Unconfirmed Reports

During the past month, one of the major reasons why this blog has been silent is that I have got myself a garden allotment. That is to say, I have obtained the right of usage over a little patch of dirt, etched out in a rectangle from the largish area of East Ward Allotments, Oxford. (map).

This cost seven pounds fifty pence in rental fee per year. It is about 10 by 15 metres, which started out covered with a mixture of long grass, blackberries and black plastic, but is quickly becoming a nice dug-over slilce of arable land. I am going to grow
tomatoes and
potatoes and
courgettes and
butternut pumpkins and
shallots and
garlic and
peppers and
leeks and
spinach and
radishes and
broad beans and
snow-peas

Notice how, of all these, only spinch is an “uncountable” noun that does not readily take plural form. I hope it will be easy to grow anyway.

I feel very proprietal about my Vegetable Kingdom. I feel very satisfied, standing there looking at it - and it would not be such a stretch of the imagination to see myself waiting there vigilantly with a rifle in my hand.

I don’t feel like that about the house that I rent, where I sleep every night. But there is something about the allotment that feels much more “mine”. I think it is because, as long as I keep using it and paying my seven pounds fifty a year, my custodianship is almost guaranteed. Renting a house though, I am always at the whim of the owner (or, at least, within 6 weeks of the whim of the owner).