I’ve always considered the allotment shed to be a home from home but the recent crop failings and resultant low morale has led it to be more of an irregular holiday home and our lack of attentiveness became apparent today.

Opening the shed I discovered my boots had been used as a rubbish receptacle, I tried blaming Lynn but further inspection revealed the worrying signs that squatters had moved in – the Rich Tea biscuits had been half inched, the coffee whitener nibbled and a row of unappealing black deposits lined up on the supplies shelf.

It appears that a mouse has declared my boot a room of his own.

I’m quite impressed with his interior design. A veritable cornucopia was packed deep into the toe recess, including two real ale bottle tops and a large handful of plum stones.

I feel like I have this entirely unsatisfactory hobby where I spend hours each weekend, weeding and tilling and planting, just in order for an army of soft, squishy critters to gorge themselves silly on our lush organic produce.

Next year I may try out a new hobby of browsing the veg aisles in the local Lidl so that I too, can gorge on some vegetables.

Broad beans have been the only success this year, in fact they were so successful that I can barely close the freeze door without bursting an over stuffed sack of beans.

Everything else?

Absolutely everything else is a complete flop.

Here’s the pitiful reward for digging an entire row of spuds in heavy and claggy clay.

The second row was no better, in fact I unearthed more slugs than potatoes.

The runner beans are nothing short of an embarrassment.

The mountain goat species of snail has been up and down each wigwam, decimating each and every plant.

I’ve jumped from foot to foot squishing them in a furious war dance, done to the tune of much swearing but I am still a little unimpressed with this gardening hobby.

There were some ripe utterances on the plot this morning and for a change it wasn’t me doing the cursing.

One of my latest crazes is woodworking but beyond whittling a wooden spoon and purchasing assorted hand tools I haven’t really progressed the hobby much further. I’ve sharpened one of many vintage chisels and have hacked at a sticking door frame with a blunt Stanley plane but it has hardly been an intense or successful apprenticeship.

So when we arrived on the plot and it became clear that true joinery skills would be required, I skulked off to deal with the tricky weeding and left Lynn to handle the construction tasks.

Cue much swearing….

I’d requested a second compost bin for the plot so that we can turn the contents of the bins from time to time and speed up the decomposition. Having spent a week scouring the neighbourhood for discarded pallets we had acquired enough to start the build.

The pallets were pretty much indestructible and Lynn wielded that hammer for a good hour before the blocks would loosen sufficiently to be able to fashion a sliding door for the front of the bin. I busied myself with the camera and tried to stay out of reach of the swing.

Looking back at the photos now its hard to see quite what my contribution to the day was, it even appears that Lynn completed the transfer of the compost between bins despite the very real threat of vermin attack. I can confirm that I did dig one bean trench and made a cup of tea. I would have made a bacon butty for the worker too but I’d managed to bring slightly past its best bacon and thought it best not to poison her.

We left the plot satisfied but a little hungry.

I have been known to swear in the presence of the M1 Garden Rotovator but after Reg gave it the overhaul last year and passed on his top tips I knew that the trick was to filter the petrol through a pair of Tracey Hammett’s tights.

It seems that our habit of churning the soil without the air filter in place has resulted in flecks of soil clogging the fuel in-let pipe. With two whole beds to turn over before we could plant the spuds I was fairly determined to get the motor running and happily strained the fuel through the hand me down tights.

Of course it didn’t work.

You can’t pull that flipping machine out of the shed without a full scale meltdown.

We got Reg on the phone who had Lynn set to with a hammer and screwdriver trying to extract the spark plug in order to scrape a pencil over its points???

Of course that didn’t work.

I went back to the old fashioned method of forking over the soil while Lynn continued off and on, to wrench her arm out of its socket trying to get the thing to spark.

I was within seconds of listing the rotovator on eBay mobile when Lynn managed to coax a satisfying splutter and roar. She delivered it to my potato bed with an almighty smug smile and happily announced that the petrol tank was empty.

It was not flipping empty! I’ve got photographic evidence of it going through Tracey’s tights. Unless they acted like a wick and absorbed all the fuel before it hit the tank.

Still, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Digging is hard work and I could have the beds ploughed in minutes if I could keep it ticking over.

Lynn cracked on with the potato planting while I retired to play with a new gadget prepare a well earned cup of tea on the Valor 64C Petroleum Cooker!

My previous tea making gadget, the Kelly Kettle, was not that popular with her in doors. It usually caused a little friction on the plot as it took me an age to build up sufficient tinder to heat up a couple of mugs of tea and I think it was seen as an excuse for a sit down.

The Valor 64C didn’t fair much better though. I had a long mothers day chat with my mum, prepared labels for all my planned seed sowings and still the kettle was still only gently steaming. It wasn’t the only one steaming!

I blame the titchy kettle. When I tried the equipment out again to fry up a gammon steak and boil some freshly picked purple sprouting it worked a treat. It helped that I’d read the instructions as well I suppose, I hadn’t realised there was a high and low setting.

After such a good start to the day it was shame that we had to cut it short but with seeds un-sown and spuds yet to be planted we received a call from the cops to inform me that my beautiful Triumph Bonneville had been found on the common – trashed. Here starts a long wrangle with the insurers.

I’ve been inspired by John Lewis-Stempel’s “The Wild Life“, to resurrect my fascination with wild and local foods. Although I haven’t actually foraged much further afield than Borough Market, I am currently preparing a pot of slow cooked, wild, rabbit stew. I might not have shot it myself but I was rather perturbed when I noticed bunny fur remaining on the quartered carcass. De-fluffing the tea brought me a bit too close to the harsh realities of our carnivorous lifestyle but that can only be a good thing.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to persuade any one else to join me for a serving so I’ve taken the precaution of preparing a backup leek and potato soup.

Back to the book, John committed a year of his life to eating wild produce hunted or foraged within the grounds of a derelict farmhouse that he and his wife had bought to renovate. It sounds like a hell-ish challenge. He started in game season so he had plenty of meat to hand but had to grub around for meager offerings of greenery. He managed to poison himself more than once by over-reliance on dubious quality produce.

His ingredients list for February reads:

Pigeon, rabbit, squirrel, dandelion, corn salad, nettles

He was pretty strict about the source of his food and so beyond the stuff he gathered or shot on a daily basis he would have to rely on foods he’d managed to preserve or dry such as nuts, oils, rosehip syrup and copious quantities of alcohol.

I think I was particularly inspired by his ability to keep himself stocked up with daily supplies of alcohol as well as his ability to stomach some of the concoctions brewed. Home brew wine is rank at the best of times and I don’t think oak leaf wine would fare any better than the usual culprits. Dandelion and Burdock beer sounds delightful though and I was impressed to discover you can turn the brew around in about a week.

The book is illustrated with many historic and authentic hedgerow recipes which must have taken some time to unearth. We have Chickweed soup, Stuffed Bistort Leaves, Fat hen pancakes with horseradish and as I’ve seen them lined up next to the rabbits at Borough Market, perhaps this one will do for next weekend:

Herby Squirrel Burgers
Serves 4

1lb/450g lean minced squirrel
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp hedge garlic, chopped
2 tsp equal parts wild thyme and wild chervil
pinch salt

Mix together the egg, meat, herbs and salt in a bowl.
Shape into flattened patties and fry in goose fat. Serve with a green salad.

I haven’t been down to the plot since the great leek disaster but this morning my electronic to-do list beeped to inform that it would soon be time to plant broad beans so we gathered our sun screen and headed off into the heatwave to prepare a bed.

Here’s the M1 Gardener basking in the sun, mocking me. Lynn and I are collapsed under the shade of the shed having spent 20 fruitless minutes trying to start the frustrating machine in the hottest day since the last unseasonably hot day, probably back in April.

I am beginning to hate the rotovator. It offers so much in the way of pain free cultivation but its always such an arse to use. It weighs a tonne, requires repeated muscle wrenching yanks to even hint at a splutter and then when you finally get it started it roars for a matter of seconds before choking its way to a pathetic end. Then the process repeats.

I ended up reverting to the good old fashioned way of soil cultivation.

Today’s trip to the allotment was a disaster of mythical proportions.

A plague of juicy maggots reduced an entire bed of leeks to this pitiful harvest.

I have to confess that I rarely do well with my leeks but I’ve never seen them as bad as this. They are completely peppered with holes, riddled with the maggots and turning to mush below the greenery.

Much wailing prevailed.

Having come back to my computer I have cheered myself up with a trip to soilman who has a whole page dedicated to leek miseries. Also on my web search I found a tip which suggested that you cut the leeks down to soil level and wait for them to re-sprout. Too late for that now but it might have been worth the risk with a few of them, I’ve barely got enough for a leek and potato soup here.

The same tipster made a point of saying you should burn the diseased trimmings. I’m afraid I didn’t do that, I like to save as much as I can for the compost heap but I’ll regret it if the bugs flourish ready for next year.

I suspect it is the leek moth as I’ve found the perfect description on this site. It’s description of the life-cycle of the leek moth includes the following:

Adult moths overwinter in plant debris. As temperatures rise in the spring, the moths start to become active and egg laying begins in April and May.

Sounds like I’ve created them a home from home in the warm heap of plant debris. I wonder if I’m too late to go back and incinerate the pile of discarded leeks.

I’ll be growing them under enviromesh next year. I had my carrots under enviromesh and for once I can be proud of a carrot harvest.

I’ve spent a good proportion of the bank holiday reading about food and quite specifically how to eat food.

I started with the seriously irritating Allen Carr and his Easyweigh to Lose Weight. I’ve read this once before and threw it out in disgust but I have to cut Allen a lot of slack as I’m into my tenth year as a non smoker thanks to his EasyWay methods. Still, when it comes to food and nutrition he drives me nuts.

His main premise is that we should look to wild animals for advice on what to eat, after all they don’t get sick or obese. Somehow he manages to jump from wild animals to the instruction to eat a vegetarian diet with fruit and nothing but fruit for breakfast. I can cope with all of that and resist the temptation to argue the point of predation and age-related conditions but when he starts on slugs and snails I’m afraid the book has to go into the charity pile again.

I know about slugs and I’m not too enamored of them. Allen likes to use the example of the slothful slug and snail to illustrate his suggestion that exercise is overrated. You don’t really need to exercise as, after all, have you ever seen an obese snail? That sets me wondering. If I match sluggy slime trails to body length, I reckon our squidgy friends are really quite active critters, especially of a damp evening and if we are going to be critical, I’m not sure I’d consider them the slenderest of creatures either. Quite podgy I’d say.

Next on my list was Savor, a Buddhist guide to mindful eating. This book attempts to fuse nutritional advice with the buddhist concept of mindfulness through the discussion of the four noble truths and a series of exercises or meditations that encourage a focus on the present. Mindfulness is not restricted to eating and Thich Nhat Hanh takes us through mindfulness for eating, exercise and living.

The eating messages I’ve taken home are:

• Eat at the table
• Avoid multitasking – so no TV, work or magazines
• Appreciate your food by use of all the senses
• Chew and take it slowly
• Quality not quantity

There is a particularly useful exercise on appreciating the apple and I’d encourage anyone to spend 10 minutes with a Discovery apple, reacquainting yourself with its joys.

I’m a big fan of food and this time of year is particularly conducive to appreciating food. The plot is so productive that I can’t help but serve up meals that are at least 70% home grown and it is such a delight to look at the plate and remember the soil turning, seed sowing, weeding and watering that led to the harvest.

We’ve snuck a few yellow courgette plants into the flower border at home and I find their unexpected presence on the plate extremely satisfying.

Not content with the first two books on food, I’ve turned now to Michael Pollen for the down to earth advice succinctly wrapped up in the title of this post: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. Homespun advice that would make your mum and grandmother nod their heads in appreciation.

In Defense of Food, contains Michael Pollens manifesto for eating and attempts to find the commonsense lost in the nutritional world that has become hijacked by commerce and the food industry.

In addition to the above advice you’ll find tips such as:

• Only eat food your great grandmother would recognise as food
• Avoid products with unpronounceable ingredients or more than 5 ingredients

I’ve been overdosing on common sense, so now it’s time to set the table and enjoy the products of our labour.

The plot and the hedgerows are so productive at the moment. It seems about two months too early but the sloes are already plump and juicy. I’ve just had to polish of the last remaining drop of slow gin from last year so that I can re-use the bottles for this year’s vintage. Extraordinarily tasty and potent stuff!

This year we remembered to take carrier bags for a trip around Mitcham Common and have collected enough apples and blackberries for about 30 pies. The trees were almost breaking under the burden of fruit, it’s a shame more people don’t take advantage of the free crops.

Back on the plot we’ve found ourselves overrun with beetroot and I’m in the unusual position of trying to find creative ways to cook and store it.

The Preserves book from the River Cottage Series has a fabulous recipe for sweet beetroot relish. I made slight adjustments, replacing creamed horseradish for the requested home-grown pickled variety and I also cheated with the tomato puree which I couldn’t be bothered to make from scratch. Here is my cheats version:

Sweet Beetroot Relish

1kg Beetroot – roasted at 180′C
250g Sugar
150ml cider vinegar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
large onion finely chopped
2 tbsp creamed horseradish
4 garlic cloves crushed
1 tbsp tomato puree

Put all the ingredients except for the beetroot into a preserving pan and boil for 5 mins.

Peel and coarsely grate the roasted beetroot. Add this to the mix and cook for another 10 mins.

The juice should be syrupy when ready to transfer to the sterilised jars.

It should last up to a year.

It’s been an incredibly productive season. Today we bagged up 3 sacks of assorted spuds and loaded the car boot with beans galore.

It all feels vaguely sinful.

The freezer is bulging, I’ve cooked dishes to last a week, I have beetroot roasting for a delicious chutney and still we have buckets of beans left in the kitchen.

We’ve dropped produce off with a friend and will offload more with the neighbours but it would be nice to pass these beautiful crops to someone who struggles to afford fresh crops and who hasn’t already done their weekly shop.