We’ve got an allotment. Yep. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about this. My husband comes from a long line of gardeners and can trace his roots back to agricultural workers in the 19th century. His father and his father before him were both market gardeners and this seems to have rubbed off on him. I on the other hand have never grown a thing. I can’t even keep a house plant alive. Once I tried to grow an apple tree from a pip but it never took.

In addition to the land, we’re now the proud owners of a wheel barrow, various gardening tools and implements, propagators, seed compost, fibre pots and a whole coffee table full of books. There are new words too, like chitting, earlies, second earlies, main crop and dibber. And other less pleasant things like the muck pile, 10 foot long brambles and grubs.

The first sight of the allotment was a bit of a shock. In my mind’s eye I’d thought of a small plot of land with neat rows of beds and shed in the corner (and well secretly of ‘The Secret Garden’). Instead we were presented with this.

As you can see we have some way to go.