The fields are green but the allotment is still bare.
Dear Caroline,
It’s taken me weeks to reply to your last letter about your allotment being vandalised, and hopefully by now you’re back up and running and it’s a distant memory. How completely infuriatingly maddening, though, to have some senseless idiots undoing all the careful work you’d done. I know that the polytunnel and the rabbit fencing must have cost a lot but it’s not about the money, is it – it’s the way it sets you back several steps in the whole process so you have to start again. So incredibly disheartening. But you’re right – you can’t let them defeat you – you just have to put it behind you and move on (while thinking murderous thoughts and resisting the urge to march into their homes and shout a lot, I imagine).
I know I’m not alone in feeling disheartened about this weather at the moment, too. It’s just so cold. I keep trying to switch the heating off and sneaking back down to switch it on. And baking lots of cakes to make me feel better. My emerging potato tops were brown and frosted on Sunday morning and my poor tomatoes, even in the cold frame, are pale and wilted like sickly children. All they need is a good dose of hot sunshine but I’m not sure if or when we’re actually going to get it.
It did stop raining enough over the weekend for me to spend most of the day on the allotment on Saturday and I planted spinach and salad leaves, and chucked in a load of chard seedlings. I felt a whole lot better after that. Then I tied up the pea seedlings that had managed to escape the appetite of the mouse, using bright orange string to deter (ha, fat chance) pigeons, partridges and crows. Rabbits continue to gnaw their way in. It just seems this year as if all the wildlife in the area has discovered us. They are talking to each other and passing it on: ‘Hey, get on down to OX10 for a party, it’s rockin’. There’s enough food for everyone!’
Pea seedlings.
Even the most fanatic wildlife promoter amongst us is muttering things about trying to keep the rabbits out – she’s the hedgehog-rescuer who gets upset if we strim round the perimeter of the fence because she says we’re destroying too much of the natural habitat, or complains about us having bonfires because we might roast the voles. She won’t even use netting because she’s afraid the birds might get caught in it. I keep wanting to say to her – get real, having an allotment isn’t all about sharing, it’s about growing stuff for humans to eat, not animals. But I think she might be getting the message now, having found all her broccoli seedlings munched down to the ground in the space of 24 hours.
And Caroline, my annuals patch! Don’t even ask. What on earth was I thinking? How in God’s name did I think I was going to be able to rescue a virgin patch of land full of nettles and docks and the very same season turn it into a flowery paradise? I reckon it takes four years of repeated weeding to tame a patch of land, so I think I just got carried away in a fit of enthusiasm, only to realise three months later that I am completely bonkers. Of course it hasn’t helped that I was unable to get out there for over three weeks because it was so wet – but on the top half of the plot the weeds were knee high so I had to strim them back at the weekend. And where I have sowed nigella, larkspur and poppies, a few measly seedlings (the ones that didn’t rot in the deluge of rain) are fighting their way feebly through the weeds like people trying to go the wrong way in a crowd. Meanwhile my pathetic little mini greenhouse is heaving with seedlings that I don’t want to plant out until I’m sure there will be no more frosts – IT’S NEARLY JUNE! As you can tell, I’m annoyed with myself for failing hopelessly in the project I was so excited about – but as Sabina reminded me today, we couldn’t have picked a worse year to grow annuals from seed.
So I plough on, trying not to get disheartened. I remembered Sarah Raven saying something about doing a second sowing of half hardy annuals in May, so I rushed out just before I had to go and do the school run to sow a few extra things – salvias, snap-dragons and wall flowers – and now pray for some good weather.
lots of love
Clare x
Plants trying to escape from my mini-greenhouse.
