The Allotment Chef: Home-grown Recipes and Seasonal Stories. Paul Merrett

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