Getting the allotment
The waiting list, the phone call, and the first morning on a completely overgrown half-plot.
I put my name on the waiting list in November 2024 and didn't expect to hear anything for at least two years. The council website said 'average wait: 18 months' and I took that to mean I had time to plan, read books about it, and maybe grow a few things in pots while I waited. I got the call in February 2026. Fifteen months.
The plot officer took me round on a Tuesday morning. The site is about a ten-minute walk from the house, tucked between a railway embankment and the back of a terrace of Victorian houses. Some of the plots are immaculate — raised beds, poly tunnels, fruit cages, the whole thing. Mine was not. The previous tenant had given it up mid-season and the weeds had had eighteen months to establish. There was bindweed. There was couch grass in quantities that suggested it had been there for years. There was a shed with a padlock that the plot officer couldn't open and said we'd 'deal with later'.
I said yes immediately. I'm not sure what I expected to feel — something more considered, maybe. Instead I felt a straightforward, slightly alarmed enthusiasm, which I think is the correct response.
The first weekend I spent mainly staring at it. I'd done reading about the no-dig method, about covering problem areas with cardboard and compost, about not trying to tackle everything at once. I'd absorbed the advice sensibly. Standing in front of an actual half-plot of actual weeds in actual March, I found the advice slightly less immediately applicable. The bindweed looked back at me. I got the cardboard.
I've cleared about a third of the plot now. The shed has been opened (the lock had to be cut) and contains: two terracotta pots, a broken fork, a vast quantity of twine, and a 1987 copy of a book called 'The Vegetable and Herb Expert' by Dr. D.G. Hessayon, which I've read cover to cover and which is genuinely useful. I've sown nothing yet. There's still bindweed in the uncovered sections. But the covered third is doing its work under the cardboard, and in the spring it'll be ready to plant into. That's enough for now.