I love visiting my allotment at dusk, once all the other plotholders have packed up and gone home and it's just me and the local cats, out hunting for field mice.
There's something beautiful, if a little melancholy, about watching the sun disappear behind the horizon and the rickety sheds blot together in the fading light.
It does have its downsides of course. Tonight I was removing the stones that weigh down the cover on my compost heap. I lifted off one, then another, then another, then another. Hang on, that's not a stone, that's a particularly large brown slug I'm holding ...
The first pic, taken on an earlier visit, is a small sampler of the produce I'm taking home at the moment. One forgets the sheer amount of processing required to turn a muddy vegetable into a delicious healthy meal: I think I've spun my own weight in salad so far this year. Top attraction so far has been the white Kuttinger carrots, although I have to admit that I don't think the flavour's as nice as the mainstream orange variety. The plan is to grow a purple variety next year and create a tricolour salad combination.
In other allotment news, my deep maroon dahlias are firing on all cylinders now, as the photo shows. They're going into vases around the house and looking deeply retro and therefore cool. Or something like that.
That deep maroon colour is the best colour I've seen this week. My parents have an extremely lovely deep purple clematis in flower at the moment, but I think those dahlias pip it just ever so slightly.
Posted by: james henry | August 04, 2005 at 10:45 AM
I guess I should have described it as "burgundy" or "cornelian" or something. Maroon has become such an uncool word. Which is probably why I used it.
Posted by: Jane Perrone | August 04, 2005 at 04:54 PM