A Year in the Garden

The letter from the allotment society arrived in January and offered Harriet plot 14. It was the plot her father had held for fourteen years and had given up two winters before, and it had been offered to four other people first. All four had walked up, looked at it, and said no.

Harriet went up on a Saturday to see why. The shed door was open, the roof had gone in at one corner, and everything from the path to the fence was covered in weeds as high as her waist. There was a spade leaning against the wall with her father's initials burnt into the handle.

She said yes on the Monday. She has never given anyone a good reason for this, including herself. The rent was twenty-six pounds a year, the society asked for a signature and a phone number, and by the first week of February the soil was hers.

February was frost. She learned in her first hour that frozen ground can't be dug, and that this is not a thing you can argue with. So she cleared instead, and filled nine bags with weeds, and found under them a brick path she hadn't known was there.

Ken had plot 15 and had been there longer than anyone could remember. He watched her for three weeks before he said anything. Then he leaned on the fence and told her that if she planted beans that early, she would lose the lot, and that everybody loses their first beans anyway.

She planted them early. She lost the lot. Ken didn't mention it again, which she found harder to bear than if he had, and in April he turned up with a tray of seedlings that he claimed he had no room for, which was obviously untrue.

By May the plot had a shape. The shed roof had been repaired, badly but honestly, with a sheet of corrugated plastic and eleven screws. A hose reached from the standpipe as far as the middle bed and no further, so the last two rows were watered by can.

June was the good month, the one people mean when they talk about gardening. Things came up. The greenhouse two plots down was full of tomatoes that were not hers, and she still felt pleased about them, which she recognised as a bad sign.

July was slugs. She tried four methods, two of which were recommended by Ken, one by the internet and one by a man in a shop who had clearly never grown anything. Nothing worked completely. She has since decided that this is the correct outcome and that everyone lies about it.

In August she came up one evening to water and found the gate open and a bucket moved. Nothing had been taken. Ken said a fox had been getting in all summer through a gap by the far fence, and that if she wanted, they could block it at the weekend, and they did.

The harvest, when it came in September, fitted into the back of a small car. Potatoes, more courgettes than any household needs, some onions the size of golf balls, and beans at last, from the second sowing, which she ate standing up at the kitchen counter without cooking them.

She had expected to feel something large. What she felt was tired, and pleased in a small flat way, and slightly worried about October. Her father had never once described any of this to her, and she thinks now that she understands why: there is nothing to say that isn't just a list.

The spade with the initials is still by the shed wall. She uses it. In November she signed for a second year, and Ken, watching from plot 15 with his hands in his pockets, said only that she shouldn't order everything in the seed catalogues.