GrowWithJoe

Just an amateur gardener striving for vegetable growing greatness.

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[growwithjoe-blog]

The Phone Call

I had been secretly wanting an allotment for a while, not very rock and roll I know, due to the retired old man wearing a flat cap stigma attached to it, but it’s something I really hoped would become a reality one day and now I don’t care who knows or what people think.

We moved to a lovely Victorian house about 4 years ago. It’s on your average suburban town road, not a huge garden but with the added bonus of a big allotment situated about a 20 second walk away from the front door. I had no idea who to speak to about renting a plot and just presumed that there wouldn’t be one available. After numerous failed searches on the internet, I gave up, deciding to put my eager green thumbs to good use in the garden we did have, filling it with terracotta pots with as many scented geraniums and herbs as we could fit in it.

It was December 2015 when I thought, what the hell, l’m going to see how I can go about getting an allotment plot. After lots of searching on the local council website, I found a name and address of someone who might be able to help, so with the old adage, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”, I did a very British thing and I wrote a letter, took it straight to the post office and hoped for the best.

Christmas and New Year came and went with no response or acknowledgement to my letter. January was a complete blur, weeks passing by so quickly, but it was the beginning of February I got “The Phone Call”. As I listened to my voice mail message from John, asking if I was free to come and meet him at the allotments the next day, I could feel a big grin starting to grow across my face. I called him straight back and arranged to meet him at 9am the next morning to have a chat and to see my plot. I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, what has happened to me, I’m 35 and getting excited about having my very own allotment?!  That evening, I took straight to the internet and with iPad in hand, I did some research into what I had let myself in for and to make a start on my all important, ‘To Do List’.

The next morning, I got up, had a coffee and started out on my 20 second commute to the allotment. I had walked and driven passed this place more times than I can remember but this time, I’m one of the lucky few who gets to open the big wooden gate and go in.

John came to meet me at the gate. He looked like your stereotypical allotment going man, retirement age, grey hair and with the look of someone who was born with the knowledge of exactly how to grow his own fruit and vegetables programmed genetically into his DNA. John was really friendly, welcoming and encouraging, we chatted as we made our way through the site, walking passed lovely, well kept, established, freshly dug over plots. We ended up at a huge, over grown plot, with tree stumps, over grown bushes with what seemed to be hundreds of Bluebells growing, it looked like it hadn’t been used for years. I don’t really know how big I thought it might be in my head. To be honest, I tried not to imagine it to be too big so I wasn’t really disappointed when I finally got to see it and it was the size of a postage stamp!

John reliably informs me the size of the plot is “10 sticks”, (something I nod along to pretending I know what he means and that I normally measure everything in ‘sticks’).  The cost of it, John continues, is £30, (as I start working out in my head how much that works out a year at £30 a month, breaking it down into how much that would be weekly and daily, trying to convince myself the price isn’t too bad really is it?!). John continues, ‘so, that’s £30 for the year if that’s ok?’. I couldn’t believe how cheap it was! I gave John all my details, was given the secret code to the combination lock on entrance gate and we said our good byes.

That was that, my allotment adventure had begun and I couldn’t wait to get started.

Books on growing vegetables and fruit ordered and my gardening tools taken out of storage.

Let the back breaking work begin…………..!

[growwithjoe-blog]

The Beginning

This is a blog about my journey on the path to home growing greatness, well, that’s the plan, whether that actually happens is another thing but I am going to give it a good go!

My name is Joe, I am 35 years old, I have been together with my partner, Donna, for 17 years, we have 6 year old Son called Finley, a 2 year old daughter called Ivy and another baby on the way due to make an appearance in June. 

We live in the seaside town of Lowestoft in Suffolk and we have just acquired an allotment which is only a few seconds walk away from our house.

I never thought in my teenage years that I would be filled with such excitement about having an allotment. I remember when I was younger being dragged round various garden centres, bored senseless by my mum, but always remember her saying to me, “You will enjoy going to garden centres one day”. I never expected that years later that sentence would be something I would think about every time I visit one today or the fact I would look back on this statement and realise mums really do know best!

The 6 week summer holidays off from school felt like they would go on forever. The long hot summer days involved spending hours at the beach, with my sisters and I, pretending we couldn’t see our parents beckoning us from the promenade to get out of the sea when it was time to go home. When we weren’t at the beach, we were playing in our garden at home, part of which, was made up of a big vegetable plot.

I have so many happy memories of this vegetable plot which was tendered to by my Granddad, who not only kept it immaculate but also kept the entire family fed with a constant supply of home grown organic vegetables throughout the whole year. This is something I now know, I took for granted. Don’t get me wrong, I always enjoyed the seemingly never ending supply of delicious, freshly boiled new potatoes in a bowl in the fridge or the huge amounts of broad beans, sweetcorn and peas we had in abundance, but I never fully appreciated the hard work and effort it took for my Granddad to keep us supplied with this amazing organic produce.

My Granddad would be tending to the vegetable garden from dawn until dusk, 7 days a week, stopping only for a mug of tea and sandwich at lunch time. I remember almost feeling lost between the rows of broad beans and peas that would tower over my head, picking, shelling and eating as I went.

There was always something to do, weeding, watering, digging or picking, all of which I look back on with great fondness and happiness, and my hope is that my children will look back in the same way on our time together on the allotment.

I have so many stories and memories I could share but this introduction would be endless, but I do hope to share more with you over the coming weeks and months if you would like join me on this almost certainly very bumpy journey, you are more than welcome.

Wish me luck!

Joe