Prone to forecast disaster at the best of times (a family trait), I toss and turn into the wee small hours. Next door’s chimney is cracked, and I fear it’s going to fall through our ceiling.

Mr Mandy Sutter is no help. Rather than shin up onto the roof and fix it there and then (my preferred option), he says things like, ‘we’ve had it looked at, and the builders say it’s fine. Why don’t you put your earplugs in?’

Eventually I do. When I wake up, I’m delighted to find that a) it is morning and b) I’m still alive.

I’m rather concerned about my globe artichoke plants, though. I have three big ones on the allotment, grown lovingly from seed, and because we haven’t had much frost yet this winter, they are still tall, splashing fountains of silver-green.

Anyway, I go down to check. I’m relieved to find most of their leaves still huge and arching, with edges like circular saw blades.

But when I’ve finished fussing about at ground level, slicing off the broken leaves at the alarmingly fleshy base, it strikes me that something’s wrong with the sky.

I look up. It’s like seeing an old friend minus glasses or beard: it takes a few moments to put two and two together. But the overhead pattern that so reminds me of a diagram of the human central nervous system, has gone.

Suddenly I understand. The wych elm is down!

The slain giant.

I hurry over to the spot where it stood and see its roots, broken on one side and torn out of the ground on the other. Luckily, the tree has fallen away from the shed and towards the compost heap.

I gaze on the slain giant. Although sorry to see its destruction, I can’t help remembering the notice the Parish Council pinned to it last summer. ‘DO NOT CUT DOWN THIS TREE!’

Well, the wind has obviously never learnt to read, because the tree is down, whether the Council likes it or not.

I look forward to telling Dad.

But he gets in first. Before today, he hasn’t visited the allotment for months, insisting there’s ‘nothing to do down there.’ But this morning he went, to fetch some creosote from the shed.

‘Have I got news for you,’ he says when Mr MS and I go round that evening.

He tells us he has already drafted a letter to the Council.

‘Oh, there’s no need to involve them’, says Mr MS, genial and innocent of the dark passions involved. ‘I’ll hire a circular saw and cut it into timber.’

My jaw falls open: Mr MS is volunteering for an outdoor job. If only we could use the leaves of the globe artichoke to saw through the tree.

But none of this matters in the event. ‘DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT TREE!’ Dad says, sounding a lot like the original notice would have done, if only it could speak. ‘Don’t so much as break a twig off. That tree belongs to the Council. I’ve told them it’s up to them to dispose of it.’

He speaks with the delight of one who has at last lived long enough to see justice prevail.

‘Did he poison it?’ asks Mr MS on the way home.

‘No,’ I say.

I know that truth is stranger than fiction. I also know that Dad told the Council he’d welcome a replacement sapling. As they say here in Yorkshire, ‘there’s nowt so queer as folk.’

Brewing up in the shed.

November is an uninspiring time for gardeners. Days are indecently short and the grunt work of weeding and digging isn’t balanced by the usual joy of planting.

But jobs still need to be done and, deserted by our fair-weather friends, we gardeners have to do them. The Reluctant Gardener has found it useful to identify a few motivational tools.

The first is a camping gas stove plus whistling kettle, mug and teabags. I was never one to visit the allotment (or any place) without a Thermos of hot drink (or ‘boil’, as Mr Mandy Sutter calls it) but brewing up in the shed beats the old flask system hands down.

It isn’t just the taste. It’s the walk to the tap, hoping they haven’t turned the water off for the winter. It’s the striking of damp matches on damp box, hoping that something will eventually catch fire. It’s the frequent breaks from digging to peer at the blue flame, hoping the gas hasn’t run out.

The whole process is so fraught and fragile that when the boil finally arrives, it’s a miracle. A worthy substitute for the miracle of seeing plants grow.

Un-bespattered.

But lack of plant growth is, paradoxically, motivational tool number two.  Because if plants aren’t growing then nor are weeds. So a cleared, dug-over bed stays cleared and dug over, in a nice plain chocolate brown, un-bespattered by Mother Nature’s green paint pot.

The third tool is the post-gardening bath. There’s no ablution to top it, especially in winter. Aching limbs are caressed by silken oiled water, grime floats out from under fingernails, nettle stings are brutally revived to tingle afresh. The spent gardener lies contentedly under bubble bath foam as a landscape lies beneath clouds.

And then of course there’s that special motivation that comes only from one’s family. Mr MS is also, in his own way, a tool. One afternoon he visits the plot and finds me covered in mud labouring with spade and fork.

‘Don’t overdo it, will you?’ he says. ‘ Sorry, can’t stay, just come to borrow the loppers. Our neighbour needs some help with her bush.’

Later, I hear that while lopping off twigs, he also lops the head off her garden gnome.

But I digress. Mr MS is something of a blurter, and in his brief minutes at the allotment he manages to tell our neighbour that Dad and I call him the Farmer.

‘Funny that,’ says our neighbour, ‘considering I’m a car mechanic.’

The dead gnome's mate.

Things have the potential to turn nasty. But they don’t: the Farmer (as I shall persist in calling him) admits that he calls another neighbour, who we know only by the disappointing title of Ian, ‘Mr Windy.’

MS looks at me. The Farmer goes on. ‘He put his shed up in a force ten gale, y’see.’

Mr MS titters obligingly but I see he’s disappointed by the explanation. He goes off muttering something that sounds like ‘cock and balls.’

Later he claims it’s a mnemonic, to help him remember a) to take some soft drink round to Dad’s to save his glass being topped up with hard liquor and b) to ask Dad about crown green bowling.

A likely story.  But I give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, it’s only a matter of time till the decapitated gnome’s mates come calling.

Traffic-light stew.

In our house, we’re not particularly partial to pickles (try saying that with a mouthful of gherkins).

Mr Mandy Sutter had a piccalilli ‘incident’ at seventeen and has never touched that violent yellow cauli, mustard and turmeric combo since. Dad is a mono-condimentalist and that condiment is HP sauce.

Dog MS’s one attempt to eat a pickled onion ended in a sneezing fit that nearly took her head off.  And I haven’t eaten Branston since someone put some down the toilet as a ‘joke’.

But along came the allotment and changed all that.

For the pickling season is upon us. Gluts must be faced, and the idea that vegetables can’t be kept for longer than a week abandoned. What can’t be endured must be cured.

We’re not alone in having a lot of green tomatoes at our allotment. It has been a bad year for blight (or a good one, if you are a blighter). Tomatoes have gone straight from green to rotten, leaving out the useful bit in between. They have hung, brown and bulbous, looking disturbingly like diseased nuts (yes, I do mean those sorts of nuts.)

If you’re in the same boat,  I recommend rescuing some before they succumb and chutnefying them with this Nigel Slater recipe. It has a nice nip of chilli, and suggests using a few ripe tommies to help the unripe ones along.

We had some red and yellow ones in the garden and added to the green ones they looked great, roiling, boiling and moiling in the pan like some sort of traffic light stew.

A shame it all has to turn brown in the end. But despite now being the same colour as the blighted tomatoes, the chutney tastes lovely, especially with a Bath Oliver and some cave aged Emmental. If you find those ingredients pretentious, as Mr MS does, please substitute a Jacob’s cream cracker and some mild cheddar from Tommy Tesco’s.

And the pickling hasn’t stopped there. A friend, hearing about our great bounty of brassicas, lent me a Harsch Gartopf fermenting pot. Ideal, he said, for making sauerkraut.

Kraut-ready

Alone with the pot, Mr MS was suspicious. ’Yes, but what IS sauerkraut, exactly? Do you eat it hot or cold? And what with?’

‘It’s pickled cabbage,’ I said. ‘You can eat it any way you like.’

I don’t know why I always pretend to know everything when talking to Mr MS. I’ve no idea whether you can eat sauerkraut hot.

But I was on a roll by now, reeling off different kinds of German sausage, unmoved by his baffled expression.

Then I relented. ‘Hot dogs,’ I said.

Suddenly, he was a different man. ‘Hot dogs? Why didn’t you say so!’

That’s the thing with menfolk. Eventually, you have to speak their language.

Actually, sauerkraut doesn’t so much involve pickling as fermenting. Or so one discovers, watching the 149-minute long video that comes with the pot, where a chap with massive sideburns and adjoining moustache tells you a very great deal about it. After two hours, he tells you how to make the stuff too. For him, it isn’t just about passing on a recipe, or even a practice. Fermentation is an ethos.

World Naked Gardening Day

I can’t make up my mind whether this is the best or the worst thing about growing your own; the fact that you don’t have to look very far into any of its aspects before you stumble across sub-cultures peopled with evangelical folk with unlikely facial hair and home-knitted trousers, or no trousers at all in the case of World Naked Gardening Day (which falls on Saturday 5th May 2012 in case you’re wondering).

Books about recycling your own piss; Potato Days; Scarecrow Festivals, the list goes on. You couldn’t make it up.

But the sauerkraut is made, anyway.  I plan to lift the lid next week.  If I can get the picture of rotting veg and handlebar moustaches out of my mind, I may even eat some.

Blackberry and apple loaf.

It’s official: today is the first day of autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats called it in Sept 1819. He also mentioned the ‘moss’d cottage trees’ bending with the weight of apples.

Unfortunately at our Yorkshire allotments it has been so windy recently that  the apples have blown clean off the trees, moss’d-cottage or otherwise. ‘Windfalls’ doesn’t cover it: they didn’t fall, they were pushed.

I’ve been forced to make a lot of blackberry and apple loaf. Forced to eat it too. Slathered in double cream from Tommy Tesco’s. OK, the recipe only uses one small apple, but it’s a start.

It isn’t just apples that toppled: plums plummeted and there was a downpour of damsons, like purple rain.

Battered beans

Veg suffered too. Beans were battered and sunflowers summarily beheaded by the wind’s guillotine.

Only crops that know how to keep their heads down have survived: cabbages, beetroot, pumpkins. The low riders of the vegetable realm.

Actually, I can’t imagine anything defeating the pumpkin plant. It had me afear’d all summer,  not just from the prospect of pumpkin-based meals for all eternity. No, the stealthy yet rapid way it covered ground was sinister. If anyone had sat still for long enough, they would definitely have seen it growing. They’d have had to camouflage themselves in a pumpkin-shaped hide, though: the grinning pumpkin acts only when backs are turned.

A pumpkin shaped hide

So I’m glad to see Autumn. The cooler weather has put a spoke in the pumpkin’s wheel: its plan to hit the A65 and make it to Leeds seems to have died a death. I still find the size of its fruits unnerving, though; the way they lurk beneath the razor-edged leaves.

Lurking

But I digress. The real point of this time of year is to yoke the menfolk and the dog together and send them off to bring home the bacon, namely brassicas and spuds, the only things numerous enough to deserve the name ‘harvest’. I don’t think a handful of runner beans and two beetroots really qualify.

But Dad asks to be excused on grounds of age (88). Fair enough: he isn’t a ‘cabbage man’ and has recently been seen buying potatoes from Charlie Co-op (he likes a nice boiled spud, and says ours ‘go abroad’ in the pan).

Then dog MS begs off. There are some urgent sticks in her ‘In’ tray, apparently, and some long overdue barking, especially at the ironing board, who needs taking down a peg or two.

As Harvest Manager, it’s obviously not my role to dig. And so the grunt work gets passed to Mr Mandy Sutter. After making protracted notes in his diary, a prelude vital to the success of any manual task, he starts unearthing spuds of myriad (well, three) hues: pink, golden, and pink and golden. I load them into boxes stuffed with newspaper and we head for the gate.

Onions lounging

We are waylaid by the sight of onions on a neighbour’s plot, enjoying their last afternoon of warmth in a hammock, before being strung up in the shed.

Mr MS eyes them enviously and slows to a standstill. He sags under the weight of  potatoes.

I crack the whip across his glistening flanks. He doesn’t budge.

The atmosphere is not mellow. Neither is it particularly fruitful.

‘I think there’s some blackberry and apple loaf left at home,’ I say.

His eyes flare, and he moves off with his load towards the camper van.

I am triumphant: the harvest is in.

Humongous home produce

I thought having an allotment would make me immune from receiving vegetable gifts.

I have had to think again.

Innocent observations to my allotment neighbours, like ‘cracking courgettes you’ve got there’ or ‘sensational sweet peas’ have brought hope to their eyes.

‘Please take a few!’ or ‘Cut yourself a bunch!’ they plead. It is an unfeeling person who looks into those desperate faces and says no.

So to help out the couple who had been on holiday and come back to find their cabbages big enough to appear on roadmaps, I took delivery of a huge head of Savoy last week.

Dad and I were already buckling under the heft of  supersized spuds dug from our own plot. One weighed in at nearly 2lb and Dad, who has taken to wearing 2 pairs of £1 reading specs one on top of the other, rather than forking out £200 at the opticians (and who can blame him), could hardly believe the evidence of his six eyes.

‘Now that’s a potato among potatoes!’ he said. ‘It’ll keep me going for a month.’

But back to our neighbours’ preposterously-sized produce. I struggled to carry it to the car. Perhaps it was already developing its own gravity system.

Big Spud

At home, it made Mr Mandy Sutter back away across the kitchen. ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said.

The table legs flinched under the weight of the Brobdingnagian brassica. ‘Well,’ I said coolly, ‘I’m away next week. I’m afraid it’s going to be your project.’

One of Mr MS’s friends was coming to stay in my absence. ‘It’s a good job Ade’s a vegetarian,’ I said. ‘And that he’s a gannet.’

We live in a terraced house that looks smaller out than in.  Visitors often comment on how spacious our kitchen is. But, glancing at the gargantuan green on the kitchen table, the room suddenly seemed small.

I left for Northampton.

I phoned home mid-week. Mr MS and I managed to talk pleasantly for a while, but we both knew where the conversation was headed.

‘The thing is, we haven’t made much of a sortie on the Savoy yet,’ said Mr MS.

It was the same old story. Except that this time, thinking about that vast vegetable, I couldn’t help sympathising.

At primary school, I was once made to sit over a bowl of sago pudding for the entire dinner hour. As I stared at the dreaded substance, unable to imagine even putting it into my mouth, let alone swallowing it, it looked more like frogspawn every second. And it seemed to be multiplying in the bowl, a vast gelatinous alien life form that might suddenly overflow and spread over the tables and chairs until it had annihilated the entire school canteen, including me and all the dinner ladies. Let’s face it: food in large quantities just isn’t appetising (unless it’s salt and vinegar Kettle Chips).

Sago pudding

‘Don’t turn your back on the cabbage,’ I muttered.

‘What?’ said Mr MS. ‘Look, we’ll try and break through the outer atmosphere tonight. I promise.’

When I returned home, he swore they had eaten three of its leaves. But the cabbage looked remarkably undiminished. Perhaps it was evolving, learning how to replenish itself from thin air.

No matter, though.  There are very few vegetables that can survive a concerted attack of recipe Googling.  Today I found a website that had 200 ideas, all involving cabbage.

To finally defeat this ginormous growth, I may have to try them all.

Boiling

Gardeners see things in a different way to normal people.

An ordinary family meal, for example, is imbued with more tension than a   Christmas episode of Eastenders as I watch Mr Mandy Sutter boiling to b*ggery  the kale nurtured with difficulty over the past months.

‘You’ve cooked it all!’ I moan. ‘We’ll never eat all that: what a waste!’

Mr MS is a wily creature. ‘I’ll eat it tomorrow. I like cold vegetables.’

As he well knows, I’m out all day tomorrow, so whether he eats it or throws it away I won’t be any the wiser. But I shut up. Not everyone feels the way I do about home grown veg, and I appreciate his saying something that saves face on both sides.

East Riddlesden Hall

The gardener’s slant view extends into many  areas. Earlier this week, a friend and I took a tour of East Riddlesden Hall, a small stately home in Keighley. Despite its fascinating history and beautifully restored interior -  including two ‘Yorkshire Rose’ windows and a carved stone head of Charles I – our interest could best be described as polite.

When we got into the garden however, it was an emotional roller coaster. ‘Oh! Oh!’ my friend said amidst apple and pear trees. ‘It’s no good, I’ll just have to move house. I MUST have an orchard.’

We oohed and aahed in ‘Plants for sale’, a limited selection of herbs no different to those you’d find in any common or garden garden centre.

But what really aroused my passion was the compost heaps. There were four. Four! Imagine. All at different stages of putrefaction. And next to them was a large chicken wire drum full of dead leaves.

I’d heard tell of leaf mould and its many good properties but somehow it had never felt personal. This drum, though, with its darkening coppery strata, was a vision.  I longed for beauty like this at our allotment and (perhaps because we have spare chicken wire) it suddenly seemed possible.

Magnificent

I hardly slept that night. Yes, I know.  But to cut a long story short, the leaf drum is now installed and is magnificent. It may even herald the dawn of a new era, allotmently speaking.

It isn’t the only recent innovation, either.

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale ‘The Road’, father and son walk an anonymous road through a blasted landscape. Armed with little more than a tarpaulin to sleep under, they approach an uncertain fate.

This prize possession was mentioned so often that, listening to the audio book, I became strangely mesmerised by the idea of it.  Never mind the searing insight into humans’ capacity for good and evil that McCarthy offered, what I took from the book was the desire for a tarp. I could keep the compost heap warm with it.

At our local garden centre, I discovered that tarps don’t come cheap.

I could almost hear Dad. ‘£14.99 for a plastic sheet? You’ve got to be joking.’

I got as far as the checkout with it, then realised I couldn’t pay that much. I scoured the place again, as if a cheaper one might have materialised. It hadn’t. I went to the camping section to see if proper groundsheets were cheaper. They weren’t.

The tarp

On the way out of the shop, I noticed something in the waste bin.  It was a large piece of thick plastic that had been used to wrap a mattress. I took it to the sales desk. ‘Can I have this?’

The sales assistant had already heard my plans for the compost heap.

‘It’s £48,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Go on, tek it.’

So I did.

Dad, hearing the story, gave a silent thumbs-up, the ultimate accolade.

Folded in half, the tarp was exactly the right size. It and the chicken wire drum make a handsome pair. And from my new, weird gardener’s-eye view, I know that when the apocalypse comes, at least we’ll have enough fertiliser.

A fortnight away

But it’s amazing what a fortnight away can do.  The benefit isn’t just in my mind: when I visited the allotment this morning, it looked like the allotment of a Proper Gardener.

Various veg (written off as bloody washouts) have shot up. The courgettes have come out of suspended animation and produced impossibly yellow flowers, the broccoli and kale have stopped drooping half-heartedly about the place and are standing up straight like proper men and even the carrots, their tops almost invisible before, have a definite, if feathery, presence.

A Watched Crop Never Grows may have to become my new gardening maxim.

Of course, the sudden growth spurt may also have been helped by my home made nettle fertiliser, applied the day before we went away. And if so, the nightmare of making it may have been worthwhile.

Putrefaction

I don’t know if you’ve ever soaked nettles in a bucket for 3 weeks? But tripping gaily about the allotment in gardening gloves and floppy hat, humming as I filled a basket with delicately heart shaped nettle leaves, I had no idea of the disgusting stages of filth and putrefaction I was going to be forced to witness.

The education wasn’t just visual. As the nettles began to decay, the water turn black, and then grow sinister white blooms and become a feeding ground, breeding-ground and general seething-ground for a thousand blue bottles, I had never smelt anything so foul.

It was unfortunate that I’d stood the buckets in front of the shed, next to the bench. Even that filth meister Mr MS was unable to drink his coffee in the vicinity. And we were all scared to move the buckets.

But the day of reckoning had to come. Armed with a Tupperware container, I approached the buckets and plunged the plastic box into the vile brew, ready to dilute it ten parts to one in the watering can.  I was holding my breath, but couldn’t resist a little sniff to see if the stuff was really that bad. It was.  The watering took an hour and a half. I had to keep running away.

But job (eventually) done. The buckets got a thorough rinseby way of thanks, the gunk went on the compost heap and the flies reassembled around the plants that had been watered with the filth. I gave those plants a mercy watering with clean water. I made a mental note not to use the Tupperware box for Mr MS’s sandwiches in future. Well, not unless he really annoys me.

Even after five washes, my fingers still stank.

Mr MS, who had not been present (he used that old chestnut of an excuse ‘I have to go to work’) blanched when I waved the fingers under his nose later.

Even worse than nettles

‘God. I see what you mean,’ he said. He had been accusing me of exaggeration. But now, was it admiration I saw in his eyes? Or just wind from eating a home grown onion?

Who knows. One thing I did know at the time, though: however beneficial the nettle fertiliser was to our veggies, I was never going to put myself through all that again.

But I notice now that my new comfrey patch is coming on really well. And soaked comfrey leaves make even better fertiliser than nettles. Apparently they smell even worse, too.  But just as it’s impossible to remember feeling hungry, it’s impossible to remember bad smells. Especially after a fortnight’s holiday.

Thanks but no thanks

The working life is tough: don’t we know it.

Unfortunately, some of us choose ‘interests’ that are hard work too.

11 months into the tenure of our allotment, Dad and I have come to realise that although TV gardening programmes  would have us think otherwise, this gardening lark is all bloody graft. It’s tough on body, mind and soul alike.

It’s like working in a crap job. When things go wrong, no-one knows why. When things go right, one feels lucky rather than clever. And every so often, a pest appears who undoes three months’ good work just like that.

Last month, everything on the allotment (weeds excepted) stopped growing.  Some blamed it on weird weather; some on poor soil. But because the crops were on a go-slow and the slugs weren’t, most of my seedlings (carefully nurtured since February) got eaten.

No doubt I put them in too early, when they were too small. And here’s another snag of allotmenteering: it holds a mirror to one’s personality, revealing things one doesn’t wish to see.  In my case, impatience.

No bigger than shallots

Impatience was why I harvested my onions too early; why, rather than waiting until 90 per cent of the tops had toppled over then bending the remaining few, I bent them all at the first sign of a tilt.  (I do have some patience, by the way, but it gets used up on Dad and Mr MS.) When I finally dug the onions up, most were no bigger than shallots.

The harvesting procedure was hard work in itself. You don’t just pick the onions out of the ground and eat them. No, you bend them over, leave them for a fortnight, lift them on a sunny day, leave them again for a few days, move them to a ‘warm airy place’ for a few weeks, cover them with ‘thin cotton’ as sun protection and finally, if you have any energy left, plait them into a bunch.

Who knew?

That’s more care and interest than I lavish on most of the human beings in my life.

And I confess to a grudge about the onions. 50 tiny ones go into the ground in October. Nine months of watering, weeding and watching later, 40 slightly larger ones come out. As Dad would say, ‘Big deal.’

Hard as hell

As for the radishes, when I pulled them, there were no bulbs at all, just dark pink question marks of roots so hard that a kitchen knife wouldn’t cut them.

It was the celeriac and the Christmas potatoes (both bulbless) all over again.

No, allotmenteering is not the idyll it’s cracked up to be. It’s a long, slow process of learning the hard way. It’s the thin, flaccid burger you get at McDonald’s as opposed to the fat juicy picture of a burger in McDonald’s window.

But there are compensations.

What keeps me going through the darkest moments is my peas.

In the finale of the film ‘Amelie’, a lonely old man gives the most succulent part of his roast chicken to a little girl. Message: food tastes best when you share it.

Rubbish. Food tastes best when gobbled down alone with the curtains drawn and in front of a TV gardening programme featuring Monty Don.

This is especially true of home grown peas in short supply. I slather them in butter then wolf them down in great forkfuls. It’s the ugly side of gardening.

‘Monty,’ I entreat the TV screen. ‘Why didn’t you warn me it would come to this?’

p.s. The Reluctant Gardener needs a holiday. Fortunately, she’s getting one: see you in a few weeks.

Bloody balsam

While gardeners are happy to emote about weeds – ‘those beautiful buttercups’ or ‘that bloody Himalayan Balsam’ – down at our allotment few voice their feelings about their own crops.

Perhaps it seems taboo, like saying you have a favourite child. Or maybe after thirty years of gardening successes and failures, one is drained of all emotion, an empty husk.

But Dad and I haven’t reached that stage yet. Our plot fair seethes with emotion, with plants we see as ‘little beauties’ or ‘bloody wash-outs’.

Dad’s feelings centre around the effort-to-edibility ratio.

Potatoes are his favourites. ‘Bung ‘em in the ground and dig em up a few months later.  A good pound of spuds from each plant.’ (The exceptions were the Christmas potatoes, which grew nice green tops but produced nothing edible underground.  They were a bloody washout.)

His other favourites are runner beans.  ‘Little beauties. You can eat the whole thing, y’see. Not like broad beans, where half your labour goes into the pods. You only get a handful of beans, then the phone rings while you’re cooking ‘em and you burn the damn things.’

Peas are dismissed

Peas are dismissed on the same grounds.

But back to broad beans, which are in fact my favourite. I planted an overwintering variety in November and my cup hath brimmed with emotion ever since.

I was amazed and oddly touched to see green shoots in winter. I was proud when the sturdy little plants withstood snow and rabbits. I was enchanted at the delicate black and white flowers and thrilled to see glossy pods stand proud. And finally I was in ecstasy (well, almost) when we ate the first pickings. They took two minutes to cook and tasted divine in that special bittersweet broad bean way.

Thrilled

And that’s not all. Broad beans are moderate plants. There’s a steady reliability about them, and no sudden shocks.

Spinach, on the other hand, alarms with its immodest growth. Give it a bit of sun and rain and it’s away, like a rat up a drainpipe. I once had a front garden taken over by nasturtiums, and to this day can’t stomach the sight of them or their seeds. When things are rife, I go right off ‘em.

Mr MS shares this sensibility. He admits to not liking August because of ‘a burgeoning quality’ about the plantlife. ‘Giddying’ he calls it. ‘It feels as if something is about to burst.’

My feeling about this manifests again in silliness about weak seedlings.  Chuck ‘em out, says every gardening book and seed packet under the sun. But I can’t.

Affection for the vulnerable may explain my picking out that neurotic, crazed turnip-muncher, Dog MS. On the subject of picking men, I remain silent.

Perhaps it’s to do with not having children. And yet I doubt it. There are thousands of childless couples in the world and they aren’t all watering spindly Brussels Sprout seedlings out of a specially made bottle every morning.

Bittersweet

As an antidote to all this emotionalism, the last word goes to Mr MS.

He’s asked what his favourite crop is.

‘Err… peas?’

‘There’s no right answer. Just say what you feel.’

Fear enters his eyes. But he rallies. ‘All plants are different, and I like them all, for what’s individual and special about them.’

For a man whose top ten films are constantly under revision, this surprises me.

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ he says.

On the subject of his attitude to women, he remains silent.

Mr MS last week

Mr Mandy Sutter, not understanding that I am the designated spiritual member of our household, went on a meditation retreat last week. It was something I’d been urging him to do, to combat stress.

So I can’t explain the strange resentment I felt when he finally went, and broke all contact with me for ten days. Not even a text.

To make matters worse, I found myself unable to meditate while he was away.

He got back and found me tense. ‘You’re stressed. You need to meditate.’

‘How can I, now that you’ve taken it over?’

‘I think you’ll find there are other people meditating besides me.’

It was a fair point.

The truth was, while he was away I had developed a new obssession set to rival meditation as the Answer to Everything. The composting toilet.

Overgrown plots

I’d spent a weekend in London with my friend David, visiting different allotments. Yes, that is my idea of a good time these days.

On one site in the East End, half the plots were overgrown and untenanted.  It was green and wild, and felt nothing like London. Someone explained: no water. But the allotmenteers were getting together to solve the problem and had installed huge tanks near the gates.

I was inspired.

‘YOU could have a plot here,’ I told David.

‘Hmm’, he said.

Browsing his bookshelves later, ‘The Humanure Handbook’ came to my attention.

David is fascinated by composting. In fact he finds it the most compelling aspect of allotmenteering. His patio is a-pong with buckets of soaking comfrey leaves, his plot a-ferment with nitrogen fixers, his mind awash with thoughts of pissing into straw bales.

Having said that, I may have outdone him with my fervour for the ideas outlined in ‘Humanure’.

When he said he was the only tenant on his allotments with a brick shed, I nearly combusted with excitement.

‘Clear out the tools and stuff, and you could have a composting toilet!’ I shouted. ‘All you need is a bucket and some sawdust. You’d be intimately involved in the life cycle. Your faeces would offend you no more. They’d be as gold dust.’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

Gripping stuff

I was forced to remember I am the one who finds faeces offensive, so much so that any dung-related incidents in our household send me off into a corner to retch while Mr MS sorts everything out.

I resorted to generalities. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s a fantastic idea. It’s recycling with knobs on.’

‘Maybe,’ said David. ‘But pissing into a straw bale will do me for now.’

I was trying, and failing, to get an easy-going man to do something of my choosing, not his. It was just like home. Which meant it was time to pack my bags and take my strange passion back up the M1.

Keeping your teaspoon handy

Now that I’ve been back a week, and Mr MS has returned, I find myself still keen. And  wondering if anyone else at our allotments would be interested.

There’s a triangle of common land near the gate that would make a perfect site.

Before asking around, I’d better broach the subject with Dad. He likes recycling and DIY when it means making lamps out of old baked bean tins, or drilling a hole in his teaspoon so’s he can hang it by the kettle.

He may draw the line at shitting into a bucket.

But I have high hopes of Mr MS.

I’ll have to get him off that meditation cushion first, though.