Payback Time

It is eleven o’clock, very hot and I have been working hard all morning cleaning out ducks and chickens, so I reckon it is time to put the kettle on, indulge in a slice of cake, drag the chair out of the ‘veg’ shed into the orchard, chose a shady spot and collapse before I get the mower out and cut the grass around the allotment. 

The apple tree stands in its own pool of shade, low slung branches hung with golden brown Russets ripening in the sun. This tiny orchard was planted with eating apples; bright crimson Discovery which are ready to eat, crisp, green, Greensleeves which will be ready to pick at the end of the month and then my favourite; an apple called Elstar which is green and yellow with a red blush when it is ripe at the end of October. Plum and gangly greengages rub branches gently in the breeze. The gages and the Czar plums are a mouth watering memory but the best is yet to come as the Victoria plums soften in the sun.

Through a gap in the trees, I can see onions ready for lifting and in the greenhouse lurk red tomatoes, dark green cucumbers and bell shaped peppers; because this is payback time. Payback; for all the hard work that has gone into the garden this year. At last, the bad guys have stopped growing faster then the good guys and it is time to start harvesting. There are beans, long dark runner beans, short round French beans dripping from their poles, their red and white flowers dancing in the warm air. The courgettes are making a bid to take over the garden and amongst the tangle of umbrella leaves and splashes of yellow flowers lurk full grown marrows. Their cousins, the squashes, are ripening fast; turning orange and red and the colour of butter. Crimson beetroot rubs shoulders with beautiful deep green and red veined Swiss chard. Tall, straight, pale green leafy celery is ready for cutting and then there are the specials; the feathery fronds of Florence Fennel drifting in the wind, Globe Artichokes with splayed, grey toothed leaves and edible flower buds and above all rises the sweet corn, yellow and straight, standing sentinel, cradling tightly closed green cobs with brown dangling tassels.

Winter crops are waiting in the aisles; the cabbages, sprouts, kale, leeks, parsnips, and celeriac, preparing for their grand entrance into the spotlight as the first frost takes out the soft summer plants.

There is something special about sitting down to a meal; looking at the plate in front of you and knowing that everything you are eating you have produced yourself. Not an air mile in sight. The family smile indulgently when I point out that this food is our food; home grown to the last nibbled leaf. I bang on about it to them in the hope, I suppose, that one day they might realise how good it is to eat fresh, seasonal, misshapen carrots and holey greens and want to follow in their slightly (?) weird mother’s footsteps and grow some of their own food.

What I don’t tell them is that it’s not always easy and life on the allotment is a battlefield, requiring hard work, diligence, constant vigilance and a large dollop of optimism. Anything that can fly, flutter, crawl, hop or run sees your allotment as an open invitation to dine. From the first rustle of the seed packet to the last cabbage cut, you are sharing what you grow with the wildlife around you. It is like living in a commune; you share. You share your pea, bean and sweet corn seed with the resident mice, anything that dares to raise its head above soil level with the slugs and snails of this world, your brassicas with those intricately striped cabbage white caterpillars, your fruit with the birds and lots of maggoty things, your unprotected sprouts with the pigeons, your proud standing sweet corn with rampaging badgers and your runner beans with long necked deer. Everyone shares; it is just that you do all the work.    

However good your defences something will get through; how do those cabbage white butterflies get inside the nets? Where is the hole in the fruit cage that let the blackbird in? Who tunnels into the potatoes and turns the tubers brown. There are more questions than answers but of course, there are more of them than us.

Then there are the disappointments. I have not been able to germinate a single carrot this year. What am I doing wrong? The beetroot looks lovely but it took two sowings to get it to this stage. Where are the swedes I sowed? Why did my row of lettuce only produce two plants that I could cut and chop into a salad? Did I blink and miss the strawberry crop?

What about the heart breaking moments? Shutting up one evening in June I noticed a black blotchy leaf on one of the main crop potato plants. Despite the fact that I held my breath, two days later, they all had blight and I was scurrying around cutting off all the leaf in the hope it would not reach the tubers. A week later, I dug all the potatoes and although I rescued what was there the crop was light and there is a gap in the storeroom. The weather had been warm and humid; perfect for the spread of blight and it found its way into the polytunnel and the green houses. I dared to go on holiday and returned to a scene of devastation amongst the tomatoes. The same day I discovered brown rot amongst some of the apples. As I trimmed blackened leaves and threw diseased apples on the fire heap, I seriously wondered why I was doing what I was doing. What was wrong with the supermarket and a deck chair in the summer? But with a change in the weather, severe pruning back of the tomatoes and a careful eye on the apples, the tomato plants have given a good crop for the summer even if there will not be any for chutney or freezing and the apples seem to have survived the hiccup.

Everything else has grown so maybe gardening is about letting go when things go wrong while hanging on to the things that have gone right.

But why do it? Maybe it is for that first bite into pale yellow sweet corn dripping with butter, or the bowl of raspberries sitting in the fridge, or the earthy smell of beetroot gently boiling on the hob. Or is it being able to look out across the allotment at the rows of vegetables and fruit and flowers just knowing that all this is the result of your hard work and labours.