The Allotment in January

 

 

Early January, only just light on a cool and damp morning, and I'm heading to the allotment to empty the bokashi. The alleyway and the green have a worn-out, post-Christmas air, a low point of gathering litter and over-trodden grass. In our shared plot, the chickens seem less eager than usual to be out of the coop. World-weary and bedraggled, they already number one less than they did in the autumn. They're not enjoying this wet winter one bit.

Our main plot is further down, hidden away by the burn with its dense, ever-sprouting crack willows. The sky is dull and sullen, but the birdsong is almost spring-like. The blue tits are active in the ancient elder, the sentinel of our plot, and the air smells of recent burning, damped by night rain. It’s a familiar smell down here – people are always looking for an excuse to burn stuff – but again it reminds me of spring; last year, around April, one of the abandoned plots was taken by a new tenant, and in preparation, one of the old hands took it upon himself to clear the plot and burn what couldn’t be re-used or recycled. I spent a happy week popping in and out, wheelbarrowing bricks away, helping with the burning. I cherry-picked the best of the analogue tools – ancient, oversized screwdrivers; a hammer with a head as heavy as a brick. The rubbish left for landfill was obscene - two long rows of bin-bagged junk, snaking the length of the plot, with the remains of a bewildering variety of wooden doors and double-glazed windows stacked at the ends. I took two old doors, the least decomposed of the bunch, to use as benches in the polytunnel – both were two inches thick and spiked with hundreds of round rusted nails. It took an hour to hammer them all flat.

This morning the polytunnel is a picture of decay. The nasturtiums which we foolishly planted - and which colonised one entire end of the tunnel, smothering the tomatoes and preventing the door from closing - are a sorry mass of slimy brown, rotting into the old carpet. The chillis we forgot to harvest hang like shrivelled red stockings on their mummifying plants. On the reclaimed door bench lies a triptych of wasted tomatoes, gherkins and cucumbers. The greens have gone to yellow, and the reds have gone to brown, and they have begun the process of receding from a vegetable state to a less three-dimensional state of blown matter and gently liquefying goo.

Speaking of goo: bokashi time. This is how we compost all our food waste, including cooked food - preserved with bokashi bran, left for a couple of weeks, then emptied into the compost bin (your standard dalek bin). The idea is that the preservation process produces waste that breaks down quickly and easily and which, crucially, is unpalatable to vermin. It doesn't work. Well - the preservation works, the composting works, and we do end up with a very decent amount of home-made compost - but the rats are not put off in the slightest. You can see their little runs and pathways, all around and under the composting area. The waste is shredded, mixed, kicked about, piled up all over the place. When you open the lid of the bin you'll see a long tail flick fast and snake-like, deep into the pile. This is Ratty's home, and every day we bring him more food and more warm bedding. I wonder if he actually thinks he's our pet. Emptying the containers is also rather unpleasant - apart from the rich, fruity smell of vomit which greets you when you take the lid off, you are faced with the prospect of reliving a fortnight's worth of plate scrapings as it slides into the compost - leaving a good layer stuck to the plastic filter tray which must now be scraped off. And then there's the cleaning of the container... 

However. None of our waste goes to landfill, and we have fine, crumbly black compost, helpfully aerated and fertilised by our clever rodent cousins.

I read this morning that wood avens, the ubiquitous weed of damp, shady places like these allotments, is a green that can be harvested and eaten all year round. Even more interestingly, the roots can be dug up and used as a clove substitute in baked apples. Outside of our plot, in the little wooded area which I've claimed guardianship of, is a strip of weedy growth comprising creeping buttercup, false oat-grass, cinquefoil and a few introductions of my own like red campion and foxglove. There's also a lot of wood avens. Seized with sudden curiosity, I fetch a trowel from the shed and dig up a likely-looking clump - although I must have dug up and removed wood avens from our beds a thousand times before. I remove the soil from the fibrous, spreading roots, slice a few off and take a whiff.

They smell of soil, not cloves. But something stirs in me, a sudden and unexpected warmth - a half-forgotten feeling of tired satisfaction. Again I’m thinking of spring, when soil is once again a thing we turn, handle, sense. I think of new beginnings and restored vigour... but maybe the world of the garden, or the urban or suburban allotment, is always like this, at any time of the year – a world of healthful outside work, ready and waiting for you to get stuck in. It’s just that, around March as the days get longer, I throw myself into it – thinking up new projects, new reasons to dig the claggy soil to search for bricks. It's odd that I’ve spent so much of the last eight years or so down here by the burn, shifting earth and clay and wood, clearing, building, growing, daydreaming.

But maybe that’s what life is all about, in the end. You, in your own patch, forming rat-like runs and pathways, taking what you can from the soil, processing your produce. Seeing the year through, from hopeful spring till midwinter's decay. I can’t wait till March.