'...co-operation between the gardener and the cook...'

The top of Soho Hill, three miles north west of Birmingham city centre, is concealed by the terraced streets that run north-south across Handsworth to Soho Road, where the gentle topography of the old rural landscape is blurred, depicted in old pictures, difficult to match with present observation.

The topography of Handsworth. Plot 14 on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments is 420 feet above sea level

I didn’t notice the hill’s slow ascent from the Hockley flyover, two miles to Junction 2 M5 and Smethwick, until, 15 years ago, I took to cycling, sensing the artery’s steady north-westward incline in my pedaling. In places, green spaces remain, once pastures, or heathland, the area’s boulder clay unsuitable for cultivating crops.
Where buildings and streets stop, there lie, near us, precious green spaces, landscaped to oblige the town – St Mary’s Churchyard where the dead lie in their classes from family vaults to paupers' unmarked indentations, Handsworth Park, whose history I’ve written, and the Victoria Jubilee Allotments on the north side of Soho Hill, on a gentle slope that continues, beyond sturdy iron palings, to the Handsworth Park pond and St Mary’s Church, whose bells, hushed by trees, ring familiar changes.
In June 2010, when the new Victoria Jubilee allotments were at last opened, Lin and I chose a plot at the far end of a site for which I and others had campaigned over ten years helping the city to negotiate a S106 agreement that delivered eighty municipal allotments, gravel paths, drains and a portakabin club house. The allotment is 200 square metres. Plot 14. A new part of my life.
“I shall not join the site committee. I’ve done enough paper work and talking to win conditional rights to this ground. £30 annual rent for over 60s. I shall concentrate on cultivating my allotment!”
I began to break up the surface tufts of well rooted couch grass the day I signed the lease. So I started to learn just what we'd squeezed from a developer who’d planned to build over the whole site, but been allowed a third of what had once been private allotments.

Plot 14 June 2010 (photo: Linda Baddeley)

The ground the developer left, after all the grading and digging they’d done to build houses, was not what it had been. The precious old tilth, product of a century's gardening, had disappeared, skimmed and dispersed all over the site, the ground graded and compressed over several years of construction by heavy machinery. The area’s unforgiving boulder clay, pushed into the Midlands by ancient glaciers, never arable, had resurfaced. The developer, pressured by the city, and Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG), had hastily strewn a miserly carpet of second rate topsoil, before handing over the site under the terms of their 2004 S106 Agreement with the Council.

In the first phase, Lin and I got a shed via freecycle. We levelled the plot’s slope, edging a square with tanalised timber on which, under a bed of sand and pummelled earth, we laid levelled slabs recovered from a Handsworth front-garden. I re-roofed the shed, adding a veranda.

January 2011. '...It makes a nice comforting sound when the rain is beating down it and one is dry and warm inside'

For the next three years of phase one, I learned about soil. There came a stage where I was close to giving up, not looking forward to the short journey - walking (12 minutes), cycling or driving - to our plot. The spur was a formal letter.

A wake-up call! I react well to notices like this

I also learned that, but for the darkest months, you cannot leave an allotment alone; that couch grass can only be reduced by persevering work that never ceases; that more or less all that's edible is food for slugs and snails, with different vegetables prone to the attention of specialist insects – onion fly, potato worms, carrot fly - as well as being prone to infestation by disease, and ailments arising from missing elements in the soil. Then there are the birds, pigeons especially, who focus on fruit. That another pest is people, who break into allotments to steal; that my plot needed investment in manure...

...topsoil and compost, delivered by tipping trucks and in builder's bags...

Black gold arrives

...that I could make my own compost, use mulch and weed suppressant fabric and netting; that I could grow from seed in a green house – bought second hand...

...and, with a fruit cage, grow strawberries and raspberries and more, and working with our neighbour Gill, an apiarist, and with site committee permission, have Buckfast bees on site, giving honey and pollination; that cultivable soil should be laid out in beds that can be reached from a network of paths to ensure not having to walk on them; that earth is rich, sensitive, structured - an environment for billions of micro-organisms; that when growing things you should be more inclined to feed the soil than the plants that you grow in it.

Published in 1945, no book on gardening has taught me so much

The second phase – from the start of 2015 - has to do with rejoicing. It would have been impossible without my discovery of, and friendship with Winnie Hall,  who’s growing skill and confidence have made Plot 14 work. ‘Our’ plot now yields crops – potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, runner beans, broad beans, onions, garlic, marrow, butternut squash, pumpkin, courgette, aubergine, peas, cucumber, apples, cherries, plums, strawberries, raspberries, pears, gooseberries, tayberries, artichoke, Jerusalem artichoke, parsnip, rhubarb, grapes, rosemary, chives.

Plot 14 on the VJA. The two flags are for my two most loved countries. They serve too as bird-scarers.

Some things planted have not thrived; cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts have more or less failed. But my feeling is of triumph made sweeter by seeing so many others who’ve fallen by the wayside as they’ve grasped the work, time and cost involved in growing food on the Victoria Jubilee’s testing ground. Almost shameless triumph is made joy by the visits of my grandson Oliver and now his sister Hannah, learning like me, ...

Winnie harvesting with Ollie and Hannah

...starting to grow things in the sunrise of their lives.

I’ve commissioned a painting from Jan Bowman to capture this delight – a portrait of Hannah, Oliver, Lin and I on the plot in July, celebrating our grand-daughter’s third birthday.

Winnie Hall, Jan Bowman, Oliver, Hannah and her mum, Amy on the rocking horse for Hannah's birthday

The third and present phase has to do with illusions; with something I’d not anticipated when focused on preparing the ground and getting it to yield harvests – a problem of bounty becoming glut.
Over a year ago I was talking to a friend, who has an allotment in London, about growing vegetables. Supper in a restaurant near Russell Square.
“…human beings’ relationship with the earth. How it’s broken. Severed over generations by the transition from rural to urban…estrangement from the land. Loss of craft in cultivation…How can I, whose ancestors abandoned the land with Industrial Revolution, getting rich as iron-masters, mill-owners, bourgeois progeny, urban aspirants earning wealth from the surpluses of mechanisation…Leas of Oldham whose business profited from the sweat of mill girls. Jacksons of Rochdale, a mansion home burned down by mill workers?”
I spoke of first generation immigrants, from lands where farming is still in the blood – as in Greece, in the Caribbean, Gujarat, Africa.
“How can I hope to acquire that feel for growing stuff?”
I glimpse a glaze, my friend, with all her grace, cannot quite withhold.
I struggle on “My paternal great grandmother, born in Oldham, married in London, left the city to live in a cottage by the Itchen. She cultivated, with help from Mr New, her gardener. My sister and I had the run of surrounding water meadows. My maternal grandmother abandoned a metropolitan social life to start the dairy farm where I was born…my stepfather, born in London, made a career in broadcasting…in his last thirty years making a successful TV programme called ‘Out of Town’ about disappearing country life, the fall-out from mechanized agriculture. He once called my grandmother’s adventure a ‘hobby farm’ … she was devastated…anyway…what I’m saying is, on my allotment, I’m getting back some of that long lost…”
My friend - at last – intervened; agreed that the relationship between humans and the land was "perhaps broken"
“Yes, yes” I said “accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside…”
“But, Simon, what also matters, perhaps even more is the relationship between the grower and the cook.”

By email she referred me to a paragraph in The Vegetable Grower's Handbook (1948) by Arthur J. Simons:

Time and again I have seen kitchen gardens and allotments which have been assiduously sown and planted by the head of the family without any regard of the actual requirements of the kitchen...The golden rule is to grow what you most like to eat in sufficient quantities to ensure that you have enough of it but not on such a scale as to involve wastage. This demands close co-operation between the gardener and the cook or housewife.

“The real problem is whether you and Lin like cooking and eating what you’re growing on your plot”

'So proud' (photo: Winnie Hall)

Leaving aside the author's archaism about 'head of the family', I hadn’t thought of this. I had just assumed that cooking and eating would follow the successful harvesting of which I was so proud.

Linda asks "So what am I supposed to do with this lot?"

So... now I..we have to learn  and far more important, agree, about succession planting, about storing, about deep freezing, about preservation, about bottling, making jam, jelly, chutney, about dehydrating, - every craft and trick from the ancient books about how to even out harvests; cooking and eating what's grown at home. There's the satisfying option too, of giving stuff to neighbours, and on occasion bringing a basket of surplus from the plot to offer for collection, when we do street work with Handsworth Helping Hands.

Denise and her niece Winnie preparing harvests from Plot 14 for freezing

Christmas holidays

A strong wind blows; nothing to what's happening in the Highlands, but enough to blow even more glass out of a rickety greenhouse on Plot 66 on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments.  Being there, I picked it up, piece by piece, and put it in the back of the HHH van. Later I wrote a note to the site secretary:

Dear G. Don’t read this until after Christmas, but I popped up to the VJA to check that these high winds hadn’t blown away the polythene sheet we spread on Plot 78, and found yet further panes of glass shattered and thrown over the ground from the frail greenhouse on the neighbouring plot. Shards had been blown almost as far as the entry gates (see attached photo). This structure is a hazard. I ask the VJA committee to let me and Winnie remove its glass, ideally with the permission of the plotholder, but otherwise without.  I collected the shattered glass ... glad no-one was around when this glass went flying.  I could do this work  - removing the glass from the greenhouse - on the same basis as we are doing other work with Committee approval. It would hardly take 10 minutes ... anytime after Christmas day. Happy Christmas. S 

At last I have a brief to start tidying abandoned plots on the VJA.  Phil, our Hon.Treasurer, agreed to let Winnie and I clean up Plot 78 opposite the site gates. A week ago we set to with a will.

Plot 78 Victoria Jubilee Allotments - before tidying

The plot had been abandoned after its tenant was evicted for leaving his tap running overnight in the middle of the summer, a breach of rules that brings penalties at any time of the year. I'm pretty sure this tenant was glad to see the last of the plot anyway. They left owing a year's rent.
I was ranting away to Vanley about why 'some people' treat their plots as tips.
As I recall, the person working plot 78 was working happily away some two years ago, building terraces to accommodate the gradient of their 200 square metres. Something went wrong. They lost interest. Not just like that; rather a gradual decline of enthusiasm, during which the site accumulated the detritus of waning intention; a mess, whose detail became more unpleasantly clear as we began tidying the vacated plot. Soft drink, beer and cider cans, plastic and glass bottles, sacks of domestic rubbish, broken glass mainly from discarded window panes brought in to build a glass house that didn't happen; spare off-cuts of wood, brought in for a purpose, allowed to rot; pointless levees of soggy plastic sacks filled with clay-mud and roots, entwined with lugs of couch grass from which extend rhizomes fatter than spaghetti, beneath which, embedded, we find more rubbish, flattened seams of black polythene that have to be scraped up to get closer to the earth.
"You know" I said to Vanley, who stays calm on these things, but listens attentively, as I stoke pious frustration at other people's errancy, their downright feckless lack of talent as gardeners
"You could donate someone a studio, give them paints, brushes, linseed oil, palette knives, canvases, size. Everything a painter needs. Come back in a year and all you have, instead of a parade, as you hoped, of creative work, of art - chaos! The materials not just abandoned, but squashed, mingled, smeared, with unrecognisable pieces of rubbish that might have been easels, chairs, frames...."
Vanley, who's famous, said to me ages ago "Allotments are a metaphor for life".

Embedded black sacks overlapping the plot boundaries

Odd-and-ends to no purpose

A cleansing fire for combustibles

Half a ton of rubbish to go to the tip

Well how did someone manage to leave an original plot in such a mess? It's not just fallow. It's a tip. Instead of  being cultivated, it's been used. With the worst and most of the waste removed Winnie could strim the plot to about 6" all over and then I spread 200 square metres of black polythene held down with bricks and stones. The uneven ground, caused by the terracing and the original intention of divided-up beds, made it tricky to keep our footing.
There had been an attractive small oak tree at one corner of the plot; killed after a heap of fresh manure was dropped on a corner of the plot. I left the manure uncovered, so other plot holders could help themselves. The trunk of the oak made a good stake. Someone will use it.

Plot 78 Victoria Jubilee Allotments - after tidying

Phil and the VJA Committee were pleased with our work on Plot 78 and have now asked us to tidy 11 more vacant plots.
On Friday we began on four of these - 54 to 57.

Tidy all the plots that have a tick on them

By midday the van was half full of cleared waste. There's more to come - a large pile of red bricks and over twenty five sheets of double glazing stacked at the bottom of the slope between the allotments and the houses.

Starting on the tidying of plots 54 to 57

The most visible rubbish was consigned to cleansing flames - the smoke blown north by a steady breeze. Later the wind changed direction, blowing smoke towards one of the houses. I knocked on the door, apologised and found it was someone I knew and was 'forgiven'. The wind changed again. As the fire heated up, the flames grew stronger, the smoke lessened. Winnie strimmed, I carted rubbish, again having to work through a blanket of couch grass to ease out layers of plastic sacks, lino, carpet and chipboard, in one area a layer of broken glass...

...to be picked up shard by shard by hand and dumped in the van...

The four plots are already looking better ...

Plots 54-57 strimmed

...but there's more to be done, before we can finish ...

...by laying the weed suppressing fabric which Phil has managed to buy in volume on ebay.

The trickiest stuff to clear as there's so often more plastic sacks beneath, usually falling apart

I suspect those bricks were collected to help terrace the plot's slope.

Glass intended for a home-made greenhouse

Later that evening I dropped by to make sure the fire had died down to embers. In the morning I picked out metal parts and raked the ashes flat, while Winnie with the brush-cutter cleared all four plots down to 5 inches, leaving a few fruit trees and a line of broom between two plots.
"We've got a lot of work done today" she said.
"And we've done lots on Plot 14!"

Meanwhile Plot 14 is being prepared for 2017

Last year and a few months we'd made the plot manageable by making more, and wider, paths between smaller beds that could be dug from all sides without need to tread on the working soil. Now I'm reclaiming some of the walking space for beds at the top of the plot.

We needed a mattock to break up boulder-clay soil in an area of our allotment that had been used for parking cars and a van. On the rest of the plot - except the paths - I can get a spit's depth with even a spade. Getting closer to the original soil back in 2010 when I signed up to rent this plot, even a fork wouldn't go down more than inches. Winnie and I, with Dennis helping, used the mattock to get some depth, removing a familiar collection of glacier-smoothed stone embedded in clay. Picking up a fist sized piece, it squeezes together and stays that way. After we'd got the depth - about 18" - we mixed the soil with 'black gold' compost making the beds a little higher, and loamier. I sprinkled and raked in several handfuls of garden lime. Worms aplenty in the compost continued our work.

Bed E0 - planned for main crop potatoes

In two beds I planted garlic in early November - breaking into cloves garlic bought at a local grocers. They've benefited from frost, and should be ready to harvest when their beds are needed for broad or runner beans.

The shed veranda has been leaking. I repaired it on top with a patch of felt over a thick coat of bitumen...

My grandson was wondering where I'd got to

 ... cutting a rectangle of plywood to sit underneath, held between the supports with brackets.

Redrafted bed plan. 'E' stands for 'English side', 'G' for 'Greek side'. 

*** *** ***
Christmas day in Ano Korakiana....Χριστούγεννα! ... την ηρεμία του πρωινού, the tranquility of the morning...

Χριστούγεννα με ολίγη συννεφιά...Αρκετός ο κόσμος στη Λειτουργία στον Άη Θανάση. Η συνέχεια ανήκει στα παιδιά της Μπαντίνας που θα περιδιαβούν τις γειτονιές για να παιανίσουν τα Κάλαντα, ενώ την ίδια ώρα τα μέλη της Διοίκησης θα αναζητήσουν την οικονομική ενίσχυση του Συλλόγου στις οικογένειες του χωριού. Τα εορταστικά γεύματα μεταξύ συγγενών και φίλων θα ακολουθήσουν...Και οι κάπως μεγαλύτεροι σε ηλικία απολάμβαναν την ηρεμία του πρωινού.

*** *** ***
27th December - work continues. Was someone planning to build a house on one of these plots?

...and another load of rubbish. On the weighbridge at Holford Depot it was 3/4 of a ton

...and to finish off four more plots, two large rolls of ground cover...

On the edge of success

A picture speeded up; summer’s exudation of greenery – leaves, tendrils, stalks, flowers, fruit, pods, tubers and all I define as weeds – burgeoning, profuse, like descriptions of far greater heat in Lampedusa's novel of Sicily which I read long long ago - the sun like a lion, the oestrus mares in the palace stables. It makes winter scenery unimaginable – as in winter, this summer abundance is remote. Yet I’m not content. 

The pleasure of my allotment is being shared with a snails, slugs and caterpillars. Pigeons and magpies drop in to enjoy the feast. On a Facebook site devoted to allotments the administrator has been asked to censor the next member who posts a clip of killing slugs; 

Yet again certain people still find great pleasure in posting slug and snail killing pictures. You should be band!!!! You know who you are and so do we. There is no need for it. Personally I don't want see It!! And sure that most other people don't want to either. Thought we had moved on!!! Admin need to step in.

We’ve had human thieves on Victoria Jubilee. They clambered over the site’s metal railings at night, looking for power tools. Nothing from us, since we have none. They borrowed a hammer of mine to break into a neighbour’s shed, leaving it on the ground outside. No-one accuses me. They broke into our shed. I’ve repaired their damage. Oliver helped. Winnie restored order inside; tidying their strewing. The police have other priorities. It's mostly forgotten already. 

Instead of just rejoicing inwardly at the progress I’ve made, learning about working an allotment, slowly but steadily transforming unpromising boulder clay, I and other plot-holders inherited in 2010, into something like fertile loam, laboriously eliminating vestiges of the couch grass that invaded the 200 square metre plot, teasing out its nutrient leaching rhizomes, spreading and pegging weed suppressing textile on a grid of paths to make it easy to work on 24 separate beds without standing on working soil, erecting a shed, adding a veranda and extra bamboo supports for a hardy fertile vine, putting up a second hand wood frame greenhouse, designing a large fruit cage that stands up to gales, laying out alternating compost bays, and getting the bees back in abundance, but as Winnie observes now and then “You’re not happy, Simon!” 

I’m overwhelmed by how much I don’t know, having learned from late experience, and reading, that this little plot is as unfathomable as the universe. It’s the site of a universe. 

“Did you know” said my friend Ziggi who works an allotment in London “There are as many micro-organisms in one spoon of soil as people on earth?” 

How on earth – literally – do I gauge what plants need? What different plants need? 

I’ve arrived at a grasp of Ph values in the earth – even bought litmus paper - but I’m stumped when it comes to reckoning how plants and weather, along with chemical, physical, organic composition makes change in the soil through the seasons. Having invested in several tons of black gold two years ago, are parts of the plot too rich now? Some cultivators start again every year, investing in sacks of laboratory collected compost and top soil. I want to know how to maintain the soil’s equilibrium, to keep it working, with minimal recourse to garden centres and internet products pandering to my anxieties like cosmetics to their consumers.
As it is, I am almost convinced now that the site's original boulder clay - described, in a geological survey, as 'natural sandy clay with pebbles', is slowly reasserting itself

The soil on Plot 14 in 2013

 - wormless, cloggy in the wet and tending to produce fist-sized hardened lumps in the dry. Difficult to fork, impossible to spade. I had hoped the soil, treated with compost, especially black gold, some manure and wood chip mulch, would stay as good as it's been the last two years, but I don't believe this is the case. I shall now consider investing in more 'black gold' and even manure if I can get it from a reliable source. 

“Simon! Have faith” urges Winnie

“Yes but look what the birds and slugs have done to the Brussels sprouts that I hoped to get right for Christmas this year. The cauliflowers have bolted again. 

The same’s going to happen to the cabbage. See how all the cherries on both the cherry trees have been taken by birds. The plum and the pear yet again, haven’t even blossomed.”

My friend Ziggi reminds me “Nature lacks uniformity. For three years in a row your tomatoes come in abundance. Then they don’t. It happens.”

But as if this unpredictability, this indeterminacy, weren’t a vexation there’s another challenge. Growing crops and bringing them home when they are needed;...

... when Lin’s prepared to cook them for supper. She can't be doing with gluts. 

“There’s only so much you can parboil and store in the freezer.” 

She doesn’t do chutney and jam - not right now with the time given to caring for her mum. There’s a proportion I can give away – to Amy, Richard; to Jo and John, friends and neighbours.

“You need to grow things in succession” says Lin; this. while I’m still celebrating the abundance of a particular crop.

“What do you expect me to do with this lot?” 
Potatoes and onions tilled on Plot 14 lie in the veg cupboard beside stock Lin's bought from Morrison’s or Lidl; my scruffy vegetables, shedding earth, sitting gawkily beside unflawed produce from over the till. The other day Oliver discovered and harvested a large aubergine...

...His sunflowers have been a success. Winnie's Dennis also grew sunflowers on the plot. When, as requested, he potted up one of these and brought it in to his school, his was so much taller than the other childrens', one small girl cried and Winnie whispered to her son not to show pride. 

In front of the 'sky-blue-white', Simon, Oscar, Oliver and Hannah beside sunflowers on Plot 14 (photo: Guy Hollier)

21st July: I was asked on FB yesterday 'do you follow much of a permaculture approach?'

I strive to understand the term permaculture on a 200 square metre plot. Its far-reaching philosophy and practice, such as I have picked up, makes plot 14 an impossible site on which to observe what approaches the new 'religion' [Google gives me 7,350,000 hits on the word in 0.41 seconds] that long ago my wise stepfather mused would one day attract the world. In permaculture terms I'm 'pre-scientific' - in the cargo cult stage, like those bewildered indigenous peoples, going slightly mad, on first encountering the technologies and unspoken values, of industrial populations. When an apple falls on my head - speaking hypothetically - I'm inclined to curse and rub my head. It takes a genius to be so rudely struck, and, amid the shock and pain, think 'gravity!'
It's true I've divorced my car. I cycle and walk - as much as possible - relying on Lin's car for emergency use. I do not use - since they are anyway forbidden on city plots - Bayer sourced herbicides or insecticides. I strive to compost and recycle amid the detritus of a consuming economy that allows me my cheap flights across Europe and beyond...I strive to understand what gardening interventions are workable in a medium of far greater complexity than I'd grasped when I first worked to prepare my plot with azada and fork, seeing the ground and what grew in it as hostile, understanding as never before the Biblical curse on Adam and Eve '“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” My family - the dearest to me in the world - are thoroughly embedded in the economic life of the present, only some of whose habits and attitudes, chime with the new life that is at the heart of a permacultural way of life. The only book that has ever worked for me - as a route into making sense of the earth - was written under war time conditions in 1945, and explains that environmentally sensible gardening is something that someone like me can do, since I'm not under the pressures placed on someone who must grow vegetables for a living - Gardener's Earth by Stanley Whitehead. I'm ever grateful for directions - further directions - but I suspect they are like the old Irish joke, where a local explains a route in great detail to a puzzled traveller only to end up saying, when sure they've grasped the directions, says "You don't go that way". I've come too far 'that way' to be very pleased about starting again 'the right way'. I'd almost rather keep banging my head against the wall - 'kicking against the pricks'. I approach my gardening almost as a penance and a therapy rather than as a seriously thoughtful steward of the land - which would perhaps make me a permaculturist. Your question is a good one. 

Digging the plot in 2012. Intended as a 'before' clip.