The Allotment Chef: Home-grown Recipes and Seasonal Stories

My gut feeling on all the above is to sit down with MJ and decide what we want to eat, then group the list into types of vegetables and take a view on how many beds we can logistically chop our allotment into. We both agree to limit the rotational beds to three: legumes, brassicas and root vegetables will all get a similar sized bed and be moved to the neighbouring bed the following year. On the row versus raised bed issue, I decide to go with tradition – and the seemingly easier option – and sow at ground level in rows.

Further reading reveals that permanent crops are those plants that are only planted once: rhubarb, soft fruit, perennial herbs and asparagus all need a permanent site. I reckon that, if we concentrate on getting these beds dug and planted, at least we will feel we have made progress. My plan is to line these beds with old floorboards so they are defined in area; this will also make the digging feel more achievable.

With my osteopath’s digging ban now at an end, and having read up on the relevant topics, I am ready for some serious allotment action. I get up full of enthusiasm and head to the local garden centre. As I walk towards the entrance, I have the same feeling of excitement and anticipation I used to feel as I approached HMV. Now, rather than wondering if I will come out with an Otis Redding CD or one by Bob Dylan, however, I have string and nails on my mind. Actually ‘String and Nails on my Mind’ does sound like it could well be a track by Bob Dylan, but this is a complete coincidence.

I have never been good at sticking to budgets and I decide that I will buy everything we need to kit out our shed on this one visit. String, nails, wire, hooks, soil-testing kit, forks, trowel, rake and a very necessary pink barbecue set are all purchased and then carted back to Blondin. The afternoon is spent hammering in nails and hooks and putting up shelves and, by the time I leave, the shed is beginning to look like it is a real gardening shed, albeit with very shiny tools. The pink barbecue is given to Ellie and I promise to teach her how to cook on it.

The Easter holiday arrives and with it comes the first serious sign of dissent in the camp. Ellie and Richie are far from thrilled to learn that Mum and Dad intend to spend most of the holidays moving things on at the allotment. I think they both feel that they are the victims of a huge con. Back in November, when we explained to them what an allotment was and why we should have one, I seriously played up the plus points (as anyone would when trying to encourage an unconvinced third party). I promised them that the allotment would be huge fun: bonfires, digging big holes, picking strawberries, pulling carrots, finding frogs, having barbecues; in truth, the only things ticked off that list so far are bonfires and digging big holes – and there are only so many holes you can dig with a smile on your face.

At this rate, I realise that they will hate the place by the time we have it up and running, and this will be a serious crisis. We are so keen for them to enjoy the allotment. Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we would have felt the same at their age – the difference is that our parents wouldn’t have cared. We do care, though, and it has always been important to us that we all enjoy the allotment.

MJ points out to them that part of our reason for taking the allotment was out of guilt. As children, we had both enjoyed a childhood in the countryside with all the freedom that brings. We had seen the allotment as going some way towards giving them that outdoor life that we had deprived them of by deciding to live in London. What we had possibly not recognised was that our kids might be urbanised beyond repair. Allotments are as foreign to them and their peers as the current Arsenal football team. As Ellie explained: why would they want to go to the allotment when they could be playing on the PlayStation? So, while MJ and I are both free spirits who have settled in London through convenience, our children are Londoners born and bred. We have given birth to Chas and Dave!

Obviously, there are times when the call of the allotment is simply too strong to resist and, at these times, you just have to drag the kids there kicking and screaming, but we have discovered that there are ways to encourage the children to get involved. You can sit the little darlings down and calmly explain that the planet is in trouble and needs our help; possibly they can be convinced that the outdoor life that is on offer is one that can enhance their lives way beyond the reach of a Game Boy or an iPod; or you can simply resort to bribery …

Easter Monday starts with coffee and hot cross buns, and the conversation centres around the fifth family member – the allotment.

‘Well, kids, where would you like to go today: Chessington World of Adventures or the allotment?’

‘Oh, Dad, not Chessington again. Let’s go and dig.’

That conversation never took place over breakfast because, right now, my children would rather go to school than the allotment. I offer several packets of football cards and a kilogram of chewy sweets but still they complain so, in the end, MJ suggests that we can go to Chessington later in the week if they come to the allotment today, and they finally yield. This is great, but how do we get them there tomorrow? We shall soon be offering skiing trips or safaris if we continue to up the stakes.

The day starts with a trip to the garden centre (I am rapidly becoming a regular), where we buy some paint for the shed – chosen by Ellie. Then we meet Dilly and Doug and their children at the allotment.

Progress is being made. MJ and I have started digging an area of about eight feet (2.4 metres) square, which will be our asparagus bed. The problem is that we are still having to sieve every spadeful for debris – I feel like I’m a pastry chef once more sieving icing sugar (though this is a lot more heavy!). An entire morning is devoted to this thankless task and this is just eight square feet.

I finally finish off the asparagus bed and then MJ and I make a start on the rhubarb bed. While we dig, the kids all paint the shed – it is lavender and marine-blue stripes, and is, without doubt, the smartest construction on the entire allotment site (personally, I wanted to do red and white stripes in honour of Brentford FC but I was overruled). They have done a great job and, by the time we leave, most of our allotment neighbours have come over to admire their work.

One of them, John, tells us of an allotment hosepipe ban put in place by Ealing Council, despite it being only April. I get the impression he sees this as nothing less than botanical murder by the council but, frankly, with nothing planted bar potatoes, we couldn’t care. So, despite this news, and after what has been a really good day, we fire up the barbecue. As we eat, we can see the progress we have already made: a potato patch, a compost bin, a very smart blue and purple shed, an asparagus bed with freshly sieved soil, and a rhubarb bed half finished. And all this domestic bliss for just the price of entry to Chessington World of Adventures.

The following week school restarts and MJ gets back to work, leaving me lots of time to spend at the allotment. I finish digging the rhubarb bed and get it manured and lined with floorboards; one of my neighbours is a builder called Richard who does loft conversions, so I have now got easy access to as many floorboards as any gardener could wish for.

I also line the asparagus bed, which we have raised as a trial of the raised bed system. I have spent many hours now reading all I can about this succulent vegetable. It’s one I’m desperate to grow but, one of the reasons asparagus can be so expensive to buy is that it takes the farmer three years to produce a crop he can sell. For the first two years after planting asparagus must be left untouched. Dr DG Hessayon, author of The Vegetable and Herb Expert, warns the reader that taking even one spear from newly growing asparagus can have catastrophic consequences. This is all well and good, but what Dr Hessayon forgets is that I am a man with a mission – I need asparagus recipes in my book and I, therefore, can’t wait three years for it to grow.

By now I am totally absorbed by the allotment and have started turning down weekend trips to visit friends and family, opting instead to carry on digging. The weather is improving, the dark days of a freezing barren wasteland seem far away and the whole project now feels under control.

One Sunday morning over breakfast the kids ask the inevitable question: ‘Do we have to go to the allotment today?’ My response would have been a gruff ‘definitely’, but MJ got in there quicker than me. She suggests that they have their own vegetable bed where they can plant exactly what they want. She adds that she will help them dig it and Dad will buy the plants the next time he goes to the plant shop.

My initial plan had been that everything we grow, wherever possible, should be from seed, but I can see MJ’s point and I refrain from pointing this out. If we can fuel their enthusiasm, it’s worth relaxing the rules so, after breakfast, we give them a gardening book and tell them to make a list of what they want to plant. This list, when complete, looks something like this:

I am trying hard to embrace MJ’s cunning plan and show willing but, when I read their list, it’s hard not to give just a small lecture on the principles of plant types and crop rotation. I bite my lip just in time.

When we get to the allotment MJ immediately stakes out a small bed, about ten by five feet (3 x 1.5 metres) and starts to dig the kids’ vegetable patch and, to my amazement, they are happy to help.

During the afternoon we have some visitors; our next-door neighbours Gill, Mal, Jake and Joe come down to give us a hand. With four adults now digging, we make real progress. The sun shines and I am soon stripped to the waist. Vegetable gardeners need a weathered look about us because we are the outdoorsy types!

The extra help means that we not only finish all the beds on the go but we also start and finish a soft fruit bed and begin on bed number two of our three rotational beds – things are seriously moving on. When we come home I immediately have to apply aftersun to my back because it is so badly burnt, and then I collapse into bed.

Twelve hours later I am back on site and proudly gazing at our plot. I take stock of where we have got to:

Potato patch – rotivated (against my better judgement) and planted (variety unknown). This is bed number one of our three rotational beds

Asparagus bed – dug, 8 x 8 feet (2.4 x 2.4 metres), raised and lined with boards

Rhubarb bed – dug, 3 x 3 feet (0.9 x 0.9 metres), lined with boards

Soft fruit bed – dug, 12 x 5 feet (3.6 x 1.5 metres), lined with boards

Kids’ bed – dug, 10 x 5 feet (3 x 1.5 metres), lined with boards

Herb bed – dug, 2 x 3 feet (0.6 x 0.9 metres), lined with boards

Rotational bed two – under construction

OK, so we haven’t actually planted anything except potatoes so far, but, with all these beds ready, we are just one shopping trip away.

We have three gardening centres near us, if you include Homebase, which I don’t because it is owned by a supermarket. So, we have two gardening centres near us and both are good for the more general gardening requirements, but, when it comes to plants – especially the permanent crops – they can be a little lacking in choice. For example, if you are a chap who wants a blackcurrant bush, your local garden centre will no doubt obligingly flog you one, but, if you are a chap like me, say, who has done nothing other than read about blackcurrant bushes for the previous six nights, that is different. That marks this chap out from your common or garden blackcurrant bush customer, as this chap is obviously well up on Ribes nigrum and he simply won’t take the first bush he is offered. This chap needs a garden centre with a choice befitting his knowledge. In fact, this chap needs Wisley Garden Centre.

Wisley Garden Centre is the Wembley Stadium of garden centres. It is run by the Royal Horticultural Society and is situated just off the A3 in Surrey, just 30 miles away. I don’t actually want a blackcurrant bush at all – that is just by way of explanation – but I do have a rather particular shopping list gleaned from my previous six nights researching soft fruit, herbs and asparagus. In addition, my dad has recommended I try Wisley for all my permanent crops.

I have not seen my mum for some time – mainly because I am now a full-time vegetable gardener – so I suggest we meet at Wisley. She naturally thinks I am going all that way to meet her (which is fine until this book is published) but really I have plastic in my pocket and some very empty-looking vegetable beds to fill. I also have a detailed list:

Rhubarb – three varieties. The books recommend getting different varieties to prolong the season

Raspberries – these come as summer- or autumn-croppers. I want summer-croppers so that we can make summer pudding. Apparently raspberries can suffer from ill health, however, so a benefit of going to a place like Wisley is that they will be certified ‘virus free’.

Blueberry bushes – two varieties are needed to ensure pollination

Gooseberry bushes – these come as a dessert variety (which is sweet) and a culinary variety, which tastes sharper. I am not sure whether we will eat them from the bush or make jam so intend to buy both

Herbs – I intend to buy a general selection

Strawberry plants – my favourite are the Gariguette strawberry so I will look for these. I also love wild strawberries – we call them fraises des bois in the kitchen – which are tiny strawberries with an intense flavour. The gardening books call them Alpine strawberries

Asparagus crowns – Edward C Smith, author of the religiously endorsed Vegetable Gardener’s Bible and one-time front man for The Fall (possibly not), suggests buying the male hybrid plant, which is apparently better than buying mixed sex asparagus

All of the books I have read have made the point that you should buy plants from a reputable supplier. This doesn’t just apply to raspberries; you shouldn’t buy plants on the cheap, and you should even be wary of well-meaning old ladies at the allotment offering plants that they say they have raised from seed. You have to buy the right thing for position, climate, and culinary requirement, but also, crucially, for its disease resistance. Failure to do so can result not only in a poor harvest but also in an outbreak of death in the flowerbed.

With all this in mind, I head off to Wisley full of enthusiasm. I can’t wait to buy the plants and get them dug into the sandy soils of Ealing. I meet my mum outside and, after a quick cappuccino in le café (that contains lots of people in woolly jumpers and sensible shoes), we head straight for the shop, where I promptly part with one hundred quid on books. Then it is off to the plant department.

Mum suggests that we stroll through the manicured gardens that Wisley boasts alongside the nursery shop, but I decline. What she doesn’t understand is that I am not interested in orchids and rhododendrons; I am a vegetable man through and through.

The nursery is all I had hoped it would be. They have a huge array of plants and at least two types of each variety. From my list I manage to get the following:

Malling Jewel raspberries – a summer cropper and 100 per cent disease resistant

Blue Crop blueberry and Northland blueberry – to aid pollination

Herbs – lavender, sage, pot marjoram. I could have bought more types of herb but my trolley was too full. (Curiously, you don’t grow pot marjoram in a pot.)

Honeoye strawberries – I have bought this Honeoye variety from my vegetable supplier at work before and they are right up there with Gariguette for flavour. Apparently I am a bit late for Alpine

Rhubarb – early and late varieties (Red Champagne and Victoria)

There are a couple of things I do leave without:

Gooseberry bushes – these are not sold at this time of year unless container grown, and they don’t recommend container grown (naturally – this is Wisley after all), so these remain on the list

Asparagus crowns – I can’t find these until, at the checkout the lady says they are on the far wall; by this time, however, I have seen my bill and decide to quit while still solvent

At this point, however, I can’t wait to get back to the site and plant my purchases so I ditch Mum at the checkout and head back to Blondin. One small blip along the way is that I have totally forgotten to buy the plants that Ellie and Richie want to plant in their bed. I am halfway home before I realise my mistake and can’t turn back. I know that if I turn up empty-handed, however, I will be accused of only caring about what I choose to plant, so I make a small detour to our local garden centre, which feels like a corner shop after my Royally Horticultural experience. Nonetheless, I am able to pick up everything on their list – a list incidentally that does not feature words but pictures of vegetables, drawn by Ellie a couple of nights previously. It takes a few moments before I decide whether I should buy pumpkin plants or an orange tree!

I carefully leave the children’s plants to one side so that they can dig them in themselves, and then get started on the crops I have bought. I feel a real sense of responsibility as I dig in these permanent crops. These plants won’t be yanked out at the end of the season and moved elsewhere; these plants are in the ground for life. As I plant the impressively straight line of raspberries, I wonder how many allotmenteers will enjoy their fruit long after I am on the compost heap.

The plot looks so good with things finally in the ground. I know the guys back home will want to see this big development so I take some photos on my mobile phone to show them. Back at home I also find myself fretting like a new parent that the raspberries won’t take or the rhubarb will be unhappy where I have put it, but, really, I tell myself I have done my bit for them and now it is their turn to repay the favour.

These plants should all be in early enough to produce some fruit this year, which is hugely encouraging, because, at the moment, we have nothing to show for our efforts. The supermarket ban I tried to impose now looks ridiculous. As MJ points out we would all be dead of scurvy had we actually followed my plan. Personally, I have actually been trying to use local shops for fruit and vegetables but I am not convinced that they are any more in tune with the seasons than the supermarkets are. I recently asked my local shopkeeper if his vegetables were in any way local, and explained my desire to reduce food miles. He said that they were; they came from Covent Garden wholesale market each morning – which frankly misses the point, but I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him.

The thought of producing our own fruit is very exciting. It reminds me of long hot childhood summers spent picking raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries with my sister in our grandfather’s garden. We would pick kilos of fruit that my granny would then turn into jams, fools, jellies and preserves. The books advise that we don’t pick any rhubarb this year because we have to allow it to establish itself. However, MJ’s standard (and most delicious) dessert is rhubarb crumble, so I have promised she can make one batch later in the year.

Apart from the potatoes, all the now-planted crops are permanent – they come back each year and don’t wish to be shunted around the plot. Our rotational beds cause a little more angst because they cover a greater area so getting the beds sieved and cleared of all the debris is a mammoth task. We have, however, made some progress. We have potatoes in one of our three rotational beds and a second bed for legumes is well on the way – this bed will be for beans, tomatoes, spinach, lettuce and leeks. This leaves just one space uncultivated. As soon as we can sort this one out we will plant brassicas.

Geoff Hamilton says in his book that, because we have inherited such a poor plot, it is important to enrich the soil with manure just as we did with the potatoes we planted. To this end I buy copious amounts of well-rotted farm manure from the garden centre (I have bought some crap in my life). It also seems that one should spread on a general fertiliser, so I use Grow More pellets. I am not really sure how organic these are but, right now, I have bigger responsibilities than saving the planet – I need to move this venture along swiftly and I will take whatever measures I have to!

The additional books I purchased at Wisley are proving, with one exception, most useful. By far the best is an RHS one, cleverly titled Fruit and Vegetable Gardening and written by Michael Pollock. It contains detailed information on plants as well as diagrams on pruning and general tips. This will definitely be a much-thumbed book. On the other hand, one is now on my ‘books to be avoided’ list. It is by Robin Shelton and is called Allotted Time. The book is basically a journal written by some bloke who has never gardened before (sound familiar?), and he takes the reader on a month-by-month journey through the gardening year. I only read about three pages before I begin to think that the book I am struggling to write has already been written. I realise that, if I read any more of it I will be become despondent, not least because his seems to be so much funnier than mine. Recent news has featured a legal battle between Dan Brown and some chaps who claim they have already written The Da Vinci Code. The case is threatening the release of a film of the book. Will a similar scandal hit the gardening world with allotment holders taking sides between me and Robin Shelton? While we sling organic manure at each other in court, a host of actors led perhaps by George Clooney (set to play me, of course) await the go ahead to release the blockbuster Brassicas Quest. My saving grace is that, as far as I can tell from the book, Mr Shelton is no cook, so at least I have him on that one. The book is now hiding in my sock drawer.

Photograph by Mary-Jane Curtis

Chapter 5 | iPods and Asparagus

As a chef I am lucky enough to go to some really interesting foody events. Not long ago I was invited to Dorset to present the Dorset Food Awards and give a small talk on regional cuisine. The evening was a big success and afterwards, the organiser, Fergus, suggested I might like to return for the World Nettle Eating Championships. Unfortunately, I can’t make it to this important event, but it has given me an idea.

Despite having cleared half our plot, we are yet to eat anything from the place and this is a constant source of frustration to me. I have considered stealing vegetables from our allotment neighbours but this really isn’t in the spirit of things (and anyway they would all find out when I publish the book). But one thing we can eat that is growing in profusion is stinging nettles.

A few years ago, while head chef at The Greenhouse in Mayfair, I put nettle soup on the menu and it was a huge hit. What is a little embarrassing to acknowledge about this, however, is that I bought the nettles from a vegetable supplier. Nettle soup is actually a well-loved dish on the continent, but it is obvious that, if I am caught at home cooking nettles for human consumption, my children will be on the phone to Esther Rantzen at ChildLine quicker than you can say ‘dock leaf’. However, if I am careful to knock up the soup when no one is home, then I can probably pass it off as pea soup, and no one will be any the wiser.