One Man and His Dig by Valentine Low

Author:Valentine Low
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

11

Sex and the Allotment

CECILY : When I see a spade I call it a spade.

GWENDOLEN : I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Machete or strimmer? It’s not one of the traditional allotment dilemmas–these are normally no more taxing than the question of whether to grow Moneymaker tomatoes or Gardeners’ Delight (and if you ask me, I wouldn’t bother with either), or whether to ditch all those pesky organic principles and bung some Growmore on your onions–but some time around July it was one that was becoming increasingly troubling.

The problem was the grass. In between the separate allotments there are grass paths (there are also grass paths in between the four beds on our plot, but that is a different matter), and it is the responsibility of the plot-holder to make sure that the paths adjacent to his or her plot do not get overgrown. Being an issue which involves both community responsibility and the potential for border disputes, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the state of the paths is the cause of some of the bitterest arguments on the allotments, and many is the time that assorted senior plot-holders on our site who, for the sake of maintaining peace and good will between all men (not that there is really much chance of that), had better remain anonymous have had occasion to complain mightily and, it has to be said, at great length, about the failure of some of their fellow plot-holders to keep their paths well trimmed. Indeed, it took a couple of gentle hints from our allotment neighbours before Eliza and I woke up to the fact that we were going to have to do something about our paths before the grass got so high that the plot disappeared from sight completely.

The question was, how? We had an old pair of garden shears at home which seemed to be the answer, so we took them over to the allotment and one afternoon I duly set about trying to cut the grass. Does anyone else remember those scissors one used to be allowed to use in primary school, the ones with round ends which were deemed safe enough for little 5-year-old hands but were in fact so blunt that they could not cut anything and struggled even to get through a single piece of paper? These shears were like them, only not quite so sharp. I did not so much cut the grass as tear it, and how we managed to get round the perimeter of the plot was a miracle of perseverance and fortitude against almost insuperable odds. By the time we finished the paths looked as if they had been suffering from a particularly nasty attack of alopecia, but at least the grass was shorter. We, on the other hand, were half dead with exhaustion, and as we crawled home that evening, scarcely able to move our arms, we decided that perhaps something would have to change.

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