There's a parcel of land beyond my own five-pole allotment plot where people used to tend their allotments in years gone by, but the ground has been left to go wild, aside from occasional mowing by the local council who own the allotment land. At the end, next to the farmer's field, there's an impromtu heap where people chuck everything from rotting potatoes to broken bamboo canes, even though they are repeatedly told not to by the people who run the allotments. It seems odd to me that even people with allotments don't hoard every bit of green matter for composting. Someone had even thrown a plastic bag full of plastic pots on the pile (see left). It really made me steaming mad (about as steaming as the compost heap, actually) to realise how unthinking people can be, even when they do subscribe to the romantic notion of keeping an allotment.
I removed it, of course, and at the same time spotted something that cheered me up. A while ago, perhaps last summer, a wasteful allotmenteer must have thrown some bits of swiss chard root onto the heap. Being a tough cookie, the chard sprung up on the rich territory of the steaming pile, and is now far more verdant than my own chard, seemingly thriving on utter neglect. I am quite tempted to harvest some of this itinerant veg, were it not for the fact that I have plenty on my own plot.
It was a beautiful, clear day on the patch, but the wind was squally and cold. After a couple of hours of hard work we sat in the shelter of the storage box on a bundle of wooden stakes to keep our bums from the cold wet ground, drinking lemonade and sharing a muesli bar, surveying our small slice of land. I felt like a cross between Pa Larkin and Barbara Good.
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