I’ve only been an allotment tenant for a few weeks, yet I already have a serious case of Allotment Envy.

Another new tenant on my row a few plots up has gone to town, and in a weekend managed to craft a geometrically perfect and beautiful 5 pole plot. They’ve put in a straight, barked-chipped path with wooden borders either side, which also lend themselves to bordering the immaculately turned, raked and fertilised veg plots. The path then leads to a smart and natty shed (newly erected), a seating area with paving slabs and some home-made well-crafted seats. The seating area is also next to a few newly planted bushes, and backs onto a solid bit of trellis. At the other end, as you approach the plot are two brand spanking new timber compost boxes with sparkly brass fittings.

Sigh.

My plot on the other hand is only half-dug, with the half-mummified remnants of a slewn-together palletted-compost heap, two old metal bins stuffed with dried manky sunflower, and some rather random additions of thatch-infested mounds to contend with. Oh, and a few stones and bricks thrown in too.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make the most of it on our budget” Mum says, knowing full well how well-turned out I want the plot to look. “It must have cost them an absolute fortune to get it looking like that. They might not even have a garden at home and are using their plot as one”. Fair enough. Doesn’t stop my big old envious eye glancing their way every now and then and feeling rather inadequate. I know my allotment won’t ever be so neat - I think shabby chic is the idea, probably because for financial and environmental reasons, I’ll be trying to use recycled materials as much as possible rather than buying from new.

Still, as Mum says, we’ll do something nice, and I must be patient. I live in a tumbledown 90 year old cottage with 6 million jobs needing to be done in each and every room, and the Smallest Smallholding resembles a half-buried building site at the moment (thanks to all the rubble I’m pulling up in the new main veg plot). Still, it’s better to be busy than floating around with nothing to do!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under allotment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.