Allotment Diary- Sunday 2 and Sunday 9 February

Sunday 2 February

Second visit of the year, and the first positively Arctic early morning start. A struggle to release the ice-encrusted padlock, eventually sending it swinging on its generously-lengthed chain and clattering low down against the ivy-green metalwork of the great clanky iron main gate, the impact surely startling the still-slumbering neighbours within the handsome semi-detached avenue bordering the site, and definitely sending tiny droplet-icicles shattering against the frozen tarmac of the main access path.

I reckon I’ve got until lunchtime before actual frostbite sets in, so determine to make some progress with the clearance of the new Iberian-peninsular-shaped bed which may or may not in the fullness of time become either a pond, or a potato-growing area, or a combination of both, or neither. The first challenge here is to actually locate the bed in question, the entirety of Plot Seventy-One, like the entirety of the site, having been evenly carpeted overnight by two inches of virgin snow, giving it the picturesque, but practically problematic, visual sensation of a very late, and very expansive, Christmas card.

Deciding on a spot three yards to the left of the compost bin (or, if you prefer, twenty kilometres to the West of Pamplona), I get going with the big fork, and enter into hand-to-hand combat with a succession of great frost-encrusted boulders of soil, the size and consistency of small meteroids. After an hour or so of this, the uneven bed resembles either a miniature iceberg troubled by a family group of hungry burrowing sealions, or the surface of the moon following a visit by a particularly restless gang of rogue cosmonauts armed with lunar icepicks.

It’s three hours into rythmic subzero exertions which have sent me half-crazy and snowblind, in the process managing to clear approximately two yards square of weed-knotted freeze-earth, when I have the day’s first encounter with a fellow sentient lifeform. It’s a cat- but not your common-or-garden suburban variety, but a great prowling thick-black-furred snow-panther of a thing, something that in my fevered state I instantly conclude has evolved overnight in response to the localised and fleeting ice-age evidently afflicting this particular corner of SK2. We give each other a wide berth; the feline quickening its pace and slinking off across the neighbouring plot, where it promptly disappears under a municipal-grade spike-topped metal fence and into the wildlands surrounding the hidden freight-train line, never again to be witnessed by modern man.

And the modern man? Well- I decide the morning has now been quite eventful enough, thank you, what with the frostbite, and the snow, and now with the discovery of previously undocumented and quite-possibly man-devouring land-mammals. Without a further moment’s ado, I lean the big fork against the near inside wall of the shed, and trudge crisply home, there to prepare myself a very stiff cup of coffee, and-what the hell- a generous half a plateful of ginger biscuits. This winter gardening lark is hungry, and occasionally startling work, so it is.

Sunday 9 February

Still and chilly, but the ice-age has retreated just as suddenly as it arrived, revealing barren but evidently diggable earth. The perfect conditions, surely, to complete the conquest of the Iberia-shaped area to the left of the compost bin. For a start, I can actually find the area in question this time- and am pleasantly surprised to discover that my snowblind exertions with the icepick (see previous instalment) have cleared another approximate fifth of the previously-overgrown subcontinental expanse- meaning that I’ve only got another third of it to tackle. Like a modern day Laurie Lee (but with mud-encrusted Decathlon walking boots and pitchfork, in place of battered hobnail boots and violin) I spring resolutely forth into the brightness of the day, dreaming of Andalusia.

Two hours later, and we have made steady progress across the plains to the South of Madrid, and have the outskirts of Toledo within our sweat-browed horizon, when a sudden subterranean clang of the fork’s prongs against an evidently substantial metallic object sends a jarring funnybonesque sensation rippling up the forearm and stops us in our tracks with the full non-negotiable authority of a pre-war wagonful of the rural Guardia Civil. It’s a moment before I have gathered my senses back together enough to attempt an unearthing of this unseen obstruction. When I do, via a good fifteen minutes of curse-inflected striving involving not just further work with the big fork, but a rare outing from the comfort of the shed for the big spade, heaven help us- I find that it is not, as I have come to suspect, a hitherto undiscovered Roman road linking Salamanca in the West to Alicante at the Mediterranean coast.

Indeed not. Instead, the object I now scrape clear of mud for a short inspection in the general shed area, is- well, I can’t tell you exactly what it is. Extensively rusted, a good six-foot long, spiked at one end and with various rounded knobbly appendices extending from its thickening, tapered spine at the other, it could equally well be some form of agricultural digging tool favoured by Cheshire rustic labourers of the pre-industrial era, a section from the inner workings of a domestic mangle, or indeed the front axle of a Mark III Ford Escort. The woman at plot Sixty-Eight, when asked, reckons it’s part of a clothes line. Deciding that it is in all probability none of the above, and more likely nothing more newsworthy than a discarded patent Spanish Inquisition torture implement, I set it carefully leaning against the green Stockport Council wheelie bin which will mark the plot entrance until I get around to building that trellis- and get back to work with the big fork. It’s coming on for siesta time after all, and if my calculations are near correct, those rounded protrusions a short afternoon’s steady progress away to the South are either the fabled walls of the ancient city of Granada, or the back end of last year’s spring onions. Only one way to find out, and it’s not by standing still.