Mandy Sutter, Writer

It’s often windy up here in Yorkshire, but one night the blustering in our attic bedroom gets so bad it’s impossible to sleep.

Prone to forecast disaster at the best of times (a family trait), I toss and turn into the wee small hours. Next door’s chimney is cracked, and I fear it’s going to fall through our ceiling.

Mr Mandy Sutter is no help. Rather than shin up onto the roof and fix it there and then (my preferred option), he says things like, ‘we’ve had it looked at, and the builders say it’s fine. Why don’t you put your earplugs in?’

Eventually I do. When I wake up, I’m delighted to find that a) it is morning and b) I’m still alive.

I’m rather concerned about my globe artichoke plants, though. I have three big ones on the allotment, grown lovingly from seed, and because we haven’t had much frost yet this winter, they are still tall, splashing fountains of silver-green.

Anyway, I go down to check. I’m relieved to find most of their leaves still huge and arching, with edges like circular saw blades.

But when I’ve finished fussing about at ground level, slicing off the broken leaves at the alarmingly fleshy base, it strikes me that something’s wrong with the sky.

I look up. It’s like seeing an old friend minus glasses or beard: it takes a few moments to put two and two together. But the overhead pattern that so reminds me of a diagram of the human central nervous system, has gone.

Suddenly I understand. The wych elm is down!

I hurry over to the spot where it stood and see its roots, broken on one side and torn out of the ground on the other. Luckily, the tree has fallen away from the shed and towards the compost heap.

I gaze on the slain giant. Although sorry to see its destruction, I can’t help remembering the notice the Parish Council pinned to it last summer. ‘DO NOT CUT DOWN THIS TREE!’

Well, the wind has obviously never learnt to read, because the tree is down, whether the Council likes it or not.

I look forward to telling Dad.

But he gets in first. Before today, he hasn’t visited the allotment for months, insisting there’s ‘nothing to do down there.’ But this morning he went, to fetch some creosote from the shed.

‘Have I got news for you,’ he says when Mr MS and I go round that evening.

He tells us he has already drafted a letter to the Council.

‘Oh, there’s no need to involve them’, says Mr MS, genial and innocent of the dark passions involved. ‘I’ll hire a circular saw and cut it into timber.’

My jaw falls open: Mr MS is volunteering for an outdoor job. If only we could use the leaves of the globe artichoke to saw through the tree.

But none of this matters in the event. ‘DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT TREE!’ Dad says, sounding a lot like the original notice would have done, if only it could speak. ‘Don’t so much as break a twig off. That tree belongs to the Council. I’ve told them it’s up to them to dispose of it.’

He speaks with the delight of one who has at last lived long enough to see justice prevail.

‘Did he poison it?’ asks Mr MS on the way home.

‘No,’ I say.

I know that truth is stranger than fiction. I also know that Dad told the Council he’d welcome a replacement sapling. As they say here in Yorkshire, ‘there’s nowt so queer as folk.’

November is an uninspiring time for gardeners. Days are indecently short and the grunt work of weeding and digging isn’t balanced by the usual joy of planting.

But jobs still need to be done and, deserted by our fair-weather friends, we gardeners have to do them. The Reluctant Gardener has found it useful to identify a few motivational tools.

The first is a camping gas stove plus whistling kettle, mug and teabags. I was never one to visit the allotment (or any place) without a Thermos of hot drink (or ‘boil’, as Mr Mandy Sutter calls it) but brewing up in the shed beats the old flask system hands down.

It isn’t just the taste. It’s the walk to the tap, hoping they haven’t turned the water off for the winter. It’s the striking of damp matches on damp box, hoping that something will eventually catch fire. It’s the frequent breaks from digging to peer at the blue flame, hoping the gas hasn’t run out.

The whole process is so fraught and fragile that when the boil finally arrives, it’s a miracle. A worthy substitute for the miracle of seeing plants grow.

But lack of plant growth is, paradoxically, motivational tool number two.  Because if plants aren’t growing then nor are weeds. So a cleared, dug-over bed stays cleared and dug over, in a nice plain chocolate brown, un-bespattered by Mother Nature’s green paint pot.

The third tool is the post-gardening bath. There’s no ablution to top it, especially in winter. Aching limbs are caressed by silken oiled water, grime floats out from under fingernails, nettle stings are brutally revived to tingle afresh. The spent gardener lies contentedly under bubble bath foam as a landscape lies beneath clouds.

And then of course there’s that special motivation that comes only from one’s family. Mr MS is also, in his own way, a tool. One afternoon he visits the plot and finds me covered in mud labouring with spade and fork.

‘Don’t overdo it, will you?’ he says. ‘ Sorry, can’t stay, just come to borrow the loppers. Our neighbour needs some help with her bush.’

Later, I hear that while lopping off twigs, he also lops the head off her garden gnome.

But I digress. Mr MS is something of a blurter, and in his brief minutes at the allotment he manages to tell our neighbour that Dad and I call him the Farmer.

‘Funny that,’ says our neighbour, ‘considering I’m a car mechanic.’

Things have the potential to turn nasty. But they don’t: the Farmer (as I shall persist in calling him) admits that he calls another neighbour, who we know only by the disappointing title of Ian, ‘Mr Windy.’

MS looks at me. The Farmer goes on. ‘He put his shed up in a force ten gale, y’see.’

Mr MS titters obligingly but I see he’s disappointed by the explanation. He goes off muttering something that sounds like ‘cock and balls.’

Later he claims it’s a mnemonic, to help him remember a) to take some soft drink round to Dad’s to save his glass being topped up with hard liquor and b) to ask Dad about crown green bowling.

A likely story.  But I give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, it’s only a matter of time till the decapitated gnome’s mates come calling.

In our house, we’re not particularly partial to pickles (try saying that with a mouthful of gherkins).

Mr Mandy Sutter had a piccalilli ‘incident’ at seventeen and has never touched that violent yellow cauli, mustard and turmeric combo since. Dad is a mono-condimentalist and that condiment is HP sauce.

Dog MS’s one attempt to eat a pickled onion ended in a sneezing fit that nearly took her head off.  And I haven’t eaten Branston since someone put some down the toilet as a ‘joke’.

But along came the allotment and changed all that.

For the pickling season is upon us. Gluts must be faced, and the idea that vegetables can’t be kept for longer than a week abandoned. What can’t be endured must be cured.

We’re not alone in having a lot of green tomatoes at our allotment. It has been a bad year for blight (or a good one, if you are a blighter). Tomatoes have gone straight from green to rotten, leaving out the useful bit in between. They have hung, brown and bulbous, looking disturbingly like diseased nuts (yes, I do mean those sorts of nuts.)

If you’re in the same boat,  I recommend rescuing some before they succumb and chutnefying them with this Nigel Slater recipe. It has a nice nip of chilli, and suggests using a few ripe tommies to help the unripe ones along.

We had some red and yellow ones in the garden and added to the green ones they looked great, roiling, boiling and moiling in the pan like some sort of traffic light stew.

A shame it all has to turn brown in the end. But despite now being the same colour as the blighted tomatoes, the chutney tastes lovely, especially with a Bath Oliver and some cave aged Emmental. If you find those ingredients pretentious, as Mr MS does, please substitute a Jacob’s cream cracker and some mild cheddar from Tommy Tesco’s.

And the pickling hasn’t stopped there. A friend, hearing about our great bounty of brassicas, lent me a Harsch Gartopf fermenting pot. Ideal, he said, for making sauerkraut.

Alone with the pot, Mr MS was suspicious. ’Yes, but what IS sauerkraut, exactly? Do you eat it hot or cold? And what with?’

‘It’s pickled cabbage,’ I said. ‘You can eat it any way you like.’

I don’t know why I always pretend to know everything when talking to Mr MS. I’ve no idea whether you can eat sauerkraut hot.

But I was on a roll by now, reeling off different kinds of German sausage, unmoved by his baffled expression.

Then I relented. ‘Hot dogs,’ I said.

Suddenly, he was a different man. ‘Hot dogs? Why didn’t you say so!’

That’s the thing with menfolk. Eventually, you have to speak their language.

Actually, sauerkraut doesn’t so much involve pickling as fermenting. Or so one discovers, watching the 149-minute long video that comes with the pot, where a chap with massive sideburns and adjoining moustache tells you a very great deal about it. After two hours, he tells you how to make the stuff too. For him, it isn’t just about passing on a recipe, or even a practice. Fermentation is an ethos.

I can’t make up my mind whether this is the best or the worst thing about growing your own; the fact that you don’t have to look very far into any of its aspects before you stumble across sub-cultures peopled with evangelical folk with unlikely facial hair and home-knitted trousers, or no trousers at all in the case of World Naked Gardening Day (which falls on Saturday 5th May 2012 in case you’re wondering).

Books about recycling your own piss; Potato Days; Scarecrow Festivals, the list goes on. You couldn’t make it up.

But the sauerkraut is made, anyway.  I plan to lift the lid next week.  If I can get the picture of rotting veg and handlebar moustaches out of my mind, I may even eat some.

It’s official: today is the first day of autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats called it in Sept 1819. He also mentioned the ‘moss’d cottage trees’ bending with the weight of apples.

Unfortunately at our Yorkshire allotments it has been so windy recently that  the apples have blown clean off the trees, moss’d-cottage or otherwise. ‘Windfalls’ doesn’t cover it: they didn’t fall, they were pushed.

I’ve been forced to make a lot of blackberry and apple loaf. Forced to eat it too. Slathered in double cream from Tommy Tesco’s. OK, the recipe only uses one small apple, but it’s a start.

It isn’t just apples that toppled: plums plummeted and there was a downpour of damsons, like purple rain.

Veg suffered too. Beans were battered and sunflowers summarily beheaded by the wind’s guillotine.

Only crops that know how to keep their heads down have survived: cabbages, beetroot, pumpkins. The low riders of the vegetable realm.

Actually, I can’t imagine anything defeating the pumpkin plant. It had me afear’d all summer,  not just from the prospect of pumpkin-based meals for all eternity. No, the stealthy yet rapid way it covered ground was sinister. If anyone had sat still for long enough, they would definitely have seen it growing. They’d have had to camouflage themselves in a pumpkin-shaped hide, though: the grinning pumpkin acts only when backs are turned.

So I’m glad to see Autumn. The cooler weather has put a spoke in the pumpkin’s wheel: its plan to hit the A65 and make it to Leeds seems to have died a death. I still find the size of its fruits unnerving, though; the way they lurk beneath the razor-edged leaves.

But I digress. The real point of this time of year is to yoke the menfolk and the dog together and send them off to bring home the bacon, namely brassicas and spuds, the only things numerous enough to deserve the name ‘harvest’. I don’t think a handful of runner beans and two beetroots really qualify.

But Dad asks to be excused on grounds of age (88). Fair enough: he isn’t a ‘cabbage man’ and has recently been seen buying potatoes from Charlie Co-op (he likes a nice boiled spud, and says ours ‘go abroad’ in the pan).

Then dog MS begs off. There are some urgent sticks in her ‘In’ tray, apparently, and some long overdue barking, especially at the ironing board, who needs taking down a peg or two.

As Harvest Manager, it’s obviously not my role to dig. And so the grunt work gets passed to Mr Mandy Sutter. After making protracted notes in his diary, a prelude vital to the success of any manual task, he starts unearthing spuds of myriad (well, three) hues: pink, golden, and pink and golden. I load them into boxes stuffed with newspaper and we head for the gate.

We are waylaid by the sight of onions on a neighbour’s plot, enjoying their last afternoon of warmth in a hammock, before being strung up in the shed.

Mr MS eyes them enviously and slows to a standstill. He sags under the weight of  potatoes.

I crack the whip across his glistening flanks. He doesn’t budge.

The atmosphere is not mellow. Neither is it particularly fruitful.

‘I think there’s some blackberry and apple loaf left at home,’ I say.

His eyes flare, and he moves off with his load towards the camper van.

I am triumphant: the harvest is in.

I thought having an allotment would make me immune from receiving vegetable gifts.

I have had to think again.

Innocent observations to my allotment neighbours, like ‘cracking courgettes you’ve got there’ or ‘sensational sweet peas’ have brought hope to their eyes.

‘Please take a few!’ or ‘Cut yourself a bunch!’ they plead. It is an unfeeling person who looks into those desperate faces and says no.

So to help out the couple who had been on holiday and come back to find their cabbages big enough to appear on roadmaps, I took delivery of a huge head of Savoy last week.

Dad and I were already buckling under the heft of  supersized spuds dug from our own plot. One weighed in at nearly 2lb and Dad, who has taken to wearing 2 pairs of £1 reading specs one on top of the other, rather than forking out £200 at the opticians (and who can blame him), could hardly believe the evidence of his six eyes.

‘Now that’s a potato among potatoes!’ he said. ‘It’ll keep me going for a month.’

But back to our neighbours’ preposterously-sized produce. I struggled to carry it to the car. Perhaps it was already developing its own gravity system.

At home, it made Mr Mandy Sutter back away across the kitchen. ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said.

The table legs flinched under the weight of the Brobdingnagian brassica. ‘Well,’ I said coolly, ‘I’m away next week. I’m afraid it’s going to be your project.’

One of Mr MS’s friends was coming to stay in my absence. ‘It’s a good job Ade’s a vegetarian,’ I said. ‘And that he’s a gannet.’

We live in a terraced house that looks smaller out than in.  Visitors often comment on how spacious our kitchen is. But, glancing at the gargantuan green on the kitchen table, the room suddenly seemed small.

I left for Northampton.

I phoned home mid-week. Mr MS and I managed to talk pleasantly for a while, but we both knew where the conversation was headed.

‘The thing is, we haven’t made much of a sortie on the Savoy yet,’ said Mr MS.

It was the same old story. Except that this time, thinking about that vast vegetable, I couldn’t help sympathising.

At primary school, I was once made to sit over a bowl of sago pudding for the entire dinner hour. As I stared at the dreaded substance, unable to imagine even putting it into my mouth, let alone swallowing it, it looked more like frogspawn every second. And it seemed to be multiplying in the bowl, a vast gelatinous alien life form that might suddenly overflow and spread over the tables and chairs until it had annihilated the entire school canteen, including me and all the dinner ladies. Let’s face it: food in large quantities just isn’t appetising (unless it’s salt and vinegar Kettle Chips).

‘Don’t turn your back on the cabbage,’ I muttered.

‘What?’ said Mr MS. ‘Look, we’ll try and break through the outer atmosphere tonight. I promise.’

When I returned home, he swore they had eaten three of its leaves. But the cabbage looked remarkably undiminished. Perhaps it was evolving, learning how to replenish itself from thin air.

No matter, though.  There are very few vegetables that can survive a concerted attack of recipe Googling.  Today I found a website that had 200 ideas, all involving cabbage.

To finally defeat this ginormous growth, I may have to try them all.