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

One morning, while I am busy watering and generally minding my own business, a lady from a plot not too far away comes over to chat. She is obviously a gardener with some years’ experience and she immediately realises that I am a complete novice and therefore must be in need of tips – lots of them.

It is almost impossible to carry on watering when you are having a conversation but I do my best and, even in this department, she is on hand with some useful advice. She advises me to purchase a hoe at my earliest convenience. Apparently hoeing breaks up the earth and allows the water to penetrate the ground, thus reaching the roots of the target plant rather than forming a small temporary pond a little further down the bed, which, to be fair, is exactly what is happening to me. She is actually a little incredulous that I don’t already own one. I feel like telling her that I am new to all this and, while she has spent the last ten years fretting about bindweed and parsnip germination, I have been busy having a life. She doesn’t look the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll type, however, so I keep my opinions to myself and leave to buy a hoe!

My other mission at present, since I failed at Wisley, is to buy and plant asparagus in our inaugural bed. During the digging of the asparagus bed I had continued to read up on this wonderful vegetable and now feel I am more knowledgeable. Asparagus, or Asparagus officinalis to give it its full title, is a fussy customer. The books advise me to prepare the soil by adding lime. It turns out that different plants require a different pH factor; in other words, some plants like a limey soil and others like an acid soil, while most sit somewhere in between. This is good information, but only if you know what pH your soil is in the first place. Luckily, help is never more than a vegetable patch away on the allotments and Andy tells me that our soil is relatively neutral, which means we definitely need to add lime.

The books also advise removing all weeds and stones because these can cause bent spears, which can be particularly annoying to the cook (don’t I know it?). As well as this, the Royal Horticultural Society book urges top dressing of the soil. This apparently means sprinkling on a general fertiliser; however, the book warns the – by now terrified – novice asparagus grower that too much fertiliser will cause excess nitrogen and, guess what, old fussbags asparagus doesn’t like too much nitrogen.

American Edward C Smith also knows a good deal about asparagus cultivation – at least this is his boast in The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible . He advises lining each trench with something rather frighteningly called triple super phosphate. I buy this at the garden centre – it is very slightly cheaper than cocaine! As I go to tip it in I wonder 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!