Never trust an allotment

If you turn your back on an allotment for ten minutes, this is what happens – weeds! It’s actually a little bit more than ten minutes, but not more than a week, since we were up weeding and digging, but I have to be honest, there’s been so much else to do, that we’ve sort of ‘ignored’ the bed down the bottom of the allotment that hasn’t been used this year. ‘It’s lying fallow,’ we told ourselves.

Well not any more it’s not! It was obvious when we got up there on Sunday that is was a potent source of vile annual and perennial weeds and just about ready to cast its ripe cargo of seeds in all directions, which wouldn’t make us popular with the neighbours. I also knew that letters had been sent out in the past couple of weeks to allotment holders who weren’t ‘keeping their plots in cultivation’ and while there was no threat of us being told we weren’t a busy and productive plot, I felt a sudden and terrible guilt that we weren’t pulling our weight after Duncan was good enough to take us on as co-workers. So we went and we dug!

I was reminded, while I dug, that in France, allotment holders in some areas are allowed to ‘rent’ a young person doing community service for a certain number of hours heavy digging. Wish we could do that here!

Labels: allotment-digging, allotment-fallow, allotment-weeds