An overdue non-update

Pictured: the author

I can’t believe I haven’t posted since June, or really that so little has happened in my life since then. Two things that directly impacted the allotment have happened: I developed a physical health issue, and then immediately, the council tried for around the eighth time to take the allotment off me.

My two new besties

The health stuff turned out to be much less scary than I’d feared, and while it’s still having a day-to-day impact on my life, the doctors don’t think it’s malignant or that it will get any worse than it currently is. I have a lot to say about medical misogyny and how, just because this won’t kill me or significantly impact my fertility, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like treatment for this very painful condition, but if I start on that issue I won’t stop.

And then in the midst of all this last summer, I got another letter from the council, saying there’d been another surprise inspection and they were taking the allotment off me. There’s no point in me going into all the finer details here, it’s enough to say I don’t think I’m being treated fairly, I know that everyone else is made aware of when these inspections happen and I mysteriously get left out, and although I am a very reserved person, if I feel something’s happening that isn’t fair I absolutely lose the plot, so I appealed the decision, sent the entire council my medical history plus a year’s worth of evidence that I’m cultivating the allotment on a regular basis, and won the appeal.

So I still have it but if I’m honest with myself, a lot of the energy’s gone out of it, because I often feel like there’s no point in me drawing up my elaborate annual allotment plan if it’s all going to get taken away from me. I’m trying to keep things much simpler this year and stick to fairly basic veg.

A tiny bell in the shape of Our Lady watching over the potatoes as they chit, which tells you a lot about who I am generally as a person, I think.

I’ve broken my own rule and have started growing rhubarb, which I do not enjoy the taste of but which takes up a lot of allotment space (plus there are ways of donating food so it’s not going to go to waste), and I’ll be growing Arran Pilot, King Edward and Maris Peer potatoes this year, so a nice mix of first earlies, second earlies and maincrop. I’m going to try and be better with spacing and watering this year too. So rhubarb, onion, garlic, potatoes, the artichokes (which have already started showing a lot of growth this year, probably because of the scarily warm February we’re having) and maybe sweetcorn again – it’s enough for the season when you take the fruit into account, and I also moved the strawberry patch to give it a bit more room (hopefully it won’t get ideas and start growing throughout the entire allotment). There’s no need to overthink things this year.

What I’m probably coming to terms with, though, is that I’m not going to be cultivating this particular bit of land forever. Either they’ll succeed in taking it off me at some point because I run out of energy to constantly fight them, or I’ll just run out of energy full stop. I’m not very happy where I’m living at the moment either, and have felt for quite a while like it’s time to move on – it’s just figuring out the logistics of moving on that’s proving tough and slow.

But…but! It is not all bad. Maybe I shouldn’t have updated while feeling a little bit sad. It’s not allotmenteering I’m not enjoying, and I basically want to grow vegetables for the rest of my life, it still makes me really happy – it’s just I’m coming to terms with the idea of not doing it in the same location. And when I look at it that way, it’s really not such a big problem (I started therapy this week because of a load of traumatic activist stuff and I’m very conscious that I’m speaking exactly like someone who’s just started therapy). Who cares about where the soil I’m growing veg on is location if I’m still enjoying growing that veg?

Plus I started sea swimming! And got sunburn while on the Costa del Donegal yet again! I love sea swimming now, I never thought I’d become One of Those Women but now I am, and I’m going into the sea for a good cause next week, and overall I’m finding it helpful with the health stuff, both physically and mentally.

So I’m still finding my way through, and am still doing my best with the allotment to ensure that as and when I move on, it’s on my own terms. Nobody wants something they enjoy so much becoming a battle, and sometimes you need to pick your battles.

Sweetcorn time

It was great growing sweetcorn last year even if I went about it the wrong way, and because I’m a strong independent woman who learns from her mistakes and takes feedback on board, I’m growing three varieties this year, still probably making mistakes, but friends, they’ll be different mistakes this time. The three varieties are:

• Ambrosia
• Moonshine
• Alliance

I really like the way they were packaged in these trays – it meant they arrived safe and sound and they also retained the moisture pretty well, plus it was really easy carrying them over to the allotment (owing the the pressures of neoliberalism and the resultant and ongoing environmental crisis, I still do not own a car).

So here they are, the lads, all in bloc formation – something I’m personally very familiar with even if I failed by planting them in rows last year like an amateur. I’m concerned the three varieties will cross-pollinate, there isn’t a huge amount of space between them, but given that as predicted, I got too enthusiastic about potatoes and planted them everywhere else, there was no space left. If I get new and weird varieties of sweetcorn as a result, that will simply be my legacy.

The rest of the allotment isn’t looking too exciting at the moment, although she is looking extremely green, but the wildflower, artichoke, potato and strawberry patches are all doing well. Everything’s suffering from the lack of water – it’s been exactly a month since it last rained here in north Northumberland and that’s not normal or great. I’m not going to use a hosepipe, so my allotment neighbours are often treated to the haunting sight of me hobbling around with two watering cans. I also get the odd visitor as I work:

That’s about it up until now – the allotment’s colours are pretty much only green right now and I’d like for the wildflowers and sweetpeas to do something to change that, such as ‘hurry up and bloom’, but nature, she cannot be rushed.

I’ve had some positive changes in my life since I last posted, one fairly big one (to me at least) being that I got a job working with the Irish language, an actual job with a contract and everything. I haven’t done any work that’s not either volunteer or freelance since 2015 so it was quite a big step but it’s been brilliant so far, both from the point of view of easing some of the constant financial pressure and also just for my confidence. And having colleagues who I only communicate with through Irish!

I also took a holiday to Sicily last month, aim being to just go and do things other than activism and languages. Obviously I ended up going to an anarchist fort and also obsessed A BIT about Sicilian dialect words, but I also did some relaxation and I can prove it.

I’m also, obviously, heading over to Ireland later this summer to speak Irish to farmers and anyone else with the patience to listen. I came back off antidepressants a few months back too, which maybe shouldn’t feel like an achievement since I’ve been off and on them for a fair bit of my adult life now, but I’m still counting that as something I’ve achieved, especially given how hard things have been since last summer. On a practical level it also means I don’t get anything like as travel sick (the mysteries of Citalopram; this wasn’t a major issue any of the times I was on it before but for whatever reason, this time round was horrific), which I think is a sign that I am meant to go on holiday. Even if the sun makes my hair extremely large. It only increases my power.

Allotment 2023

Yes, I have been using this snowy and chilly time of year to plan my allotment for the season to come (since my plan to move away from England is going poorly owing to me ‘having no money’). Behold my annual piece of artwork:

The ‘seating, one day’ action point has remained unresolved for the entire time I’ve had the allotment, I’m happy to say, and probably will remain unresolved forever since I just sit on the ground and never invite people to the allotment because it is the place I use to escape humans. But yes, this is the basic plan for the year, I’m once again avoiding anything too exotic – I was tempted to try oka again but as we’ll see, I became too enthusiastic about potatoes to have space for anything else, not for the first time in my life. The ginger I was planning on growing last year (where the squash will hopefully be this year) didn’t work so I’m giving it a second shot in a location that gets a bit more sun. I really enjoyed growing sweetcorn for the first time last year even if I did it wrong and planted them in rows, not blocks, but we move, friends, we live and learn.

I’m blessed with a mother who not only doesn’t mind that I only see her a couple of times a year because I’m always off on a protest or planting vegetables, but who also sometimes funds my lavish livestyle, in this case with a Christmas present that was garden centre vouchers. They couldn’t be redeemed online so yesterday I had a Big Day Out.

I was so excited. My trip involved quite a lengthy hike because I’m not the kind of person with a “car” and in Northumberland we don’t really do public transport, but I got there and just look. I had a huge lunch with the elderly folk and bought half the shop. I was in a kind of happy daze and reflected that if it wasn’t for capitalists, misogynists and fascists constantly making the world so miserable, I could just be on my allotment all the time and sometimes friends would visit, and sometimes it’d just be me, and I’d be happy.

The absolute highlight of the trip was pick n mix potatoes. This is so exciting because I always want to try out many varieties but they tend to sell them in 2kg bags. The original plan was to grow three varieties because if I let myself get too excited about potatoes, I only grow potatoes, and you can’t do that because crop rotation and soil nourishment are both things that exist for a reason. I’ve compromised a bit with myself and am still only growing three varieties in the beds, namely:

• Wilja (second early) as a general all-rounder
• Pink Fir Apple (maincrop) because they’ve worked well before and they’re unusual enough to be significantly different from what you can buy in supermarkets
• Sharpes Express (first early) just because I don’t think I’ve tried them before

This system with the three varieties with different harvesting times works pretty well – one of my biggest early allotment errors was just harvesting all the potatoes I’d grown at once instead of adopting an ‘as and when’ approach. I’ve become a lot more calm and patient in my dotage. Except, apparently, when it comes to getting emotionally overwhelmed in garden centres because I also bought small quantities of:

• Pentland Javelin (first early)
• Heidi Red (maincrop)

The plan with these is to use growbags – I watched a Youtube video a while back arguing that even if you have the space, growing potatoes in bags is ALWAYS the better option. I think for the Heidi Red in particular, it’ll make them easier to harvest, since the colour makes them stand out from the soil way less. I want to see if this is a better method overall, basically, and at least this way, I can grow even more potatoes without exhausting the soil. My kitchen is now entirely full of chitting potatoes.

So that’s basically it from me, I’m doing far better overall than I was last time I wrote, and have a lot of very supportive and kind friends around me. In terms of the allotment, I’m hoping for far fewer battles with the council. I’m still taking pictures every week to prove that I’m there on a regular basis and sometimes the headlines are NOT NECESSARILY ones you’d want right next to your face, but sometimes being petty leads to these situations.

Norbert bears fruit

Yes. Norbert the strawberry tree has borne fruit after seven years. I’m not trying to be critical of Norbert, everything happens in its own time. Of course, the fruit of a strawberry tree is not known as ‘strawberries’, it simply does not have a name, but I found this quote on Wikipedia:

The name unedo is attributed to Pliny the Elder, who allegedly claimed that “unum tantum edo“, meaning “I eat only one”.^[12] It is not known whether he meant that the fruit was so good he could eat only one, or whether he meant that the fruit was uninteresting so he ate only one.^[13]

I also only ate one, but not for either reason, just because I could only reach one that looked ripe.

I make absolutely no apologies for the state of my hand here: I am, as we know, a woman unafraid of toil and the dirt is merely the result of that courage. The fruit tasted…good? Part of my actual job involves translating menus so you’d think I’d have more words to describe it. It tastes nothing like strawberries. The texture reminds me a bit of lychees, the flavour is fairly sweet and quite mild. This is one of the best things about gardening, in my view – most people haven’t even heard of these daft fruits, they’re not sold anywhere commercially because it’s hard to transport them, and it’s not something I’d have ever tasted had it not been for the fact that I have an allotment. Might have to fight the bees for the fruit though (it’s OK, the bees have had a hard time lately, they can have it). Norbert’s also started leaning into the main path through the allotment so I’m either going to have to prune him, tie ropes to him or just change the path somehow.

Regret to inform everyone what I went mad again and am trying to keep on top of the council’s constant attempts to evict me, one of my current methods is ‘deranged signs that I’ve put up all over the allotment’. It might antagonise the councillors but I suppose they already dislike me anyway, and I’m trying to forestall yet another conversation where I explain a) no, I’m not going to use weedkiller b) no, this doesn’t make me a hippy commie although I am a commie c) yes, green manure and weeds are different things and d) I have the right to quiet enjoyment of the allotment AS PER OUR CONTRACT, SHARON!

Planning to plant onions over winter and maybe garlic too, since the latter didn’t do very well over the summer. I haven’t had much success with late season potatoes in the past – I think if I was doing them again, I’d grow them in containers. I saw a Youtube video a while back about an allotmenteer who only grew potatoes in bags on their allotment, because it was way more efficient in terms of space and yield. I’m considering that for next year although space efficiency isn’t one of my primary concerns.

I’ve been sullenly rolling out this weed cover that the council gave me as a kind of olive branch. It’s not even covering the beds, it’s covering nettles that’ll probably grow through the weed cover eventually, but for now it’s nice because it allows me a nice space in which to have a lie down if needs be. This is how we sunbathe in Northumberland.

Things have been really difficult these past few months. I’m back on Citalopram – the plus side is that I don’t feel like I want to die constantly, but the downsides are that I feel vaguely queasy most of the time and I’m not really allowed to drink alcohol. It’s not a bad trade-off all things considered, but it’s been caused by this miserable ongoing situation where members of an activist group I was in are suing a friend of mine, another woman who, like me, left because of all of the misogyny and spoke out about it. Things were very bad within the group, like, it’s not normal to have to be taking anxiety medication before every meeting because you’re worried people are so hostile to you, and I guess I’d hoped to not be affected by it any more after leaving, but then this happened and I’m very scared for my friend. It’s the kind of thing that could’ve been sorted at an early stage with an ‘OK, we recognise that you were hurt by these things we did, we’re sorry, and we’ll try and do better’, but I never got a real apology, and once you introduce the law against your former friend, and pass her home address on to the solicitors, you’re removing the option to effectively mediate, especially if you’re positioning yourself on the radical left. I’m not sure what part of anarchist theory justifies going to solicitors when you’re criticised – I thought we weren’t meant to be the biggest fans of cops, and solicitors are surely just posher cops – and on a practical level, if somebody sincerely believes their criticism of you, no amount of solicitors letters is going to change their honest opinion or prevent them from speaking to others about the harm you’re causing them. There’s still this shameful little part of me wishing for a text that just says ‘I’m sorry, let’s talk about it’.

I think it’s this fear of truly seeing when you’ve caused somebody genuine hurt, and of course it’s confronting because it clashes with the view we all have of ourselves – I get that to an extent because I’m guilty of it too. Very few people see themselves as bullies, or as misogynists, racists, or bigots of any kind, and this is why it’s so important to listen to criticism when it’s first mentioned how your behaviour is impacting someone else, instead of doubling down, or, just as harmfully, pretending you have nothing to do with it, because that’s the kind of thing that rips friendships apart. And if you don’t have these friendships or at least respect for your comrades, you don’t really have a group. But while it’s brought out the absolute worst in some people, it’s brought out the best in others and we’ve had some fantastic solidarity. It’s been a complete outlier in terms of what I’ve experienced in activism and it’s not going to put me off, it’s just knocked me back. I know I must be doing better mentally, though, because I’ve started being a bit nicer to myself and planning fun things I can do in future. I’ve embraced non-alcoholic prosecco, for example.

And I’ve permitted myself the odd nibble on nasturtiums as I stroll through the allotments! I’m thinking about growing oka again next year, because that was one of the things that for whatever reason did really well, plus it can’t be bought locally. But this is a job for the version of me that’ll exist next month.

Trevelyan’s corn

I’m happy because the sweetcorn experiment was a success, at least as far as my initial findings indicate.

I didn’t really enjoy eating sweetcorn before this but it tastes really different fresh (and grilled with a bit of garlic), so that’s my lunch sorted out for the next couple of weeks. I’m very pleased with it overall, apparently you know they’re ready to harvest when the wee hairy bits are brown? Pictured: the wee hairy bits.

I’ll leave some to grow a bit bigger but I’m planning to grow sweetcorn again, it was pretty easy, takes up a good amount of space and doesn’t seem to require much in the way of care (it probably benefitted from the heatwave but I guess that’s just what we’ll all have to put up with as the planet hurtles ever-closer to extinction). It’s second only to potatoes and artichokes in terms of allotment success stories.

I’ve also started harvesting the chickpeas, although I don’t know yet how successful that’ll be. I really want to have enough to make my own hummus because OF COURSE I’m the type of person who makes their own hummus, but I’m drying the chickpeas first. I ate one or two fresh as I worked, having previously demolished the wild strawberry patch (which I foolishly merged with the normal strawberry patch for whatever reason, with the result that it’s been entirely taken over by their more feral cousins. Something for me to sort in autumn).

I’ve taken up maybe 40% of the potatoes so far, we have the Carolus on the left (with a couple of surprise Other Potatoes from previous years! Clearly my 4-year rotation plan isn’t working as well as I’d hoped) and the Edzell Blue on the right. Yield wasn’t great in either case and the Caroluses were smaller than they had been in previous years, but I suppose we’re only in early August. Still have the Pink Fir Apples to take up but they can wait, they’ve never let me down before.

I’ve been making elaborate salads quite a bit – tis the season after all. This one’s only about 20% home made but you know, comrades, self sufficiency is progressive, and my next salad will be 40% home made. I’m growing a lot of tomato plants on my windowsills and hopefully they’ll be kind enough to actually yield some form of tomatoes in the near future.

I’ve been having yet more trouble with the council, who did another surprise inspection and told me they were taking the allotment away because there’s no evidence of cultivation. Is this their way of telling me they’d like a veggie bag? This inspection was a true feat of physics since I’m the only one with a key, and also a feat of logic given there are many Certain Other Allotments Perhaps Pictured here that are 100% weeds but that have stayed in the same families for years. The one next to me is literally just scrap furniture. I’m kind of feeling that this might be political, since I didn’t have any issues with them before I started doing mutual aid stuff in my town but God forbid I should try and help people locally by giving them free food. Anyway, I sent the councillors the 50-odd pictures of my face posing with a newspaper on the allotment every week this year and they’ve begrudingly extended the deadline to late December, late December of course being the ideal time to inspect an allotment for cultivation. I’m putting down green manure (mostly rye and alfalfa, especially where the potatoes were because the soil looks so sad and depleted) and I’m going to document myself doing that because I just know that the council will say this is the same as weeds. I just think that given the planet’s dying and everything, it might be better to use sustainable methods instead of killing off all the plants? Especially given that the weeds that are indeed on my allotment don’t actually affect anyone else?

Anyway, enough ranting – I sneaked away to Donegal for a few days because why wouldn’t you, it’s objectively one of the best places. Did the trip mostly by bus because again, as discussed, the planet’s dying. It’s nice to be able to travel more, one of the things I really missed during lockdown was the ‘constant trips to Ireland’ portion of my life and I’m delighted that it’s part of my life again.

Terrariums

I felt that the June 2022 ‘terrarium breakdown’ needed documenting, even if only to have something to show my future therapists if the government ever fund mental healthcare properly.

I wouldn’t be a big fan of the old monarchy, it’s fair to say, and for a few weeks I felt like I was living in Ian Paisley’s fever dream. I did not want to live there so I started watching a lot of videos about terrariums. One of my earliest memories is ‘helping’ my mother create one (the extent of the practical support I was able to provide is open to debate). I’m not really into houseplants or even growing anything other than vegetables but I was under some mental strain because every time I went outside to the allotment, I had to run a gauntlet of Butcher’s Aprons. So for several days, the sole focus of my life was on making a terrarium or two.

The first mistake

The main issue was that I ordered too many tiny plants. I went on Etsy, which is never a good idea in the first place, and just wanted all the plants because buying plants is what I do when I have emotions I can’t process. The shop I found was really good, the plants arrived safe and sound, and there was me thinking ‘what have I done’.

It soon became clear that I was going to need more jars, so I scuttled off to the shop and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. I followed a fairly straightforward terrarium guide and used the same procedure each time – gravel, then activated charcoal, then potting mix and moss. All my terrariums were going to be closed on the sole basis that all my containers had lids.

This is where we play a little training montage. I spent an entire Sunday doing this after an incredibly stressful week and it felt good for the sole focus of my angst to be ‘How do I get all these tiny plants into these jars’ for a bit.

I’m going to describe all four of these frightening things I made. This one might be my favourite – I’ve had very limited luck growing orchids that I haven’t imprisoned in glass but that seems to be the way forward because she’s still here after 3 weeks and that breaks the last ‘orchid survival’ record by a good 2 weeks. She’s in there with a little nephrolepis fern, and there are also some decorative skulls from a bracelet that I broke because I was in an Extinction Rebellion meeting where they were making us do guided meditation and I pulled on the bracelet in frustration and scattered the skulls among the hippies. A shocking scene.

This one’s the smallest and she’s a Tradescantia Nanouk. I put way too much water in and am not really sure what to do about this other than ‘don’t water her for a while’, but apparently she should be able to cope because she’s less sensitive to humidity owing to her robust leaves, we’ll see about this.

This is the largest of the four and contains a Blue Star fern and a little Peace Lily (and possibly another plant I’ve forgotten), plus some sea glass I collected. Some of the leaf tips have been burnt under the LED light even after a pretty short space of time so I’m having to take care not to put it under direct light at all, but I think it’ll be quite happy if I just leave it alone in the dark (same).

Finally we have whatever this is. The glowing thing you can see in the middle is a neon angel figure and I have no memory of how I got it so my working theory is ‘God sent a sign that I should stop making terrariums and get a grip’. Plant-wise we have a couple of fittonias and an asparagus fern.

So that’s how my insanity’s manifesting itself this month. I wasn’t hugely picky about what plants to get and ordered the ‘mixed’ batches from the shop but I’m happy with that decision. Three weeks later they’re still going strong, I’m planning on watering them and airing them out every couple of weeks at this point and seeing how that works. It was quite nice to do gardening other than allotment gardening for a change, and now I can’t stop thinking about a potential next project…a goth carnivorous terrarium. But we’ll save that one for another day.

Lentils and chickpeas

After a very slow start, the lentils and chickpeas seem to be doing something.

Chickpeas to the left, lentils to the right. Not all the chickpeas actually germinated but the ones that did seem to be happy at this point, so we’ll see what happens. About 50% of my diet is chickpeas, in accordance with the general leftie stereotype, to it would be nice if I actually get home-grown chickpeas.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll enter my ‘giving spare artichokes to everyone who’ll accept them’ annual phase. The artichoke plants get more massive each year, I’m almost scared, but they’ve never let me down.

I saw these little artichoke ornaments for sale and thought about buying one and presenting it to the allotment in thanks, like a trophy, but that’s a bit weird.

The potatoes are all thriving, which is a relief. I used fertiliser this year – even though I try and operate a four-year rotation system with the potatoes, I grow so many that it’s not practical, and the potatoes have been a little disappointing for the last couple of years in terms of yield. With the fertiliser, it took way less time for the plants to actually appear, and hopefully the yield will be a little better this time round as a result.

Jury’s still out on the sweetcorn. The plug plants have certainly grown in the month or so since I planted them, although we lost one out of the ten more or less straight away, it’s just that they’re not thriving. I’m hoping they’ll have a growth spurt at some point.

Another development in my life is that I’ve become obsessed with terrariums, or at least, I was, as a coping mechanism as an anti-monarchist living in England these days. I planned to make two terrariums because I have two spare jars from when I brewed vodka as a youth. However, I became too enthusiastic, and too insane, and now I’ve ended up with this situation:

In my hubris, I ordered too many tiny plants, and now I might have to have three or four terrariums, but the shop’s out of jars and this is a source of massive stress to me. Creating terrariums is meant to be relaxing, and I have fallen at the first hurdle. But I have booked tomorrow off specifically to try and sort out my terrarium-based issues, which I brought entirely on myself.

I’d like to pretend these salads I made were homegrown, but with the exception of the mint in the lentil salad (ginger mint, incidentally, which is delicious), none of it was, although I suppose it’s early enough in the season that I could blame that rather than my own failings as a gardener. Look how colourful they are, though! The sweet potato and kale one included maple syrup, which I would never have thought to use on a salad but it worked really well.

This isn’t strictly about gardening but I had a chat with a couple of friends about the mutual aid thing on this very podcast. I suppose it is about gardening, really. There are reasons I picked gardening as a hobby – self-sufficiency as opposed to relying on people whose aim is to make a profit from you when it comes to basic necessities like food.

I’m hoping the terrarium-making tomorrow is soothing instead of stressful, I’ve had a couple of weeks where a series of small things have gone wrong and it just throws you off course – like, I broke a tooth, had to get it fixed at the dentist, knock-on effect of which is that I’m stressing about money. I’m trying to move things forward with my mutual aid project but there’s all these unexpected hurdles. Stupid stuff like that, building up. But this is why I think it’s sensible of me to have a weekend where I just potter around with the plants, it’s my first free Saturday in months and now I’m going to examine the tomato and cucumber seedlings.

Sweetcorn

It’s an exciting day in my household. Yes. It’s time to try growing sweetcorn for the first time.

my daughters

These are from Rocket Gardens. Historically I’ve not been a big fan of sweetcorn (don’t tell my ten new daughters) but I ate some on my birthday and it was delicious. Prosecco had also featured that day, however, so maybe that caused a bit of bias.

I was fantastic at time management yesterday and managed to go climbing AND plant sweetcorn AND do my actual job, whatever that might be. It’s so rare to have a day where I feel like I had enough hours. Hopefully my sweetcorn daughters will go big and strong, anyway, I reckon I could’ve got away with ordering another five and planting them closer together, but we live and learn! This is the joy of gardening – it lies in the thousands of mistakes we make, literally every year. I’d been preparing the sweetcorn bed for ages, with lots of compost, so hopefully it’ll all be fine and not eaten by any rabbits, which have previously plagued the allotment, those fluffy fiends.

I moan every year that the potatoes aren’t quick enough to come up but look, here they are! This year I’ve used potato fertiliser, partly because it was on special offer from Wilkos and you can’t go wrong with that, and also because even though I’m trying to keep to a 4-year rotation system, I’m concerned that the sheer amount of potatoes I’ve grown on the allotment has taken up all the nutrients. This is probably paranoia owing to the lush crop of weeds that my allotment is currently sporting. I’m really glad I bought the strimmer but even with that, the weeds are growing faster than I can cut them. But nettles are apparently a sign that your soil is good and fertile and the allotment is about 35% nettles right now.

Finally, here’s a couple of images of the mint I’m growing – ginger on the left, pineapple on the right! Both are thriving right now, probably in memory of their grapefruit mint cousin, who was swept away in Storm Arwen. I use them exclusively for adding to gin and tonic. In my mind, I’m a useful gardener, with all kinds of herbs available right outside my kitchen for the range of healthy and wholesome meals I make from scratch. In reality, Northumberland’s not warm enough for me to properly grow basil, the Best Herb, and my gardening efforts are focused almost entirely on enhancing my gin.

Apple saplings continue to thrive, even though one of the five is curiously massive for no good reason. Pruned the plum and cherry trees this week too, and it’s looking like there’ll actually be substantial fruit from them this year – had a grand total of three cherries and one plum last season and while yes, I have a healthy respect for putting in the minimum amount of effort giving that neoliberalism is driving us towards extinction, I’d hoped for a wee bit more than that.

Seeds you cannot hear may never grow

The tiny artichoke plant I was waxing lyrical about in my last post died, or at least, it’s not going to do anything this year. We had another storm and the leaves just came off, and when I discovered this, I was having a bad mental health day and cried for about ten minutes. But it’s OK! I’m not going to be short of artichokes because her brothers are thriving, even if she’s having a little rest.

I’ve been away for a week or so and I knew the weeds would be creeping up on me so I utilised the strimmer I bought last year. It’s empowering. I can’t tell you how content I feel, defeating the weeds, listening to French revolutionary music. The neighbours are terrified but I’m at peace with that, the allotment is where I go to escape people so it’s not the worst thing if they’re too nervous to approach.

I was over in Ireland, as is my custom, where I celebrated my birthday and also graduated! The first time I graduated, well over a decade ago, I do not think I appreciated it properly because everyone I knew was also graduating, but this time I was doing it part-time on top of maintaining this gargantuan allotment, and having a ‘job’, and doing mutual aid etc., so even though I look daft in an academic hat, I wanted to make a thing out of it anyway. The hat kept falling off my stupid head but I had a nice time anyway. Now whenever I get told I’m not good enough at Irish, I can whack people over the head with my diploma. I forgot to do the hat-throwing thing again, though.

Also when I was over, I got this cool picture from my stint as a farm worker in Conamara! It’s one of my favourite pictures of myself, I think, I don’t remember it being taken and it shows me ‘in the zone’, the happy place I presumably go to when I’m…weeding between onions, in this case.

Back to Northumberland now, and this is roughly what the allotment currently looks like:

It’s always nice to get photos during the very brief window in which a) It’s green and sunny and b) It’s not fully overgrown with weeds. I have everything planted now except the sweetcorn, which should be arriving as plug plants in the next week or so, and which I’m putting in the bed to the right, in front of the newly-dug raspberry patch. So apart from planting them, it’s just a case of staying on top of the weeds until it’s time to harvest.

In a mild panic about what to do with the Five Sentimental Apple Saplings – I’ve seen how fast the cherry and plum trees have grown (along with Norbert the strawberry tree) on the allotment and at some point, I know that the saplings are going to be too big to be portable, a situation that forces me to think about my future and whether I’ll finally move away as I’ve been saying I will for ages. For now, though, I’m happy they survived the winter, I don’t know much about fruit trees other than basic pruning, so this will be quite the learning experience.

Finally I thought I would share the lyrics to this nice anti-fascist song I recently discovered, Song of Choice. Gardening and antifascism are two of my favourite things, and this song reminds me of the importance of literally weeding my allotment, but also the importance of speaking out when I see something unfair.

Ahs gan well

There’s part of me that absolutely lives for the approval of the elderly Northumbrian men who run the various allotments around mine. Because I don’t drive, I have to haul compost from Wilkos to the allotment myself (I don’t even own a wheelbarrow because I’m a bad allotmenteer). So quite often, these elderly men I’m on nodding terms with will be confronted with sights like this:

And while it’s taken around seven years, they’ve stopped offering advice now and just approve of my toil. It genuinely lifts my spirits a little when they say I’m gan well because I carried a heavy thing. I’m also an extreme sociolinguistics nerd and some of these elderly men use words I’ve never heard after a decade of being in Northumberland, it’s so fun.

Anyway it’s very important that people acknowledge the work I did on the raspberry patch. It’s been in a state for the last couple of seasons so I redug it (we’ll see how many Surprise Canes we get, though). I’ve got four new Cascade Delight canes, five Glen Moy and one Black Jewel. I couldn’t resist just having one novelty goth variety but hopefully the other, sensible, Scottish raspberries will give a decent yield.

I’m going with Karina Peas this year – I failed to save some Lord Leicesters from last year because I ate them all and they’re not available commercially at the moment apparently. I only have onions, garlic and ginger left to buy for seeds at the moment, the potatoes arrived and are chitting away nicely.

I went for Carolus and Pink Fir Apple, both of which I’ve grown before and which, together, cover my main potato needs, Carolus being great for chips/baking and Pink Fir Apple being possibly the best salad potato. Went with Edzell Blue for the novelty variety, it’s not really ‘out there’, they’re just a bit purple (which makes them a pain to spot when you’re trying to harvest them), but you know, it’s exciting enough for me.

Some of the seeds I ordered this year have such metal names. DRAGON’S TONGUE. BULL’S BLOOD. AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST…FRENCH BREAKFAST! I’m glad I’m not the only person into gardening who’s got a flair for the dramatic.

The sweetcorn’s arriving mid-April, which I’m quite excited about and it gives me plenty of time to prepare the bed, apparently it’s not too late to do that in spring. I’m hoping to procure the onions and garlic fairly locally, since that’s what’s worked quite well in the past. I had to order a couple of random things to make up a minimum order with the peas and I ended up getting rainbow quinoa, which is painfully middle class but apparently it will look like this?

So not many pictures of the allotment itself at the moment because it’s more or less just soil, and then within a month or so it will be weeds, then there’ll be a brief period in July where I feel as though things are under control, and then there’ll be a harvest, followed by weeds. This is what I have learnt after all of my years of having an allotment.

The artichokes never fail me, though. Look how cute this one is! She’s always been a bit (well, a lot) smaller than her four counterparts who live close by and I think she’s produced a grand total of one globe artichoke, while her brothers produce around 10 each every year. But that’s OK! We love and support her anyway.