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The allotment is not what I expected. There are no neat rows of plots, some with small sheds or twee seating areas at the end. There is no committee, no signs up declaring the site’s rules or advertising upcoming community events. There is simply a padlocked gate onto a field, as anonymous as any other privately demarcated plot of land in the surrounding countryside patchwork. We go through the gate from the village car park on a dull, early spring morning, having been granted the code for the lock. A thrill to be let into this secret space. We walk down the lightly trodden path through late winter-brown, knee-high grass, past curious chickens in an enclosure under just-leafing trees next to a full-height vegetable cage full of purple sprouting broccoli. The plot that is to be partly ours is at the end, an empty pig shed in the space beyond it. A rickety fence surrounds the whole area. An overgrown hedge, still largely bare of leaves, lies at the back of the plot, which seems to be mostly made up of bits of old carpet and tarpaulin in between a sea of nettles.
We go through the listing gate and stand uncertainly, looking at the space. I tread down a couple of nettles and scuff up some earth with the toe of my wellies. Stooping, I pick up a handful of soil; it is dark brown and crumbles between my fingers, a reassuringly rich loam. I brush off my hands and turn away from the flat, weedy patch we have inherited to look at the valley falling away from it to the brook out of sight and earshot below, and then rising again beyond. With loamstained fingers, I shade my eyes as I squint up at the overcast sky. Apart from a strip sheltered by the hedge rapidly turning into trees at the back, this plot is in full sun, with well-draining soil, the opposite of our steeply shaded, heavy-clay, moist garden. The children promptly climb into an old bath discarded against the fence and begin to play a high-stakes game that involves sailing through a sea of nettles without getting stung. My husband and I look at each other, pick up our tools and set to work.
I never intended to have an allotment. They were not a thing to desire where I grew up. In the urban sprawl occupying a densely creeping band across the north-east of Trinidad, hemmed in on three sides by mountains, marshland and the sea, there seemed little thought of growing spaces, little call for them. There were parks in the older town centres, vestiges of colonial city-planning given the names of dead governors or queens. For most of my childhood we lived near the largest grouping of urban green space, within walking distance of the Queen’s Park Savannah, the Royal Botanic Garden, the Hollows and Memorial Square. These parks were composed of tamed trees, closely clipped lawn, disused fountains and impeccably tended planting, neat white stripes painted around the bottom of palm trees. They were spaces that had been reclaimed from the colonial landlords when they were ousted, for public leisure and enjoyment, but the legacy of their creation lingered and their planting was heavily controlled and policed. For people to come together over a plot of land in these public areas in the shared act of growing for nourishment was unthinkable. In the weeding out of that story of relating to land, we had lost our common ground.
In the suburban gardens of my earliest childhood, much of the growing was either ornamental or fruit trees. My grandmother spent a great deal of time gardening, focused on tending her beloved roses and other decorative plants in her proud front garden, while setting her teenage sons the task of managing the mango, avocado and citrus of various sorts in the back yard. Other than the fruit, her only concession to growing plants for consumption was an aloe vera by the kitchen door and a few other herbs used for their medicinal properties. Often made to drink the bitter aloe’s water – for the cooling she thought that my fiery temperament needed – I held no appreciation for these plants. In our neighbourhood, perhaps the odd person raised their own patch of pigeon peas, or harvested sorrel for Christmas, but most of the veg we ate came from the local shop or the market, much of it imported from other Caribbean islands or further overseas. I had a few friends who lived more rurally or owned land out in ‘de bush’, as we named the tropical rainforest wilderness on the hills. But their relationship with that land seemed mostly to involve hunting local wild meat to be feasted on for parties and for pleasure.
There was some agricultural activity on the island still, though mostly the economy relied on oil and gas drilled and pumped from fields offshore. When I was very young, cows roamed the expanse of grass we called the savannah, which lay at the end of the cul-de-sac my grandparents lived on, though they had disappeared by the time I was a teen. The goats that grazed verges on less busy roads, or the yard fowl once commonly kept for their eggs and the Sunday roast, similarly faded from view. Farmers grew food at scale, and we needed them, and yet there was an unspoken snobbery about their necessary work. They did not sit high up in the island’s inherited hierarchy of social class. To live off the land in that way was somehow dirty, and marked you as poor. To return to working the earth as many of our ancestors had been forcibly brought to the island to do was a backwards step in our progression away from the shackles of history. I strode forward into the white sterility of medical training to my community’s great joy and blessings.
The word ‘allotment’ had no meaning in my Caribbean childhood. Or none that anyone I knew wanted to reclaim. The only allotments that I encountered were in history books, the tiny allocations of land on plantations that enslaved people tended in their limited spare time in order to try to grow small crops of food and medicine for themselves. What food? Which medicines? Our history books skipped over these superfluous facts. Did they grow black-eyed peas? Originating in West Africa, did those dried beans with the central black spot that presumably gave them their name come with the people on the slave ships to these Caribbean islands, along with the traditional belief that they must be eaten on New Year’s Day for prosperity and good luck? I try to imagine the scene, holding on to a belief in prosperity and good luck when so much else had been savagely stolen. Did the small patch of earth that they tended hold on to that faith in something better? Did they imagine a patch of land to tend freely one day?
It is hard to know where to start with this unruly parcel of land. We are sharing it with another villager, given the offer of the space after her previous allotment partner moved away. Her side has been tended, and looks recognisably like the outlines of a vegetable garden waiting for the growth of spring, but ours looks as though it has been neglected for quite some time.
We begin by peeling up the disintegrating membranes, tarpaulins and mats that had once been laid in an effort to suppress the plants now gleefully entangled among them. My husband hoes up swathes of bright-green, spring-fresh nettles while I follow him slowly, squatting and picking over the residues of plastic and ropes of bindweed in the soil. After a couple of hours my lower back feels as knotted as the bucketsful of white roots I have been pulling from the soil. Stretching, I stand and look around at what we have managed to clear and prepare for planting. I am dismayed; it does not look like very much. But my husband is cheerfully optimistic, pleased with the space. He slings his tools over his shoulder and whistles as he sets off along the path back to the car park. The children race up from the field and follow after. I linger a moment, to cast one last worried look at this extra project we have taken on. This greedy surplus of land when so few have any. As I look, I realise that sunlight has burned through the overcast skies as we worked, and is now sparkling on the buds and just-unfurling leaves of the hedge at the back. I can hear the fervent nesting song of birds hidden among the branches. As I turn to leave, I pick a small bouquet of nettle tops to be steeped in a pot of tea back at home, in the superstitious hope that the plants might somehow tell me how it will be in their space.
At least all the nettles reassure us that the soil of the plot is fertile. We decide to attempt potatoes, planting rows and rows of them in the growing patch of earth that we partially reclaim from the bindweed and nettles. We are reading Joy Larkcom’s guide to vegetable growing in the lengthening evenings, and she recommends potatoes as a good initial crop to break in neglected soil and suppress other, less desired plants. The suggestion delights my husband and daughter, both fond of a starchy tuber, and three kilo bags of blue, purple and red heritage seed potato varieties arrive in the post, and then jostle for space to chit in the front porch. It takes us days to plant them all.
When we first arrived in our new house in the countryside, taking on an allotment was the furthest thing from my mind. We suddenly had over a third of an acre of garden where we had had none before. Coming to terms with the land we now had under our care felt urgent and overwhelming enough; I couldn’t imagine seeking more. We gratefully threw ourselves into the space when a pandemic locked us within it, amateurishly sowing seeds along with what seemed to be the entire
nation. We planted our uncertain seedlings into the garden’s old, precarious veg beds and tended them as they grew. Later we harvested from the survivors until the beds rotted away and fell down the hillside and grew too unsafe to use. That autumn, we built new veg beds on the small lawn, one of the only flat areas of our site. It was not ideal. Sitting as it did just behind the house meant that it was heavily shaded for most of the year, but it was a kitchen garden just outside our kitchen, where we imagined that we would look out of the windows and see our harvest.
Growing food turned out to be hard work. Our soil was heavy and wet. By contrast, the organic peat-free compost I had ordered to fill the no-dig beds we had created turned out to be disappointingly dusty and dry. Our garden lay in a frost pocket, so our soil was cold till late in the year, and trying to get our seedlings strong enough to thrive in it without a greenhouse was a trial. There was a healthy population of slugs, the vast majority of which seemed to congregate in the veg beds. There were hedgehogs and frogs, slowworms and even glow-worm larvae too, but not enough to stem the tide of voracious slimy creatures decimating our lettuce. I thought about getting ducks, but felt ill-prepared for livestock if I couldn’t keep even vegetables alive. I gave up on lettuce and tried chard, which the slugs seemed less interested in, but which tempted the deer out of the nearby woods. Bending over the beds with our struggling crops, I felt the full force of my resistance to food growing, and my resentment of it. To bend and labour over the earth triggered a pain in my psyche that was generations deep. One that I had been taught to turn away from, to concrete over, box in with reinforced glass and steel. I thrust my hands into the earth with seeds and seedlings anyway, resolved to gain some nourishment out of my burgeoning relationship with the soil. The peas that survived the mice eventually did well. Broad beans, garlic and brassicas too. A courgette turned into a monstrous marrow seemingly overnight. The children complained about how much of it there was to eat, but I was relieved to find that there were indeed some things we could grow. I thought it was all that we needed.
So, when one day at the school gates a neighbour asked if we would like to share her plot, my first instinct was to decline. I felt as though we were barely managing our own garden; to take on an allotment as well seemed madness. But my husband was keen. He thought it would offer us the growing conditions that we simply did not have in our own garden: less frost, warmer and drier soil, more sun. It would allow us to try a wider range of food with a better chance of a useful harvest. But more persuasive than this, my curiosity was piqued. I had heard that there were allotments in the village but knew they were not the traditionally operated, local council-run sort. I wanted to understand them, to find out what function they served in this place where I imagined that everyone had their own country garden. Intrigue got the better of me. I agreed to come take a look and see.
There turned out to be two small allotment sites in the village. Both privately owned parcels of land, loaned out to those neighbours whose homes were carved out of the erratically divided up former small farms in the centre of the village in such a way as to leave them with no garden to grow in. The allotment site at the top of the hill just above our house seemed to have no vacancies. And we were told that with our generous garden the owner and gatekeeper of the space would have been unlikely to deem us deserving of a place. We wandered in once when the gate was invitingly open as we walked past. There were no signs advising us to keep out, but the knowledge that this was really a neighbour’s bit of land, despite the communal culture of allotments, made setting foot into the space feel illicit. A form of trespass. To one side of the otherwise neatly tended area was a rampant patch of raspberry plants dripping with fruit, some already rotting on the canes. We did not discourage the children from helping themselves to all they could eat. It seemed a shameful waste otherwise.
The other allotments in which we were to be granted our eventual patch lay on the opposite side of the village, further from our home. One strip of plots along the western edge of the field looked professionally tended – I had no doubt that some of the prize-winning specimens on display in the village’s traditional annual flower show were grown here. I could imagine pencil-straight runner beans and neat, regulation courgettes in a few months’ time. The strip to which our plot belonged along the northern edge of the field was wilder, and more unruly. The arrangement we entered to grow on the space was an informal one. A token amount of rent paid to the landowner annually, meant to cover water usage, though our plot had no tap, only the cracked bathtub commandeered by the children. A gift of extra space, benevolently bestowed by the landowner who seemed to like me, my keen interest in gardening, my desire to grow community and reconnection with the earth alongside my crops.
The field on which our allotment sat was held in joint ownership, with the party with whom we dealt holding the lion’s share of its worth. The history of the space, pieced together from fragmentary conversations, seemed to tell a story of initial idealism that over time had transformed into something more jaded. It appeared that friends had once unevenly clubbed together to buy this field and a neighbouring orchard. There was a nostalgic sense in the stories of a vision of something more communal and collective, feeding a community of neighbours from this shared land. Over the years, it had seemingly not come to fruition. When I mistakenly announced a wassail for the orchard in the village newsletter, an attempt at a fun way for people to gather and to teach our children about the rites of the growing season in traditional cider country, I was reminded that I had not sought permission to advertise the event, and that information about the gathering should be disseminated along private channels to suit the status of the land. Chastened, I reread the friendly and polite email and wondered where the line lay between the cynicism that came with ownership and the care that accompanied stewardship. I emailed my apology, withdrew the public notice, and messaged on WhatsApp groups instead, thinking all the while about the corrupting power of land’s monetary worth.
I supposed that if we were to fit any allotment, it would be this unlikely one, carved from a weedy patch of land on the scrappy edge of a field. A piece of land generously loaned, but the precarious conditionality of which leaves me feeling as though I am trying to root into uncertain ground. As a black immigrant trying to make a home in the UK, I am always trying to root into uncertain ground. But I wondered how different it really was from the allotments we had walked past in the city we lived in before, where friends hoped for years on long waiting lists for the gift of a space. Where most of the plots lay in the more affluent areas of the city where the houses tended to have gardens anyway. And I wondered what connection any of this now held to the original allotments in the history books of my childhood, rooted as they were in a system of loaning out a patch of land to the labouring poor so that they might attempt to grow a bit to eat.
At summer’s end we harvest our crop. We have been back since, planting our potatoes, weeding and earthing them up in snatched moments between the increasing pace of work and school as the world once again speeds up after its pandemic pause. They have done well, and we uncover generous piles of tubers. The children are delighted by the colours, running around exclaiming with wonder at red and blue versions of this vegetable they know so well in brown. We place them still muddy in trays as an attempt to store them over the coming months in the cool basement.
We take the chance to comb through the soil disturbed by uprooting the potatoes, removing as many bindweed roots as we can, then begin planting out alliums to fill some of the space over winter. They are less likely to compete well with the plot’s established plants, but they are an easy ‘set and forget’-style crop, needing minimal intervention until harvesting – provided that rain comes when it should. And I have begun dreaming of spring, of what crops we could try in this space next year. Dahlias maybe, which will not grow in my own damp, slug-endowed garden but might thrive in this sunny spot. I imagine their flowers but, if they do well enough, we could try them for the original purpose for which they were grown by the indigenous people of Central America, not far from the country of my birth. We could eat the tubers as well. And to make this plot of land with its uncertain relationship between the private and the communal feel more like home ground, I have ordered some seeds.
I have not found black-eyed peas that might thrive here, but a type of northern-adapted pigeon pea that should crop within our shorter growing season. Pigeon peas travelled like black-eyed peas from the West African lands of their origin to the Caribbean. Eaten year-round using tinned peas in a traditional rice-based dish called pelau, fresh bags of pigeon peas were in season at the end of the year to appear stewed on a laden Christmas table, the ultimate expression of the year’s prosperity and good luck. I think of the packets of dried out, dull-green seeds as I prepare the soil. What will it feel like to grow a crop so connected with my childhood? To gain the comfort of familiar nourishment from this different land? What would it feel like to grow on true common ground? Owned by no one but the land itself, what would it mean to grow free? There is perhaps no real knowing on this private patch of ground, but I will sow my seeds into the earth and see.
This is an extract from This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing (Elliott & Thompson), edited by Sarah Rigby and publishing 6th June.
