The Allotment Chef: Home-grown Recipes and Seasonal Stories

One morning, therefore, I go down to the allotment with a pair of rubber gloves and a dustbin bag and start collecting nettles. They grow mostly along the borders of the allotment against a wire fence. With my Marigolds on, I am able to sift through and choose only the youngest, tenderest nettles; back home I turn them into a brilliant green creamy broth that everyone agrees is the best pea soup they have ever tasted. Sensing my moment of triumph, when the last spoonful has been eaten, I proudly tell them the truth – at which point Ellie bursts into tears and says her mouth is ‘sting-y’. Who cares about mouth ulcers when we have just eaten our first allotment meal? I wonder what cooch grass is like?

I quite enjoy my solo trips to the allotments, and during the week the plots are relatively quiet. Our most immediate neighbour there is Andy, who seems to spend days on end at the allotments but never on the same plot. While we have nodded a hello in the past, I have not ever had a chat with him, so, when we pass on the path one morning, I make a quip about which plot he might be working on today.

Andy explains that he is the Vice Chairman of the Blondin Allotments committee and, as such, he regularly checks the entire area and looks over plots that seem to be falling behind in terms of maintenance. I had never realised that our closest fellow gardener is part of the Blondin secret police.

Although we have moved the plot forwards in the past two months, I am aware that our initial start has been anything but convincing, so I ask him if we have violated the rules by not coming to the plot from December to March. He, surprisingly, replies that quite the opposite is true and that, in fact, they are all rather impressed with our efforts. Furthermore, Andy lets slip that one of the adjacent plots to ours is on the hitlist and, if the owner is evicted, we might be offered a plot extension. This faith in us should be heartening but, having worked so hard to get to where we are, I am not sure if I could start all over again on another bit.

We say our goodbyes and walk off in opposite directions. It’s good to get to know a few people at the site because a day’s digging can be a lonely life. At first, although Sheila and Keith had been friendly, few other people acknowledged us as we walked to our patch but, now we have proved ourselves as hardcore, green-fingered regulars, we have been accepted into the clan.

Sheila always calls hello as we come through the gate and invites the kids over and Keith will come over for a chat, and John – a plot away from us – is also a friendly chap, and there is the most charming West Indian woman who always stops me and asks when I’m next on the telly. My standard response is to joke that she should forget all about that CCTV appearance on Crimewatch and not say a word to anyone; every time she laughs as hard as the first, which is very kind.

On the other hand, several of the plot holders have erected large fences made of poles and bits of wood around their plots and these guys tend not to be the ‘good morning, nice day’ types. They appear to have barricaded themselves in. Then there is Mr iPod Man, who sings out loud while he works. He is usually bent over planting or digging and, while I have never worked out who he’s listening to on his iPod, it is obviously a band that he knows well, because he is always in full song whatever the time of day.

I have yearned for an iPod for ages. Every birthday for the last three years, I have hoped in vain to spot the Apple logo as I tear back the recycled wrapping paper. So far, no joy, but now I am head gardener I feel it might be time to treat myself.

I once heard John Major describe writing his memoirs as a cathartic experience. Frankly, I am finding writing my book completely frustrating. Digging, however, now that is truly cathartic. Some of my best times at the allotment have been spent with just my rambling imagination and a shovel for company. One morning, having nodded a hello to the iPod man, I take my shovel and start to dig rotational bed number three. It strikes me that, if I were to get an iPod, I could spend many a happy hour listening to what I please as I dig and sieve the land. The trouble, I have found, is that, as your children get older, they start to complain about the music that’s played in the car – ‘Dad, is “White Riot” really appropriate for us to be listening to?’ – and then, worse still, they demand music of their own. Ellie now insists on the Black Eyed Peas (at least it’s a vegetable reference) or some blokes called McFly, and she inevitably gets her way. Suddenly the allotment offers me a way out of this musical rut – if I were to buy an iPod I could cycle down to the allotment and listen to Neil Young without someone calling ‘this one sounds the same as the last one’ from the back seat.

iPods are a wonderful invention and, as I ponder the possibilities, it strikes me that there could be a vegetable version of this wondrous gadget. Just imagine this. You desperately care about the environment. You also wholeheartedly agree with the environmental issues surrounding food production, such as the air miles it is flown and the use of pesticides, but you are simply too busy working to play a ‘hands-on’ role in the environmental movement. Perhaps you are a long-haul pilot with a busy schedule or a lumberjack working away from home in the Brazilian rainforest, or simply someone who doesn’t like dirt under their fingernails. If this is you, then you need iPlot.

The investors and I buy a huge patch of land (perhaps Wales) and we carve the entire area into allotments, each with its own shed, compost heap and water butt.

You, the ethical wannabe, contact us and we assign a plot of land exclusively to you and give you a small piece of software through which you can download vegetables 24 hours a day. We then run out and plant your download to order before delivering it to your door when it’s ripe and ready to eat. Perhaps after a few beers you will fancy downloading a few carrots, a marrow and a plum tree. No problem. We at IPlot will get them dug in. For the specialist gardener there is the whole range of obscure vegetables to enjoy with just the simple click of a button. Salsify, artichokes, sea kale and red carrots will all be available for immediate download. And with coordinates provided by Google Earth you can tune in and watch your garden grow. One click of a button and out rushes some chap with a watering can. You can tend your virtual plot while down the pub, on the train or even while on holiday …

OK, so I’ve overdone this digging thing lately. What I need is a night off.

I have arranged to meet some friends, most of whom are chefs, for a quick beer. The problem with chefs, though, is that quick beers don’t really exist. We spend the first part of the evening catching up. I tell them of my allotment project, promise all of them a box of vegetables as soon as I can manage it and, before I know it, it is three in the morning and I am lying in the back of a black cab.

MJ had told me not to be too late home so, as I stumble into bed, I know I will need a good excuse if I am to be granted a lie-in. Though in-car map reading, forgetting birthdays and impromptu hangovers can all lead to domestic disagreements, the next morning I discover that, even if I haven’t come up with a good enough excuse for a lie-in, the allotment provides the perfect solution for the hangover issue at least.

I hop out of bed as if I refused every one of the fourteen bottles of beer I was offered the night before. Maintaining this look of sobriety, I declare that a visit to the allotment is well overdue, and that I shall go without delay. With a quick stop en route to buy a Mars bar, a cappuccino and a newspaper, I whiz down to the allotment, set up my camping chair, doze, read the paper and listen to the football on the radio before rubbing soil on my hands and returning home. And you thought you could walk a tightrope, Mr Blondin?

Back in the real world, the late April sun is drying out the earth and making the digging of the rotational beds that bit easier. Each of the three will measure approximately 18 feet by 10 feet (5.5 metres by 3 metres). I suspect that each year we might try different crops within each bed, but the principle of grouping a type of crop together, and moving it along one bed each year, remains. The various books seem to overlap in advice on which vegetable goes in which group, however. For instance, Dr Vegetable Expert puts onions in with his legumes, while the Royal Horticultural Society put onions in with their roots. We make up our own minds on these arbitrary points by letting the chef decide – an onion to me in the kitchen is a root vegetable and so be it. So, we finally have a list of which vegetables we are going to put in each of the rotational beds:

Bed number one – roots

Potatoes

Carrots

Onions – spring, pickling and large

Beetroot

Parsnips

Garlic

Bed number two – legumes

Beans – runner and broad

Spinach

Lettuce

Tomatoes

Sweetcorn

Bed number three – brassicas

Cabbage

Broccoli

Kale

Cauliflower

Radishes

Brussels sprouts

Swede

Having worked out what vegetable gets grown where, however, we have to re-read all the books to see what vegetable gets planted when. It turns out that ‘just about now’ is the answer to the above question, certainly when it comes to the bed of legumes; it is late April and runner beans, broad beans, tomatoes and sweetcorn are all in need of sowing.

The books also advise that most of these plants should be started off at home, so we make yet another trip to the garden centre, this time for plant pots and potting compost. I thought that growing your own vegetables was supposed to reduce the cost of living but, right now, it’s costing us a bloody fortune and we still haven’t eaten anything home-grown.

At home Ellie, Richie and I cover the table with bin liners and set about sowing seeds. They are actually far better at it than I am. Whereas Ellie easily manages to sow each tiny tomato seed dead centre in its little pot, they are far too small and delicate for my wacking great hands. Peter Schmeichel would make a useless gardener.

Within a couple of weeks our fledgling plants are ready to be transferred to the allotment and we all drive down to Blondin. All three passengers have a tray on their knees full of little plant pots, each containing a potential supper. While MJ and Richie plant up the seedlings, Ellie and I plant spinach and lettuce straight into the ground. I haven’t yet managed to grow anything but I already know that, when I do, I want it to grow in a straight line, so we put a bamboo cane across the bed and crawl along it placing each seed with great precision.

Before long our entire legume bed is a mass of baby plants about which I worry constantly. My dad had explained that watering at the beginning of the day is far more beneficial than a midday water so each morning my first job is a pre-breakfast dash to the allotment to water the plants.

One morning, while I am busy watering and generally minding my own business, a lady from a plot not too far away comes over to chat. She is obviously a gardener with some years’ experience and she immediately realises that I am a complete novice and therefore must be in need of tips – lots of them.

It is almost impossible to carry on watering when you are having a conversation but I do my best and, even in this department, she is on hand with some useful advice. She advises me to purchase a hoe at my earliest convenience. Apparently hoeing breaks up the earth and allows the water to penetrate the ground, thus reaching the roots of the target plant rather than forming a small temporary pond a little further down the bed, which, to be fair, is exactly what is happening to me. She is actually a little incredulous that I don’t already own one. I feel like telling her that I am new to all this and, while she has spent the last ten years fretting about bindweed and parsnip germination, I have been busy having a life. She doesn’t look the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll type, however, so I keep my opinions to myself and leave to buy a hoe!

My other mission at present, since I failed at Wisley, is to buy and plant asparagus in our inaugural bed. During the digging of the asparagus bed I had continued to read up on this wonderful vegetable and now feel I am more knowledgeable. Asparagus, or Asparagus officinalis to give it its full title, is a fussy customer. The books advise me to prepare the soil by adding lime. It turns out that different plants require a different pH factor; in other words, some plants like a limey soil and others like an acid soil, while most sit somewhere in between. This is good information, but only if you know what pH your soil is in the first place. Luckily, help is never more than a vegetable patch away on the allotments and Andy tells me that our soil is relatively neutral, which means we definitely need to add lime.

The books also advise removing all weeds and stones because these can cause bent spears, which can be particularly annoying to the cook (don’t I know it?). As well as this, the Royal Horticultural Society book urges top dressing of the soil. This apparently means sprinkling on a general fertiliser; however, the book warns the – by now terrified – novice asparagus grower that too much fertiliser will cause excess nitrogen and, guess what, old fussbags asparagus doesn’t like too much nitrogen.

American Edward C Smith also knows a good deal about asparagus cultivation – at least this is his boast in The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. He advises lining each trench with something rather frighteningly called triple super phosphate. I buy this at the garden centre – it is very slightly cheaper than cocaine! As I go to tip it in I wonder whether it was an organic addition to my plot. The box suggests that it might not be but my serious desire to see my asparagus flourish means I decide to ignore the plight of the planet on this occasion and add it anyway.

To drive the knife home, so to speak, the RHS book reminds the reader that slugs and snails can damage the crop, as can the worryingly named asparagus beetle. All this, and you can’t even make asparagus soup with seared salmon and crème fraîche until the third year after planting!

But I am still determined to grow it so now, with my bed ready, I am on the hunt for asparagus crowns to buy. Planting asparagus seed is not that simple, so most of my books recommend planting what is known as a crown. This is actually a one-year-old root stock, which is then transplanted.

I don’t have time to drive back to Wisley and am unable to get asparagus crowns locally so, in the end, I hit the button marked Google and type in ‘asparagus for sale’. There are lists of people all over the country queuing up to sell me asparagus. I note three numbers and hit the jackpot on the very first call. I phone a farmer in Kent who sells asparagus crowns and explain to him that I have a bed dug and have added lime. I ask him if I should plant the crowns next year after the soil has had a chance to settle and develop, but he tells me, in no uncertain terms, to plant it this year, saying, ‘We could all be dead this time next year.’ This is alarming news and I am not sure if he made the statement as a sales tool to encourage me to buy asparagus, or whether he may in fact be a witch doctor with some uncanny foresight of the future. Anyhow it works, and I purchase ten crowns from him. A year ago I knew nothing about asparagus cultivation but now I find myself having highly technical discussions on the subject. I ask him if the ones I am purchasing are male hybrids, which he assures me they are (both of us know that you don’t want female asparagus depositing red berries among your crop and spoiling next year’s harvest – though I have to admit I never have quite found out why).

A few days later my asparagus arrives. I have not been to the allotment for several days because, thankfully, we have had a bit of rain so watering has not been an issue. I arrive at the allotment with half an hour put aside to plant my asparagus only to find a weed epidemic in full flow. This is what happens if you fail to visit the allotment for even a short period. I immediately start hoeing all the beds including the proposed asparagus site and then turn to planting the asparagus.

This humble fern represents far more than a tasty excuse to consume hollandaise sauce; the asparagus is the yardstick by which I shall measure my gardening success. I have spent long nights reading about this fussy perennial and, as I approach the planting stage, I feel nervous lest my knowledge should come to nothing more than a barren bed of earth.

The crowns of the asparagus themselves are the size and shape of a small octopus but, unlike octopi, which are best tenderised by beating against a rock, these plants need to be lovingly handled and spread out in the trench with care. As with the raspberries and other permanent crops, these are only planted once so I feel that the pressure is on.

I discover also that runner beans are only slightly less troublesome in the planting department than asparagus. They require some imaginative structure on which the runner beans can climb so, one Sunday morning, the family all troop down to Blondin where we meet up with Dilly and Doug and their children. MJ is on watering duty while I am putting my maleness to the test with a spot of DIY bean-structure building. Runner bean supports – an aid to the climbing bean plant – are an opportunity for a gardener to show his more practical side. I remember that, when I was young, my dad made his by fixing a stake in the ground and securing a metal hoop at the top. From all the way round the hoop he then ran twine down to the ground. The beans climbed up the twine. My grandpa on the other hand was more of a traditionalist – he made a wigwam out of canes and let the beans climb up these.

We do not have the room for a wigwam structure and I have no metal hoops so I can’t replicate my dad’s. Instead I make my own version by putting a cane into the ground at either end of the bed and then joining them by another cane, which acts as a crossbar. I then tie canes either side of the crossbar coming down to the ground at a slight angle.

Once this is in place, Ellie and I dig holes and plant the three-inch-high plants at the base of each cane. We then plant more rows of broad beans, spinach and leeks, while MJ and Richie dig in some sweetcorn plants.

I mark the rows with a line of string over the planted line of seeds, with the string held taut at each end by a short piece of bamboo. When the plants start growing we will obviously be able to see them but, until they push through, the string will act as a reminder to us all that there are things happening below ground level. This isn’t my own idea but one I have copied directly from our allotment neighbour John, who seems to know his stuff. Actually, MJ and I are always very careful to walk around the beds, but our children don’t seem to share this concern. If they need to get from one side of the allotment to the other, they always take the most direct route and, if that means walking straight through a vegetable bed, tough luck! Perhaps my little strings will stop them!

We have been trying to stagger the sowing of seeds where possible because MJ’s mum has told us that, if we stick everything in at once, we will have a problem with overwhelming quantities when it comes to harvest time. This may seem obvious, but the temptation to get everything up and running is enormous. Many gardeners find that, for three or four weeks each summer, they are literally buried under a mass of ripening fruit and vegetables and, as many gardeners are better at the growing than at the cooking end of vegetable production, they fail to keep up with the harvest.

There are two solutions to this problem: one is to buy this book for tips on using a glut – I would highly recommend this tip (and congratulations to you for having done so); the other is to stagger planting, thus extending the cropping period (but don’t forget it doesn’t have to be either or!).

Planting out the young plants is very satisfying. The bed is now full of small green stems all in neat rows, but there is a worry at the back of my mind. What if the temperature drops? Or there is a swarm of locusts? The plants will have to fend for themselves. I expect it is a similar experience to waving off your grown-up children at the airport as, with rucksacks on their backs, they go travelling the world. That night, as the wind whistles outside, I think of the bean and sweetcorn seedlings out in the elements, but there is nothing more I can do for them now.

I have started to daydream about succulent asparagus slowly pushing through the delicate topsoil. It’s almost erotic. When I bought the crowns I was told they would show through in about a week. Each day I visit the allotment with only one thing on my mind: has the asparagus come through yet? After six days and not a single spear in sight, I am beginning to worry that nothing will happen.

The weather is still awful, especially for late May. Richie’s birthday football match in the park with his friends (Brentford versus a World Eleven) is very nearly rained off. As a gardener, however, there is a small silver lining to the enormous rain cloud presently over Northfield Avenue. I can at last use the phrase ‘at least it’s good for the garden’ and really mean it.

On the water front, I read that blueberry bushes need very soft water. The water they are currently receiving is coming from either a passing cloud or from the allotments’ water butts. These butts are plumbed in and have a tap from which you can fill a watering can. At first I decide not to worry about this snippet of information, but these things play on my mind. In the end I find an Argos catalogue and look up water filters. The cheapest one looks like a big kettle and is about fourteen quid. I could fill it up at the beginning of the day and, when the water had dripped through the filter, I could pour it on to the blueberries. MJ says this is a little obsessive and she is probably right because we don’t even drink filtered water ourselves, so I risk it without.

As May draws to a close the weather slowly begins to improve and I am back to watering the allotment each morning. Back home we also water our flowers and shrubs, but I can’t help feel that pouring tap water on a plant that will never be eaten is completely at odds with our drive to create a greener environment. I suggest to MJ that she could use ‘grey’ water rather than filling the watering can straight from the tap. Since ‘grey’ water is used bath water and second-hand washing-up water, she cleverly points out that I have banned baths and that we use a dishwasher so I have to agree that the tap is the place for the watering can.

One evening I get a call from Andy who says our shed window has been blown out by the wind. The next morning I scrap my plans to install a water butt at home and head off to the allotment. Stuff the window – today is a great day: we have asparagus! Five beautiful, innocent, happy spears have gently nudged aside the well-limed, stone-free earth and are pointing skywards. My mind wanders back to the birth of my children – that is the impact of this discovery. Sure, they will grow up into big bold asparagus wrapped in pancetta and smothered in hollandaise sauce, but, right now, they are the pride and joy of my short gardening career. They must not be cropped for three years but it is all I can do to stop myself dining on them there and then.

I call home and tell them the news, expecting them to drop everything and rush down to share the moment but, to be honest, their reaction is a little low-key. This could be because I have talked of nothing other than asparagus to anyone who would listen – so they may well have had their fill of the stuff before a single spear gets boiled.