GardeNdesigns CREATING GARDENS
Left: ONE MAN AND HIS DIG: VALENTINE PICTURED AT WORK; VALENTINE’S SON, ORLANDO, INSPECTS THE HARVEST.
Onemanandhisdig When Valentine Low took over an allotment in west London, he never anticipated exactly what it entailed: over-enthusiastic weeds, under-enthusiastic children and a strange stirring of vegetable bed envy...
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When we first got our allotment about four years ago, our children were still young enough to get a bedtime story, and one of the favourites which used to get wheeled out on a regular basis was The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I say favourite not because the children were particularly keen on it, but because I would use the slightest excuse to get it down from the shelf so I could look at the pictures. Not only are Beatrix Potter’s illustrations enchanting – as style icons go, Peter in his blue waistcoat with brass buttons is pretty much unbeatable – but they also, in my opinion, laid down the blueprint of everything a vegetable plot should be. The perfect setting would be a walled garden, with a potting shed and cold frame, and lettuces and radishes in neat little rows, and a fruit cage for the gooseberries and currants. There is, however, one aspect in which I demur from the Beatrix Potter ideal: rabbits, I am afraid, would be banned by order. Delightful little rascals they may be, but I am with Mr. McGregor in believing that they belong in the pot, not the cabbage patch. That was the fantasy; the reality was a very different matter indeed. Like many allotments, my plot – in west London – is long on urban grunge and short on rural charm, being surrounded as it is by a sports hall, a block of flats and two main roads. You wouldn’t mistake it for Mr. McGregor’s vegetable garden. But that is no excuse for not trying, and so when my wife and I first arrived on our plot – which at that stage was so thick with weeds I feared that if I ventured within I would never be seen again – we thought to ourselves: “What are we going to do with this? How are we going to make it look nice? Does it matter if we don’t? In sum, what are the fundamental principles of allotment design?” Being determined to adopt a strict system of crop rotation, we decided the simplest way would be to divide the plot into four by means of two intersecting grass paths, which had the added advantage of there being less grass to dig up. It all looked very neat, too, in a geometrical kind of way, and rather different to our neighbours’ plots, which to our eyes looked like big patches of earth with assorted crops growing in a fairly random way. We had beds, and we were terribly proud of them. The feeling of pride didn’t last long, though, as the practicalities of running an allotment began to impose themselves on our little vegetable dream world. First of all there were the permanent crops – a line of raspberry canes along one edge, a gooseberry bush in the
“LIKE MANY ALLOTMENTS, MY PLOT – IN WEST LONDON – IS LONG ON URBAN GRUNGE AND SHORT ON RURAL CHARM”
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“VEGETABLES ARRAYED IN THE SORT OF NEAT LINES WHICH WOULDN’T LOOK OUT OF PLACE AT A SANDHURST PASSING OUT PARADE” corner, a short row of globe artichokes next to the path – which quickly put paid to any ideas we had about an orderly arrangement of vegetables arrayed in the sort of neat lines which wouldn’t look out of place at a Sandhurst passing out parade. Then there was the architecture. Any allotment worth the name has to have a compost heap, not to mention a manure heap as well if you get your horse muck nice and fresh and have to find somewhere to let it rot down; and by the time you have those two sorted out you discover that actually you have to have TWO compost heaps, one to add to and one to mature. There is even an argument that you should have three, but perhaps there are limits. A bench is crucial too, obviously – where else are you going to sit down to admire the fruits of your labours, or even nibble on a radish? Although, somewhat unusually, we have two: the first one, which we inherited from Michael, our plot neighbour, is very beautiful, but not strictly up to the job of supporting the weight of an adult human being, so we made another one out of four old bread crates and a couple of lengths of two by four. Not exactly Terence Conran, but it does the job. Finally there are the children’s beds. If you are a parent, and want to spend any time on the allotment at the weekend, it is vital to put some permanent space aside where they can grow their own crops and generally feel part of the team (although, if your children are as annoying as ours, be prepared for the moment when you realise that their cucumbers/radishes/beetroot are in fact straighter/crisper/ fatter than the ones you have so lovingly tended on the main part of the plot, despite being covered with weeds, underwatered and generally ignored for most of their short lives. A bit like the children, really. Take a tip from me, though: if you have two or more children, make them share the same bed rather than dividing it up into individual units. Separate nation states may have its appeal, but you will find that minor border disputes – “he’s got more than me!” – quickly escalate into major international incidents, and before you know it World War Three has broken out over the tomatoes. By this stage we were finding that the allotment was taking on a distinctly free-form character. But even if your plot is more energy and chaos than order and symmetry, there is still plenty you can do to make it look nice. Flowers are important, even if they are not
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usually associated with allotments. The likes of cornflowers, nasturtiums, tagetes, nigella and dahlias (don’t worry what the gardening snobs say, dahlias are wonderful and blowsy and keep on producing blooms for weeks on end) not only cheer up the plot, but also provide a fantastic supply of cut flowers for the house. Elsewhere, the smallest of touches can make a difference. If you are growing your beans up wigwams – this year we are growing the climbing French bean Cherokee Trail of Tears, quite the most fashionable bean of the moment – try using hazel sticks for your bean poles rather than bamboos: they look much more rustically authentic. The advantage of wigwams is that you can use small children as slave labour – sorry, work experience trainees – to go inside the wigwam and pick the beans you cannot reach. When my son, Orlando was five, we used to call the Orlando-sized space inside the wigwam “bean world”, and that was his personalised harvesting territory: once, when Michael was passing by, I pointed to the scarcelyvisible Orlando and said: “Look, a human bean!” How I laughed, although with the passage of time I cannot accurately recall whether anyone laughed with me. Just when we thought we were getting the hang of this allotment business we acquired some new neighbours. A couple took over the plot next to ours, and were confronted with weeds so thick that I wondered how they were ever going to get it cleared. I discovered the answer a week or so later when two Polish lads, stripped to the waist, set about turning the bindweed-and-dandelion jungle into a wellcultivated plot. Another new neighbour arrived at the tail-end of last year, and then spent the rest of the winter creating an ambitious grid of raised beds. Beautifully engineered they are, the sort of constructions that any cabbage would be proud to spend its days in. I couldn’t help looking on aghast, though; not only are they the only raised beds on our allotment site (I think some of the old codgers regard them as a bit new-fangled) but they make our plot – with its lopsided compost heaps made out of old pallets held together with baler twine – look distinctly ramshackle. I fear I am going to have to raise my game. Now, where’s that copy of Peter Rabbit... ? Gd One Man and His Dig by Valentine Low is published by Pocket Books, priced at £7.99