‘A scythe! There have been scythes here, but not in years. I remember using a scythe, when I was a boy, cutting the corn. Cutting the corn…but we haven’t got any here. What are you after a scythe for?’ I explain that we have recently acquired an allotment, and that I need to cut down some tall grass to get to the ground.

‘…and you can’t get a strimmer up there because there’s no electricity!’

‘That is exactly the problem,’ I say. I am at the Gorleston trading depot, back in my home town. I used to describe the Gorleston trading depot as ‘like Norfolk Homemakers, but less well organised,’ but a surprisingly small amount of people know what Norfolk Homemakers is, so now I describe it as ‘the place your furniture goes when you die.’ I feel this description conjures not only the actual purpose of the depot, but also the atmosphere inside the depot itself.

In one corner of the depot is a few tables and bins dedicated to ‘tools’, although many of them are now half tools, or kind of anti-tools in the way that to make them function again as a legitimate ‘tool’ you would need several other tools to fix them. Nevertheless, I thought this was the most likely place to find a scythe, because most of the tools here are older than me. I found a pretty sturdy looking hoe, but I didn’t buy it (much to Amy’s disappointment) because I don’t really have any idea how a hoe works. I just don’t get the logic behind it, and I have never seen one in use. I think the hole is the most mystifying bit; it looks kind of like a trowel on a long stick, which I could understand…but then why this no doubt essential hole in the middle? I am confident that before the spring I will know how to use a hoe. And I am confident that this hoe will still be in the Gorleston trading depot, or a hoe remarkably similar to it.

So this is why I asked the man in the little room (I am hesitant to call it an office) if he knew of any scythes hidden in one of the many crevices of the depot. To which he answered in the negative, but was fantastically enthusiastic, which is why I carried on:

‘Do you have any idea about where I could get hold of one around here?’

He thought for a while, and said ‘The only place I can think of is a place on Be— are you local?’

I informed him that I was.

‘The place on Bells Road, up on the right, which sells all kinds of antiques and things. The thing is, it has kind of…irregular opening hours. So, what you have to do is go down there, and if you can’t see anyone in there, you go two doors down to Benji’s Bakery. Now, in Benji’s Bakery, you go in and ask for Patricia, remember that name, you ask for Patricia, because she sometimes works in the antique shop. If you ask her, she might be able to tell you whether there’s a scythe in there.’

I thank him, leave, and head in the direction of Bells Road. There is indeed a shop which I can’t believe I have never seen before, because it’s got all archaic nearly-useless stuff that I love to buy - typewriters, old chests, bits of motorbikes. Most of the things I can see through the never-dusted windows were antiques before the war, and might only be described as ‘antiques’ in the same way that a morgue might be described as a ‘social club’. It looks fairly closed, and I find a hand written opening times stuck to the inside of the door which reads:

Saturday morning 10-12

That’s it. Those are the opening times; or more precise the opening time. Just one. So I head over to Benji’s Bakery and ask for Patricia, and I wish, I wish I could take this story further but Patricia wasn’t at the bakery. I bought an eccles cake, and went for a walk on the beach. The long grass at the end of the plot is still currently unkempt, and that’s the end of chapter one.

Today I misread a poem, James Tate’s The Definition of Gardening. The poem is pretty much harmless, and defines gardening in the way of the character - a character called Jim, after James, who seems to fly just to the right of the author’s own temperament. Which is to be expected. At the end of the poem, the protagonist shows us an uncharacteristically sinister version of himself:

the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the healing of the ground.

It’s a very simple and effective way of talking about that whole idea of a human relationship of the land and of nature, which can be expressed in terms of responsibility or ownership. You are allowed to stab the soil and twist and break its tendons. You are allowed to swipe away at overgrowth with a blunt knife; you are helping it, or you are helping yourself, or you are at least entering into a modern contract with the environment.

It is a byproduct of the last few years of my education that whenever I think about wounds and earth together I always think back to the same place and two specific films. That’s obviously a discussion for another place, but let me say just that the phrase ‘the healing of the ground’ therefore strikes me as one that is always loaded, but in a multitude of different ways for different people. For me it is a signifier of cultural memory, and the way ‘healing over’ can be a cover, hiding as much as a sign of getting better. For others the image of the land with an open wound can be enough to symbolise the way we have taken nature for granted and is the reason we now have the septic infection of global warming. Another, perhaps even more universal reading, is with that connection to gardening and the way people tend to associate gardening with old people, or gardening more as one gets older, and the image of tending to the sores of the soil as relative to an unspoken therapy of death or ageing and memories of youth. To make it even simpler, I, for one, know that my grandparents still tend their garden as well as my parents, and remember ‘helping’ with the garden of various relatives, tasting tomatoes and pulling up rhubarb for stewing; I also don’t think I’m the only one who had a much more active role in the garden at this point in my life over any other: before the cynicism sets in and it all seems too much like hard work, before there are more important things than the cultivation of flowers. I still believe that, and despite my current landscape gardening and allotment tendencies I find it hard to see myself ever growing something that wasn’t edible or directly related to growing something edible.

So what I am saying is that Tate’s near-end line was very evocative and made more effective by the fact that it didn’t seem to fit in with the sentiment of the rest of the poem. And then I realised that the word was not healing, but heaving, so the lines read:

the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture

which is poor, so poor by comparison. The other thing I am saying - because this is not my poetry blog - is that I will not hesitate to use Tate’s near miss as my own symbol in a future poem. Thanks, James!

But what of the allotment? I hear you cry. Well, it’s fine. It’s just chugging along at the moment; these are the quiet, slow months when everything has to just grow for a little while, get covered in frost, and then grow some more. There is little to plant that we haven’t already - or, little that we want to plant now that we haven’t already. It’s just a matter of staggering the spring onions and clearing more land.

Alex came down this weekend, who is back from what can be reductively described as six months on european farms, an experience which I hope will funnel itself straight back into our humble cause. On Sunday we added to the great and dangerous pile of carpet, one that I should soon remove to the dump lest it take on the properties of a golem. We uncovered more ground that was previously  a swamp of grass; now it is merely a swamp of dying grass and quite immense grass roots. It is interesting how the term grass roots has always been used to talk about getting back to the beginning, the source, coming back to what really matters - whereas in practise I can’t really see a situation where uncovering grass roots can be cause for celebration. In those depleting instances where it seems beneficial to grow grass, the uncovering of grass roots means that you are killing what you intended to thrive - that open wound again. If you are trying to expel grass from a certain part of land, then the uncovering of thick grass roots means that you will likely never be fully free from those sinuous veins or the green spikes that puncture the skin of your manure and drain, like leeches, the goodness from your crop.

Grass roots: not as good as they sound.

From The Mennonites, by Larry Towell

Second barter with the devil:
           Watermelon seedlings rise like a million forked tongues from the earth. With mouths wide and calling, they tremble in the sun. Christ is alive today but may perish in the market tomorrow. The young plants laugh as Bernardo pulls the weeds from around their throats. God! From their throats they laugh. Nothing can stop them guffawing in his face as he bends to save them from the slow strangulation of weeds. Their jaws are open. He looks down their throats. He listens. He wonders. Will they ever stop?

Looking back, it is strange to see that we have had more trouble fighting carpet than fighting weeds. And now it seems as if we are entering the stage where we might fight both. From the start, I was always aware of the duality of weeds, their complex role both as pests and as healers. There are definitions of weeds which simply say it is a plant growing in competition with cultivated plants; there are definitions which rely purely on the ability of a wild plant to thrive and say nothing about the human interaction to that plant - blackberries, for example, would be seen as a weed. And while now we think of weeds as nuisances and pests, weeds were the first forms of medicine - the Romans, when invading Britain, even brought their own varieties of nettle because of their love for it as a herb and medicine. Weeds are wild fruits; Richard Mabey, in his new book wholly devoted to the subject (which I have not read yet but is on my list) says that Burdock was the inspiration for velcro.

It turns out that carpet has a duality, too, but from the other way around. We think of carpet as protection from concrete, a comfort for our feet and knees, from the raw materials of dwellings; at worst, we think of carpet as something to pull up to reveal all those beautiful floorboards. Outside, we think of a forest floor carpeted with snowdrops and bluebells. We never think of carpet underground, as it has manifested itself on our allotment. Carpet has become evil, where no evil existed before. The carpet is carpeted with soil. The carpet is a cover. The carpet is a hidden wound.

This is from a few weeks ago now. I think I didn’t put it up for so long because I was happy with it sitting there, captured, so that even if everything went wrong I would always know that it happened:

Our first shoots - garlic - defying our diminishing ignorance. At this point, its sad to think that growing things is almost counter-intuitive to me. I’m used to having to fix every little thing before something works properly; I’m thinking primarily about computers, because that’s what I deal with a lot on a daily basis - whether at home or work. I’m of a generation where computers were pretty much introduced to the public on a mass scale (from about 6 of my friends having dial-up to everyone and their grandmother having broadband), which means that I was young enough to adopt their type of logic into my own developing understanding. But it’s not just computers. So many aspects of daily life - whether filling in forms for abstract bureaucratic systems, or leveling a piece of wood to build decking - involve such precise actions that much of our time is correcting mistakes that shouldn’t need to be corrected.

This is why I find it so surprising that you can take or leave most of the instructions on seed packets. Plant them two inches deep? Well, maybe I’ll just stick my finger in the soil and put it in however deep that turns out to be. Even things like ‘put it in with this end facing upwards’ - that doesn’t even matter. Seeds and garlic cloves and onion sets just find the surface of the world without you having to do anything apart from giving them a little puzzle to work out. Same with compost bins: you need to use this wood, and secure it this far apart with three sections and actually it’s better if you use plastic walled octagonal containers with black sides to heat up and aid decomposition…or just nail some pallets together:

And there you have it. The precision of nature is the kind of precision that a teacher gives a child; when nature asks us to write our name and we accidentally throw up, nature says ‘…good, better than last time,’ and finishes the job with cursive lettering.

That said, I do enjoy a bit of precision. I’ve been a bit ill over the past couple of days, so I’ve spent my time watching zombie films and making (vaguely) precise diagrams with (vaguely) precise measurements. They don’t look that great yet because they have no colour and not a lot going on and I made quite a major mistake on one of them that I have yet to correct, but here they are:

This one is two small squares to every foot, and this larger one:

is four small squares to every foot. This one is two pages of my brand new blue graph paper. I never really appreciated the beauty of blue graph paper up until this point, thanks to my increasing love for typefaces and graphic design in general.

In that quiet insanity that one enters on the verge or relief of an illness, I can think of nothing more than making this map bigger; at its current scale, it doesn’t really fit onto two pages, considering the fact that two pages with a foot for every four little squares (let’s call it 1:4) totals 70 feet. The plot itself is 94 feet. Granted - there is a barren wasteland beyond the black tarp (which looks like a map of a desert even at these proportions), but the application of cartography throughout history has done nothing more successfully than fill potential space with imagined space. It is at these moments that I come to completely sympathise with Manifest Destiny. I wonder: was it god who drove the cartographers, or the cartographers who drove god?

As soon as I start to think about expanding the scale so the width would fit comfortably onto two pages (meaning that the length would stretch to six pages to fit the untamed second half of the 94 feet), I remember that very short Borges story, On Exactitude in Science:

…In that Empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the Empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigors of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the discipline of Geography.

I think about my map, changing weekly with the height of the onions and peas, and I think better of it - fit only, in the end, for compost.

The other document committed to graph paper is another imprecise plan which Amy was very keen on, namely the Reckoning of the Vegetables:

and I’m not going to post a larger version of that one because:

1. It’s not finished.
2. I did this when Amy was asleep and I made certain assumptions about vegetables - specifically, which vegetables we will be growing (and in the dead of night I made other assumptions about vegetables, like their attitudes and political viewpoints…don’t you think aubergines would be kind of militant, like right-wing militant? I don’t know why I think that. And potatoes would obviously be communists, and this is a great game to play if you can’t sleep) - and so this is not by any means the final draft.
3. I have no doubt that the final draft will stretch onto at least (those are the italics of barely concealed excitement) two pages.

Finally a mention to Megan Lewis, who is the first of our friends who has come to help us at the allotment. It was a strange day, where I was performing the manly task of hammering nails into wood (see compost bin, above) and listening to witch house and Amy and Megan were talking about different way to pronounce ‘theatre’ (I think?) and constructing these wonderful objects:

which are now filled with seeds. Having other people there makes you work harder and for longer - although it doesn’t seem like harder for longer because there are other people there who you would probably hang out with any way. I think a lot of people would like to help but are hesitant - a lot of people have said to me that they would like to help, but can’t make the commitment. Commitment? What do they think this is? I want to tel them that every Sunday I have trouble getting there, and I rent the damn thing, but I feel like that would make them lose even more confidence in me. Once you get there its fine and its fun. Especially with other people…I have a vague plan of building decking in front of the compost, where it would be impractical to grow stuff but practical and convenient to sit and make tea on a camp stove, or maybe sit and have some sandwiches and a beer. I feel like we haven’t really got the social side of the allotment sorted yet. Actually, a lot of it is my fault - a few friends have been enthusiastic and I genuinely think they would help out with all the shit stuff - but I’m nervous about asking them to help out at the moment, because it kind of is primarily shit stuff, and the allotment doesn’t look that great at the moment. I know, I know - this is when we need the most help; this is when they’ll be willing to get their hands dirty and dig stuff up without fear of ruining some neat little system that we’ve devised. And yet…and yet. I’ll ask them soon. I will.

Anyway, the bed on the left is scattered with red clover seeds, because we’re not going to have any more legumes before the end of the year. The right bed has a single trench of peas, with a second trench to be added once we have trained the roots in toilet rolls. Now, if you take the information I have given you throughout this post and take a look at that first piece of graph paper, you can start to get an idea of where everything is! Is that as exciting for you as it is for me?

The one thing that isn’t on that map is the cats. Of course, how would one map a cat? But I don’t mean moving cats. I mean the cats we hang our cd player and sickle from. The cats without a consistent layer of fur.

Amy doesn’t like the cats…

…Amy doesn’t like the cats at all.

There is something that no one really talks about in terms of an allotment, which is money. Money! No one talks about it much anywhere, I suppose, unless they don’t have it.

Well - I don’t have it. And while we think allotments are the sublime trade off, the thing that means you spend your time rather than your cash, cutting out the middle man of capitalism, it’s not really the case. Allotments still cost money, sometimes a lot of money. The plot? That’s a comparatively negligible amount; as are the tools, if you already have them. And surprisingly cheap if you don’t…just last week, I managed to get a spade for £2.69 from Roys (of Anglia Square, nee Wroxham). £2.69! Nothing good can come of that. Many people have been fucked over in the production of that spade. Still - needs must. Morals are for people who can afford to buy new jeans. Sorry, I don’t really believe that. But I did buy that spade.

The reason we can justify it in our minds is because we don’t buy it all at once: things build up. Much like you want the dirt to rise over the crest of potato leaves, so does the expense account of that shed and soil. Does anyone keep track of this packet of seeds, and that extra trowel? Every one who has an allotment knows this little expensive secret, hiding under the cabbages. Investing. That’s what we tell ourselves. We are investing in the land, we are investing time in meaningful activities. That’s what we’re doing.

This little reasoning is more comforting than most, actually. There is truth here, and beauty. There is land connection, and home grown food, and those phrases could be as empty as any other excuse but, strangely, they’re not. I can’t fully explain that to myself. There is also the best beer you have ever tasted after a Sunday at the allotment.

But, as I was saying, everyone who has an allotment secretly acknowledges that it can be deceptively expensive, and so they share ideas about how to make it less so. One of my favourites - perhaps because I grew up near the sea - is that you can use seaweed as a mulch, and the seaweed also improves the potassium content of the soil. There are other ideas, and most of them are so appealing and seem so ingenious because they not only solve the problem you are trying to solve, but they also fix something else that you hadn’t even thought about.

Take green manures. I first read about green manures a couple of weeks ago, almost by chance. I was trying, at the time, to find an alternative solution to killing the 25 square feet of tall grass with black plastic sheets - mostly because black plastic sheets are surprisingly expensive. At first I thought I could find some kind of farmer wholesale place, because they always seem to cover their whole fields with the stuff. I’m not sure, however, if they’re actually getting it that cheap; it might just be one of those necessities allowed by intensive farming, and the relative expense/cost of each square meter of usable land. The other thing I thought about was cardboard, which is still a potential solution, and hessian-backed carpet. We have an abundant supply of carpet…but this is a bit of a blessing and a curse due to where the previous owner had ‘stored’ it.

That’s when I read a page about green manures. I think I had seen the phrase before, but in all honesty I think I avoided reading about it because I assumed it was a version of organic composting that was going to be more bother than it was worth…but if I knew about it and didn’t do it, I would feel guilty about not doing it. So I didn’t read about it.

But then I did, and I’m glad the words on the page were so persistent. So for those who have been as illogically resistant as me, green manures are basically plants that look a bit like crops or weeds that you sew in empty patches over winter to stifle weed and grass growth in that area. Just like black plastic. But green manures do more, like fixing the nitrogen in the soil, or providing colourful flowers to attract bees to pollinate your nasturtiums and such. Some of the really clever ones even work when you strim them down after winter, like Caliente Mustard (off topic: one of the only words I know in Spanish is ‘caliente’, from ‘Alerta: Caliente!’ on the side of a coffee cup which means ‘Caution: Hot’). Caliente mustard releases what is easily described as the ‘caliente’ part when you cut the leaves, which gets into the soil and helps to prevent soil-borne diseases. Amazing.

Now, green manures aren’t going to be the whole solution, because I will still have to trim or clear a lot of the grass before we can put them down. But still - amazing. It’s like walking into a shop and saying ‘Can I have this?’ and they say ‘That’s quite expensive,’ and you say ‘like how much?’ and they say ‘well, like, this much’ and spread their arms out, and you say ‘oh…ok. Let me think about it,’ which is when they come back with ‘but we have got this, which is cheaper and does what you want it to do plus about five other things that you would probably try and fix anyway.’

What I’m trying to say is that this doesn’t usually happen.

We looked at which green manures to plant, taking into account the different things they do and when you should plant them and for how long and how attractive they are. And if I was being really geeky I would say that it feels a little like an adventure game, where you have to decide what your strengths are and whether to take a medic and scientist or whether to just blast your way through with the tanks and the cannons, but I’m not going to be really geeky and instead I’m going to be really literary (which can amount to the same thing) and say that I wanted to grow tares because there is an R. S. Thomas collection called Tares.

R. S. Thomas was a Welsh poet and also a priest. He wrote a lot about Wales, and nature, and his religion. I’m writing a longer essay about him somewhere else, but what I like about him is how unendingly questioning he is of the people around him and his faith and anything else. From Tares, this is an extract from a poem called A Welsh Testament (which can be read in full here, but don’t listen to the terrible recording of it)

I saw them stare
From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep
In ewes and wethers. I saw them stand
By the thorn hedges, watching me string
The far flocks on a shrill whistle.
And always there was their eyes; strong
Pressure on me: You are Welsh, they said;
Speak to us so; keep your fields free
Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar
Of hot tractors; we must have peace
And quietness.

                        Is a museum
Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper
Of the heart’s relics, blowing the dust
In my own eyes? I am a man;
I never wanted the drab rôle
Life assigned me, an actor playing
To the past’s audience upon a stage
Of earth and stone; the absurd label
Of birth, of race hanging askew
About my shoulders. I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning in the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?

I suppose it is more common now, but there’s something about the attitude towards nature that is unique in the voice Thomas uses. We are skeptical of idyllic countryside images, but Thomas’ archaic writing makes it seem like he was a single voice questioning the role of tradition while at the same time believing completely in the fact that it must not be lost. This skepticism goes back much further of course. Called post-pastoral in literary ecocriticism, the earliest I can remember is Blake’s songs of innocence and experience, which contain all three stages:

• the pre-pastoral, which is a fear of nature, associated with the sublime, where the body or the mind recoils from the hugeness of nature, of the land, of animals because it cannot comprehend their conception or, more importantly, cannot comprehend how humanity will rule it or defeat it
• the pastoral, which is the one everyone knows, the romantic ideal of a cottage in the countryside, or the farmer in the field with his sheep in the morning sun
• post-pastoral, where these ideas are questioned and the conclusions are always different and often unanswered…but which often hints at the pre-pastoral and pastoral attitudes as microcosmic of wider society…and often actually draws in ideas from post-colonialism and - back to R. S. Thomas - projection of a culture onto a landscape in order to map it, or to tame it

Blake’s pastoral skepticism was always a bit aloof, like he already had the answers tied up and hidden away in those elaborate etchings next to the poems. R. S. Thomas just seems more human, like he has no idea where he stands.

I think this is why he is particularly suited to all this talk of green manures. I’m in a position where I don’t really know too much about gardening or allotmenting, and everything I read or attempt is new. I’m learning things all the time. One of the things I’ve been keeping an eye on is that idea of tradition, and making sure I don’t do something just because it’s old and everybody does it, but at the same time not just doing all these new techniques and getting carried along with the hype. Because there is an undeniable hype around allotments at the moment. They’re the in thing - even if no one actually seems to have one, they’re everywhere and the waiting lists are massive.

Any idea of a fad quickly becomes redundant when you start digging, though. No one will care in a couple of years, just as no one will care if you give up now. No one is watching you pull out weeds and clapping as you wrench another piece of twisted iron from the wound of the earth or make a compost bin out of stolen pallets.

Is this what I’m doing here, making sure someone is watching? I’ve been making some field recordings recently, in preparation for a group installation early next year, and recording is the exact opposite of being noticed, of doing something just so people see you do it. From my recording notes:

We are used to forcing ourselves through the air, projecting our voices and our bodies through space. George Berkeley might say that this is simply how to live: existence is nothing unless it is perceived, and the perception of something requires that you are aware of its presence. We are simply willing our existence. What is it like to do the opposite? It is an unusual feeling, to be drowned in the sound of your surroundings, refusing to participate.

This blog feels like the opposite of that. But it also feels like a pay off. Remember, all that time ago at the beginning of this post, I was talking about the cost of the allotment? Well, talk is cheap, and I like doing it. Writing about this thing, this digging thing, works just as well as the seeds in the ground. I feel like this is part of the fruit.

One more from Tares.

Those Others

A gofid gwerin gyfan
Yn fy nghri fel taerni tân
- Dewi Emrys

I have looked long at this land,
Trying to understand
My place in it - why,
With each fertile country
So free of its room,
This was the cramped womb
At last took me in
From the void of unbeing.

Hate takes a long time
To grow in, and mine
Has increased from birth;
Not for the brute earth
That is strong here and clean
And plain in its meaning
As none of the books are
That tell but of the war

Of heart with head, leaving
The wild birds to sing
The best songs; I find
This hate’s for my own kind,
For men of the Welsh race
Who brood with dark face
Over their thin navel
To learn what to sell;

Yet not for them all either,
There are still those other
Castaways on a sea
Of grass, who call to me,
Clinging to their doomed farms;
Their hearts though rough are warm
And firm, and their slow wake
Through time bleeds for our sake.

Today was potentially the most exciting day so far, but ended up being the most depressing. We were about to start planting actual vegetables, something we haven’t managed to do so far. While we’ve been filling ridiculous holes and tending generally to the rehabilitation of the rest of the plot, we’ve been cultivating one patch in particular. We covered it early, and fed it with some manure a couple of weeks ago; this week we took the cover off. The soil looked good, breathable and healthy. One of the things I’ve wanted to grow from the start was garlic, and Amy will not shut up about parsnips, so the first bed we’ve started is roots and onions (onions, garlic, shallots, parsnips, leeks, etc). October is the time for garlic and onions, so we’ve got some red set onions and a couple of heads of garlic. We pulled up the carpet, and started to scrape at the thin, white attempts at grass underneath, just to make sure there wouldn’t be a lot of weeding to do striaght away.

I’ve spoken before about the treasure trove of shit that the previous owner has buried for us, and I had started to cultivate various theories as to how it all got there. The most solid theory so far is that he was really, really paranoid about a zombie attack. The whole site is a minefield for the undeadly challenged, complete with a hidden supply of weapons disguised as previously useful objects:

But this week we found the Sleeper Cell of the whole outfit, their own personal Operation Dropkick: layer upon layer of slowly disintegrating carpet. I can see them now, formulating the plan. Eventually the zombies will need to grow brains, or other grey matter-based food. This is what they think, sitting on their broken picnic chairs, under their moulting plastic cats. When they reach our allotment, after we have retreated to the Isle of Wight with our dogs to create a new race, they will be unable to grow anything through our various levels of carpet based defence! And then the non sequitur of thought: Also, we will bury bits of wire within the carpets. Also, we will bury our dentures.

It is much less depressing for me to imagine this series of events rather than the more likely version: they put a layer of carpet down to supress grass; the grass grew through; they put another carpet down, and the grass grew through. And then they tried once more, losing various pieces of twisted wire and a top jaw of dentures, and then they gave up and left.

So, instead of planting rows and rows of potentials, we tried to pull a delicate foam lattice from under five inches of soil, trying to roll it carefully so as to not rip it and lose the hidden carpet. The problem with trying to roll it carefully is that there are 5 inches of soil on top, and this gets very heavy very quickly. The other thing is that the grass roots above and below have wound through the carpet and tried to make a carpet of their own - being subjected to so much of the stuff I can understand why the roots think that this is the modern way to behave - and so the various layers are bound together. When something rips, you’re not quite sure whether its a good rip, like the separation of synthetics from nature, or a bad rip, like the loss of a thread through the needle in a massive sack of soil.

After a lot of disheartened silence and exhausting carpet rolling, we eventually got to plant a few rows in a much smaller patch than we had originally intended. But we got all the garlic in, and three rows of red onions.

Along with the zombies, I thought about an easier way to do this. We find some dusty old graveyard, and get rid of all the crumbling gravestones. Maybe we use them as paving, maybe we just pile them up to rot. Then, we read backwards from the Necronomicon, and the dead rise through the soil. Best possible scenario is that they aerate the soil, and any large bits of carpet get caught on their ribs and dragged to the surface. Worst possible scenario, they just bring bits of carpet up, so brittle, so frayed, and we have to rifle through the pages of other dusty, fictional books to find a way to control them. And then we will send them back down to pick up carpet.

This is how all nemesises begin: allotments, the living dead, and then one thing leads to another and bam! You’re wearing a green top had and speaking in riddles to muscleheads dressed as bats and birds.

“I’m looking for pigeons,” he says. What? He’s got some kind of rifle in his hand. We didn’t hear him coming because we’re playing some old fuzzy tunes from the tape player, which is hanging off an old tie nailed to the shed. “I’m looking for pigeons, but I can’t shoot them when they’re above the houses because, you know, that’s people’s property.” He’s right, it is, and he has a stammer, kind of, and a need to cut you off before you finish your sentence; sometimes, when he feels it getting close to the end of a cadence he opens his mouth and just makes an agreeing noise so that he can carry the torch of conversation right to the end of wherever he feels he needs to take it. “Those two belong to Mark. He’s from Sicily!…but he’s all right really.” He’s completely sincere. He tells us how he shoots some pigeons and then puts them in the fox trap near the entrance. Then, and this is where he gets really excited, every few days (it feels like he’s keeping the days non-specific, even to himself, so it’s more like a wonderful surprise) “Rob from over there (a vague swing of the rifle butt) brings his shotgun down and bam!” It’s more humane than dogs, he says, in the way that some people say one dog is more humane than three dogs; in the way that says “I am trying to gauge your moral compass but I am having difficulty in not standing my ground, right here, in my own absolute.” Later on I see Sam, who has the plot next to us. I relate to him how a guy came over with a rifle to shoot pigeons - I am trying, from the other side of the fence, to gauge his moral compass - and, snap, as soon as I mention the gun and the pigeons he relates word for word how the guy from over there comes down every few days with his shotgun and I’m not quite sure if he’s just repeating, as if in court, for a jury, trying to remain as objective as possible, to stand clear of opinion on this matter at this time, or whether he’s excited inside a certain madness in the same way as the gentleman with the gun or whether it’s some kind of manchurian candidate thing, or whether its a traumatic gap that I have missed, an indoctrination into the Catton Grove allotments, a Bourne Identity scenario where we witness (or even enact?) the moment we tuck ourselves away for the good of the hive, until we leave those gates, sneak out past the 50p a bag manure sign, lock the gate, forget the gun and the fox and the screaming in the trees.

In other news, we levelled the first couple of beds out and covered them in tarp. Does anyone have any manure? It would be really useful. Or any black polythene? At the moment we are mostly using old carpets.

Whenever I’m at the allotment, there is something that needs to be cut with the sickle, which pleases me greatly. I cut things, and then I have to pull up yet another seed tray that the previous owner has thoughtfully buried (a shit treasure hunt of disintegrating plastic), and while I’m pulling the black flakes from the soil I hang the sickle through my belt loop.

A perfectly reasonable place to put it. Despite its ergonomic and aesthetic ingenuity, I have had my share of detractors with their ‘reasons’, such as:

• You scared that man over there

and the old classic,

• You will cut your testicles off

which I seem to hear at least once a week.

I’m reading Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper at the moment, and other than making me think I would really like some limes now right now every couple of minutes, it also offered up this paragraph in the prologue (the emphasis is mine):

The crowd shouted the names of animals and Antonio folded on cue; they loved the creatures he created. Even men who carried sickles and whose hands and souls were worn and splintered, men who were callous not only to the feel of silk but also to the beauty of landscapes because all they ever saw was terrain and toil - even they, after sliding their sickles into their belt loops, pulled at the tails of paper swans and watched the flapping wings.

History! You have saved me from the detractors. But I doubt you will convince them. Thomas Edison had a similar situation in mind, I’m sure, when writing to William Le Roy Emmet in 1926:

The worst is to come, for it takes about seven years to convert the average man to the acceptance of a solved problem.

Music on the allotment this Sunday consisted of the massive sound of the brushcutter, drowning out all conversation and any quiet comfort of other allotmenteers. The thing about Sundays is that there isn’t really anyone around, which I always find strange. I would’ve thought Sundays would be the busiest day of the week for this kind of thing - but it suits me well because I always think someone is going to come over and say ‘no…oh, no, no, you shouldn’t’ve done that, especially not now…and that thing you’ve built over there is actually illegal, and your shed is covered in asbestos, and then thing you thought was a weed was actually a very rare and very delicious form of strawberry.’

The brushcutter destroys evidence. Everything gets obliterated. It’s incredibly satisfying to use. The easiest way to describe it is like an industrial strimmer. The difference is that strimmers, even a lot of the petrol strimmers, have a thickish wire which is a bit like washing line cord. The wire spins, and tears at the grass, or cuts dry leaves. The brushcutter is both more sophisticated and more primitive: a bigger motor, heavy duty contruction, and instead of a cord the motor turns a metal blade. The blade, however, is hardly a blade, and while it is symmetrical you get the impression that it needn’t be, and that it could just be any old hunk of twisted scrap that you weld to the end of the shaft.

We also rescued a diaspora of strawberries from around the plot, seemingly planted in random sections of the counterintuitive sunken beds,

and did the same with the skeletons of cabbages, splitting the seeds from their pods.

Every bed had a cabbage or two planted, but there were no beds with any sign of cabbage rows. I am still trying to work out what the previous owner was up to. There are no beds whose purpose was cabbages; and yet it seems as if the whole site was a shrine to the destruction of disperate cabbages by slugs and snails and flies.

Weeds. What is their worth? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtue has not been discovered yet. What a noble thing to say! But also - slow down, Ralph. Ralph, I understand that you can make wine from dandelions, and that you can make a passable flour from the ground heads of seeding dock leaves. You can also make a soup from nettles, and some kind of nutritious, disgusting broth from a plant called chicken’s foot, or hen’s feathers or something.

But maybe that’s not what we want. Maybe we want a large rectangle of perfectly ordered cauliflower heads, or row upon row of tender onion leaves. Maybe we want a cheeky patch of strawberries nestling up against a trellis of beans.

Whatever the case, it is our choice, and we can beat them - the weeds - if we choose to. Here are the facts, as I see them:

• We are taller than (most) weeds
• We are more intelligent than weeds (if we ignore the way photosynthesis utilizes quantum mechanics into order to achieve over 90% efficiency in the conversion of sunlight to food energy)
• Weeds are uncomfortable in social situations
• We have access to tools specifically designed to destroy weeds
• Weeds ain’t got no game

It won’t be easy. Can you feel it? I can feel the thorns in my fingers. Can you feel the sting, the dirt in your cuts, the rain down your slender neck, pulling the cold into the small of your back? Brothers, sisters - I feel it too.

But what of the future? The future! Oh, the future will be bountiful. Imagine: mid-August, 2011. We sit down, hands sore from cracking wood. We build a small fire, leaning the sticks against one another like the struts of teepees. We brush the crumbling earth from potatoes, warm and dry from the afternoon sun, before rapping them tightly (but not too tightly) in shining foil. We arrange the silver parcels, and we wait. Perhaps one of us glances towards the rough rectangle behind us, and we all turn, some of us looking over our shoulders, some of us standing up, dusting off our knees, and, collectively, together, we quietly marvel at everything we have achieved.

Tomorrow, boiled potatoes with chive butter. Why, I hear you chuckle, by the end of it, we’ll all be sick of potatoes! Well, what can I say? You may be right. You may be absolutely right.

—————————

At the moment, the allotment is definitely a ‘field of opportunity’ and there is work to be done before we can start growing anything. We’re going to be there every Sunday, if not more. For the sake of organisation, I’m setting Sundays at the day when we will definitely be there, so you can come down and be sure that there will be someone there and something to do.

We’re planning to run the allotment with a kind of permaculture no-dig ethos. No dig basically means that you don’t dig much, and let the earth and vegetables do a lot of their own work, with a push in this or that direction. This hopefully translates to less pointless manual labour, and vegetables that are more comfortable in their environment and therefore less prone to disease or failure, as well as being more naturally nutritious and successful in terms of crop size and vegetable size. This is what we hope to achieve over the next few weeks:

1. Remove the heads from all the docks, to prevent them going to seed and swamping the site next year.
2. Clean out and organise the shed.
3. Collect seeds from the remains of the previous vegetables - opening up cabbage seed pods, etc.
4. Strim and remove the grass and other undesirables with a bushcutter.
5. Replace as much of the top soil as possible into the sunken beds. Most of the soil is in piles along the side of the plot and next to the shed; we can top this up and mix it with compost and manure. The more help the better on this one.
6. Cover as much of the ground as possible with rolls of thick black plastic to prevent/slow the growth of undesirables.
7. Topping up the manure/compost content as much as possible will be an ongoing task.
8. Begin to roll back the plastic, starting from outside the shed, as and when things need to be planted.

As we get further on in the year, the ground under the plastic will become more malleable and the nutrients from the compost will find their way further down. By the time the big planting season comes round, we should have some good soil to work with. But we can start to get some stuff planted before then -

September-October: Winter hardy spring onions; spring cabbages; other brassicas; beetroot

November: Garlic

And it goes without saying that any ideas about what to grow are welcome. I’m open to trying anything, and if you’re going to help to grow it and eat it then it follows that you would want to have a hand in choosing these things that you are growing and eating.

As I said before, the more help at this stage the better, as well as with every other stage. I inhereted some dog ties with the shed, so dogs are welcome. And babies. Maybe they can fight each other? There will be a relatively quiet period closer to the end of the year, but in that time we can do things like build compost containers from wooden pallets. I suspect there will always be something to do, and we will listen to music and maybe after a hard days work we can sit outside the shed and have a beer, or a cup of tea on the tilly stove. Maybe you’ll even tan that pasty skin of yours.

Babies, dogs, beer, tea, spades, party. Potatoes.

—m.

I guess it kind of makes sense to get rid of the Lidl trolley. But it’s been there longer than we have, and I can’t help but think it’ll come in useful soon - as a make-shift wheelbarrow, for example, when we try and even out the sunken beds with topsoil next week. I have a dream where we upholster it with some of that clear plastic, and change the wheels for some heavy duty sackbarrow tyres. Maybe we’ll put hinges on the front so we can just scoop the contents out.

That’s actually a great idea.

Contents of the shed:

• About 20 cardboard toilet roll tubes
• Used teabags
• Spiders
• Loads of spiders
• Unused tea bags (with insect holes through most of them)
• So much sugar
• 1 can of Pepsi (circa 2006)
• 1 can of diet Pepsi (circa 2006)
• 1 can of spar Dutch Lager, 4% (circa 2009)
• 2 cans of EXCELSIOR Lager, 4.2% (circa 2008)
• 2 (previously mentioned) sickles (blunt, aesthetically pleasing)
• Dog ties and balls with bells in them
• Netting A flood of netting
• Twine!
• Wire!
• RUSTY NAILS.^TM
• 1 shitty torch
• 1 spoon
• 1 rusty spoon
• 1 dull knife
• Balding plastic cats climbing the wall, which are actually disgusting and I don’t really know what they were going for, or why after the first one had started to molt in the rain they didn’t then decide to take them down, I guess they just thought, well, they’re up there now, we can be the guys on the allotment with the ——— up rabies cats nailed to our shed, oh, what fun we’ll have, with our dying plastic cats
• A hose - on a hose reel
• A map of the allotment with the names of the owners of the adjacent plots written on the map just in case we ever forget them (I put that there)
• A bunch of other junk.

Now the shed is a lot cleaner. We tied the flood of netting with other netting, so now it is a kind of pool (if we carry the metaphor) bordered by a river of its own tributaries, and a dam of its own watery making.

We also hung some of the tools on nails in the walls. I don’t care who you are or how crooked your nails are or how rusty your tools: hanging tools on nails makes the place look ship-shape. That’s my Groundforce tip of the day.

—m.

Sunday’s allotment music. (Future Radio’s Boiling Point)

—m.

So far, ‘work’ on the allotment has mainly consisted of walking out there with different people, surveying the intimidating space and saying “…it’s going to take a lot of work.” After that, we walk through the tall grass (which seems taller each time) and open the shed. We look at the Lidl shopping trolley, piled up with clear plastic and green netting, and I show them the two sickles. I am excited about the sickles.

Yesterday, we went out for the first time to do some actual allotmenteering. We have decided on a ‘no dig’ approach, because there is less digging than with a ‘dig’ approach. We’re starting slowly (or taking small bites out of big elephants, which is something Paul said and sounds like a more noble way to describe our methods), so yesterday was just beheading the docks in the sun to prevent them going to seed. I understand this means that we will still have docks next year, but that they will be proportionately less.

I had imagined that we would be able to put the dock heads into a plastic bag, but the seeds went down the stem much further than I remembered. The blunt scissors I took were consequently useless, completely unable to cut the thickness at the bottom of the plant, a poor imitation of Amy’s confident secateurs. Secateurs, with your swagger and your anvil blade and your awkward spelling.

This is when I found out that a blunt sickle is actually a pretty good substitute for a sharp sickle, and that you can wear the blade through the belt loops in your jeans without causing your jeans or legs any lasting damage. I managed to get five or six weeds at a time, with a clenched fist ‘round their necks and a few hacks at their ankles, so we had all the docks up in about half an hour.

It was only after we got to the allotment that I remembered I wanted to document the whole process, so for one night only we have google’s help for a photograph of dock seed heads:

I also forgot to bring a tape player, but luckily we had the car (anticipating a shed clearout), so we had the Boiling Point show on future radio. Calypso and afrobeat actually for make great allotmenteering music.

—m.