought was grass. It turned out to be the dreaded couch grass. The more you cut up the roots in your efforts to dig it out, the more it grows.
I decided that industrial methods were required. I hired a rotovator and balanced it precariously half out of the car boot as I headed off for a stint as a ploughman. The old chap next door looked even more puzzled. And my illusions of being care and machine-free were already gone.
I soon learned that clearing the land is only the start. You have to keep it cleared. Otherwise nature strikes back – and couch grass returns. As it did.
And so did blackfly – especially on the broad beans, which they love. And maggots (or was it clubroot?) that destroyed the roots of cabbages and other brassicas (a word I newly learned).
THE COST
I have already mentioned the car. It took 10 minutes to get down to the by-pass. I reckoned that you needed to be on site working for at least an hour at least three times a week. Otherwise you were overwhelmed. And that kind of driving drives up the cost.
And don’t forget the tools, seeds, fertilizer (on my sandy soil it was vital – forget that organic dream), net coverings (birds are another arrow in nature’s quiver), fungicides, green and blackfly spray. I could go on.
It wasn’t long before I started thinking of how easy it had been to get veggies at Kingston market. Or at the little shop round the corner. And frankly, they tasted just as good. Another illusion gone.
THE GLUT
Nobody told me that everything came in at once. Suddenly, there was an abundance of French beans (my most successful effort). But what to do with them?
The only answer was to freeze them but in those days we were told to “blanch’ them first which meant boiling them for a minute (I never did work out why) and then bagging them up in fiddly portions. Of course you needed a freezer (more cost and valuable space used up). And you can’t freeze potatoes.
Courgettes also did well. But we could not eat them fast enough and within days, they had grown to the size of marrows. I found that I needed a compost heap for my unused crops.
And naturally (for nature works according to its implacable timetable), when we had a glut, so did everyone else. The shops were full of whatever we had. The question loomed ever larger – so why grow your own?
THE EFFORT
My plan of three hours a week was the basic minimum. And it was rarely achieved after the initial enthusiasm wore off, which it did very quickly. One began to find excuses – babysitting was one, though I, or rather we, did take the pram down there a few times (see photo), which required more effort getting it in and out of the car.
And in the photo, I also see a pathetically small watering can. This just about sums up the odds I was facing. You had to use one as the council did not let us deploy hoses, so you had to trudge back and forth to a tap some way from my alloted space. It took ages. Mark you, in the photo the broad beans look quite healthy (you can tell from their flowers) though I am not sure why I covered them in a wire cage, as blackfly would not be – and were not – deterred by that.
THE CONCLUSION
The Queen and Prince Philip survey their new ‘allotment’
In the end, after the second summer, I think, it all became too much. I had found out that I was not really up to this hand-to-hand combat. It was too much effort, too costly and you could get stuff from the shops or market much more easily. I told myself this was also helping the people growing and selling it…
I tried cutting the allotment in two, giving half to a friend who was much better than me (he had been in the Canadian navy). But I knew the end was coming. The couch grass made a steady return to my half. Then I hung up my spade.
I came to think that man and nature do not live well together but are best apart.
And unless you are really prepared for a fight, leave it to the professionals. The Queen does.
