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

I have yearned for an iPod for ages. Every birthday for the last three years, I have hoped in vain to spot the Apple logo as I tear back the recycled wrapping paper. So far, no joy, but now I am head gardener I feel it might be time to treat myself.

I once heard John Major describe writing his memoirs as a cathartic experience. Frankly, I am finding writing my book completely frustrating. Digging, however, now that is truly cathartic. Some of my best times at the allotment have been spent with just my rambling imagination and a shovel for company. One morning, having nodded a hello to the iPod man, I take my shovel and start to dig rotational bed number three. It strikes me that, if I were to get an iPod, I could spend many a happy hour listening to what I please as I dig and sieve the land. The trouble, I have found, is that, as your children get older, they start to complain about the music that’s played in the car – ‘Dad, is “White Riot” really appropriate for us to be listening to?’ – and then, worse still, they demand music of their own. Ellie now insists on the Black Eyed Peas (at least it’s a vegetable reference) or some blokes called McFly, and she inevitably gets her way. Suddenly the allotment offers me a way out of this musical rut – if I were to buy an iPod I could cycle down to the allotment and listen to Neil Young without someone calling ‘this one sounds the same as the last one’ from the back seat.

iPods are a wonderful invention and, as I ponder the possibilities, it strikes me that there could be a vegetable version of this wondrous gadget. Just imagine this. You desperately care about the environment. You also wholeheartedly agree with the environmental issues surrounding food production, such as the air miles it is flown and the use of pesticides, but you are simply too busy working to play a ‘hands-on’ role in the environmental movement. Perhaps you are a long-haul pilot with a busy schedule or a lumberjack working away from home in the Brazilian rainforest, or simply someone who doesn’t like dirt under their fingernails. If this is you, then you need iPlot.

The investors and I buy a huge patch of land (perhaps Wales) and we carve the entire area into allotments, each with its own shed, compost heap and water butt.

You, the ethical wannabe, contact us and we assign a plot of land exclusively to you and give you a small piece of software through which you can download vegetables 24 hours a day. We then run out and plant your download to order before delivering it to your door when it’s ripe and ready to eat. Perhaps after a few beers you will fancy downloading a few carrots, a marrow and a plum tree. No problem. We at IPlot will get them dug in. For the specialist gardener there is the whole range of obscure vegetables to enjoy with just the simple click of a button. Salsify, artichokes, sea kale and red carrots will all be available for immediate download. And with coordinates provided by Google Earth you can tune in and watch your garden grow. One click of a button and out rushes some chap with a watering can. You can tend your virtual plot while down the pub, on the train or even while on holiday …

OK, so I’ve overdone this digging thing lately. What I need is a night off.

I have arranged to meet some friends, most of whom are chefs, for a quick beer. The problem with chefs, though, is that quick beers don’t really exist. We spend the first part of the evening catching up. I tell them of my allotment project, promise all of them a box of vegetables as soon as I can manage it and, before I know it, it is three in the morning and I am lying in the back of a black cab.

MJ had told me not to be too late home so, as I stumble into bed, I know I will need a good excuse if I am to be granted a lie-in. Though in-car map reading, forgetting birthdays and impromptu hangovers can all lead to domestic disagreements, the next morning I discover that, even if I haven’t come up with a good enough excuse for a lie-in, the allotment provides the perfect solution for the hangover issue at least.

I hop out of bed as if I refused every one of the fourteen bottles of beer I was offered the night before. Maintaining this look of sobriety, I declare that a visit to the allotment is well overdue, and that I shall go without delay. With a quick stop en route to buy a Mars bar, a cappuccino and a newspaper, I whiz down to the allotment, set up my camping chair, doze, read the paper and listen to the football on the radio before rubbing soil on my hands and returning home. And you thought you could walk a tightrope, Mr Blondin?

Back in the real world, the late April sun is drying out the earth and making the digging of the rotational beds that bit easier. Each of the three will measure approximately 18 feet by 10 feet (5.5 metres by 3 metres). I suspect that each year we might try different crops within each bed, but the principle of grouping a type of crop together, and moving it along one bed each year, remains. The various books seem to overlap in advice on which vegetable goes in which group, however. For instance, Dr Vegetable Expert puts onions in with his legumes, while the Royal Horticultural Society put onions in with their roots. We make up our own minds on these arbitrary points by letting the chef decide – an onion to me in the kitchen is a root vegetable and so be it. So, we finally have a list of which vegetables we are going to put in each of the rotational beds:

Bed number one – roots

Potatoes

Carrots

Onions – spring, pickling and large

Beetroot

Parsnips

Garlic

Bed number two – legumes

Beans – runner and broad

Spinach

Lettuce

Tomatoes

Sweetcorn

Bed number three – brassicas

Cabbage

Broccoli

Kale

Cauliflower

Radishes

Brussels sprouts

Swede

Having worked out what vegetable gets grown where, however, we have to re-read all the books to see what vegetable gets planted when. It turns out that ‘just about now’ is the answer to the above question, certainly when it comes to the bed of legumes; it is late April and runner beans, broad beans, tomatoes and sweetcorn are all in need of sowing.

The books also advise that most of these plants should be started off at home, so we make yet another trip to the garden centre, this time for plant pots and potting compost. I thought that growing your own vegetables was supposed to reduce the cost of living but, right now, it’s costing us a bloody fortune and we still haven’t eaten anything home-grown.

At home Ellie, Richie and I cover the table with bin liners and set about sowing seeds. They are actually far better at it than I am. Whereas Ellie easily manages to sow each tiny tomato seed dead centre in its little pot, they are far too small and delicate for my wacking great hands. Peter Schmeichel would make a useless gardener.

Within a couple of weeks our fledgling plants are ready to be transferred to the allotment and we all drive down to Blondin. All three passengers have a tray on their knees full of little plant pots, each containing a potential supper. While MJ and Richie plant up the seedlings, Ellie and I plant spinach and lettuce straight into the ground. I haven’t yet managed to grow anything but I already know that, when I do, I want it to grow in a straight line, so we put a bamboo cane across the bed and crawl along it placing each seed with great precision.

Before long our entire legume bed is a mass of baby plants about which I worry constantly. My dad had explained that watering at the beginning of the day is far more beneficial than a midday water so each morning my first job is a pre-breakfast dash to the allotment to water the plants.