Monday, December 10th, 2001

I slunk out of the allotment this afternoon, quietly, laden with guilt; I didn't even look back as I pushed the barrow over the hill.   What terrible thing have I done?   Spring will tell - and until then the sycamore tree at the end of my plot will raise two accusing headless fingers at me.   In the two years I've had this plot, the "weed" sycamore had grown a good three feet, and was very soon going to outgrow anything I could do to control it.   So I "cut its head off", pollarded it, in the hopes of getting a stock of pea and bean poles in three or four years.

The cutting job was absorbing, and kept me warm in the cold wind.   Cleaning off the twigs and extracting useful poles and pea twigs was satisfying - why buy bamboo or plastic canes when you can grow your own?   But by now the 5 foot high tree trunk was weeping.   A better word would be bleeding; sap pumping out, flowing out of the wound and down the trunk.   I was surprised just how much would run - especially during what is supposed to be mid-winter dormancy.   Weed or not, I will feel guilty if the tree doesn't put out shoots to replace its lost head in spring.

It's just as well did some other jobs first.   I have pruned all the currant bushes - they're beginning to show some shape, and it should be easier to pick the fruit next year.   Laid a thick layer of compost around them, and over the rhubarb crowns.   And a very generous layer of compost over the asparagus bed; they deserve a bit of spoiling - I should be able to harvest this coming year, and taste my very first.

Take a couple of minutes to rest quietly, and you can see the wrens and dunnocks scuttering through the brambles and briars.  

Sunday, December 23rd, 2001

With first light I was walking up the hill to the allotment - a light dusting of snow over frost-crunch grass.   The frost had been so hard that the padlock on the site gate was frozen solid.   A cigarette lighter is not the easiest way to defrost the mechanism.

The hedges and brambles are alive with blue-tits, wrens, blackbirds, house sparrows, and dunnocks.   As soon as I started driving the spade into the frozen ground to lift parsnips, a robin was bobbing around at a safe distance - he got a few choice worms today as soon as I walked off!

Harvested the last of the romanesco - plenty of heads, so I'd to freeze some.   And went round picking whatever was available for Christmas dinner - a couple of heads of calabrese, sprouts, sorzonera, swede, parsnips, some fresh herbs, and loads of leeks.    The purple broccoli will soon be ready.  

Cold and sharp as the morning was, I tried to find any excuse to stay a bit longer - over an hour ambling around, checking the other plots out, looking at the frost patterns on the kale and the brambles; the frozen ponds and barrels.   Everything so quiet and "dead" - but only three or four inches under, through the solid frozen crust, the soil around the parsnips was alive with worms.

Tuesday, December 25th, 2001

A very Happy Christmas, and all very best wishes for a successful year to you - and especially in your allotment or garden!

And I hope your Christmas dinner was at least as fine as ours - every single vegetable came from the allotment; and a Summer Pudding (!) with our own red and black currants proved one of the best Christmas puddings I've ever had.