Mandy Sutter, Writer

When it comes to keeping pests off veggies, a strange mixture of sense and superstition seems to prevail at our allotments.

On one plot, a stuffed character from the cartoon South Park has been hoisted aloft by a long pole up his jacksie.

But the pole is very sturdy, so nothing moves when the wind blows. It’s hard to see why it would scare birds (though it did scare Mr Mandy Sutter). His and my favourite scarecrow is the one who looks like a Rastafarian. He doesn’t move much, just stands ‘taking the breeze’ all day, though his fingers, made of plastic bags, do stir occasionally. Mr MS finds much in him to admire.

It’s a lot of trouble to go to though, when the key seems to be simply to have something that moves.  I love the cat weathervane, but I’ve never seen it pointing in any direction other than West.

Less glamorous things probably do the job just as well. The deterrents most in evidence allotment-wide are things that rattle on sticks, like inverted plastic bottles and yogurt cartons. And a phenomenal number of Benecol, Actimel and Yakult pots. I’ve often wondered who buys that stuff.

And there are plenty of old CDs and DVDs strung between poles. Paul McKenna’s ‘Overcome Emotional Spending’ and the first series of  ‘Coast’ swing between broad beans on one plot and further down, light glances off the rim of David Attenborough’s ‘The Life of Mammals: Meat Eaters.’

These bugaboos are all on the established allotments, though, rather than in our new bit. I don’t know why: we have the same pests. We also have two extra ones: rabbits and tiny beetles that turn turnip and radish leaves into doilies.

The beetles, apparently, were disturbed by the earthworks when the land was converted to allotments. Word is that they will ’settle down’ next year. Do they know this, though? And I do wish the council would talk to the rabbits, maybe put up one of their strongly worded notices. Because the rabbits used to live where we are now and as far as they’re concerned, it’s still their patch. On a fine evening they flock back onto our plots to bask in the sun, looking suspiciously well fed and pleased with themselves.

So in the new bit, intimidation is done with nothing more flamboyant than posts and mesh. The rabbit proof fences are still going up. We’ve even got one ourselves.

When a neighbour asked Dad for £30 towards the £240 she was being charged to put up her  fence, Dad was happy to pay up, but couldn’t get over her total fee.

‘£240?’ he kept saying. ‘It’s a ludicrous amount! I reckon I could do it for £50.’

And the gauntlet was down. He drove round Yorkshire in his red Peugeot until he found a place that actually manufactured the wire netting supplied to B&Q et al. He decided to use thinner posts than most. He decided not to set the fence in a trench. He decided against a gate: we would just step over the wire. And in the blink of an eye, our fence was up.

‘Thirty-eight quid, all in,’ he said. ‘You can’t beat it, can you?’

It is flimsy compared to all the other fences. They have posts set in concrete and gates with latches.  And our back fence (council built) still has a gap of six inches at the bottom. Other allotment holders have filled theirs with wire mesh dug into the soil. But Dad believes the crops he’s planted at the back will keep the rabbits out, forming an olfactory barrier.

‘They don’t like potatoes,’ he says.

I’m not sure a few spuds planted a foot apart are going to be enough to keep out a determined buck. Some of them are enormous. But Dad has something else up his sleeve: he’s read that rabbits dislike human hair, so every time he has a trim, he takes the sparse snow white clippings and sprinkles them about. Poking twigs into the ground close to crops is another trick, to be brought out later perhaps, like the big guns.

‘And how much does it cost us?’ he asks, triumphant. ‘Nothing, that’s what.’

I’m coming round to these funny old home remedies of his.  Perhaps they will work. And so what if they don’t? I don’t want our allotment to be a pristine, efficient, vegetable producing machine, even if it could be.

Anyway, I’ve thought of something else that would cost us nothing: a scarecrow. And who cares whether any pests are scared off or not? The point is, she’ll look fantastic.

An allotment regulation has been sticking in Dad’s craw.  Clause 11.2 says that tenancy ends ‘on 1 January in the year next after the death of the Tenant.’

‘Well, I’ll probably stagger on till the end of the year,’ he said as we sat looking at the contract back in June. ‘It’s still worth going ahead, don’t you think?’

His estimation of how long he’s ‘got left’ varies according to how he feels on any given day, and his sciatica was playing him up. ‘On the other hand,’ he reflected, ‘I might drop dead tomorrow.’

He eyed me. ‘But then, so might you.’

I wasn’t unduly alarmed. He often says things like this. And his father, who had similar health issues, lived till 91, which would give Dad 4 more years.

‘So…?’ I ask.

He comes to the point. ‘We might end up doing a load of hard graft just for some other b*ggers to cash in on it.’

He says this again more politely and therefore in a lot more words, in a letter to the council. He also explains that his health has deteriorated during the exceptionally long wait for a plot. He asks whether a) his daughter could sign the agreement instead of him or b) we could sign it jointly.

A letter comes back saying no. There is a strict rule against ‘inheriting plots’.  Unfortunately, the illegal semi-felling of the ash tree has also taken place this week, so the council throws in a ticking off about this, too.

Much to my surprise, Dad takes the council’s decision on the chin. He tells Mr Mandy Sutter and me, ‘If I’m on my deathbed, I’ll try and hang on till the 2^nd January. That’ll give you another year.’

‘Or we could have you embalmed,’ says Mr MS, ‘and prop you up inside the shed. Then no-one will know you’ve gone.’

Dad’s laugh has a nervous edge. Sometimes Mr MS goes too far.

But from Dad’s point of view, the matter is closed.

It’s his daughter who can’t let it lie. She thinks that transferring the agreement at the outset can’t be described as ‘inheriting’. She feels undone by a technicality: if Dad had known about this rule beforehand, he would have put her name on the waiting list, not his.

More to the point, she has fallen in love with this patch of earth and weeds by the river: its nettle mafia, its one-and-a-half trees, its toad who lives in a hollow under the blackcurrant bushes. She doesn’t want to give it back.

I decide to talk to the council.

I enter their offices prepared, having memorised my list of points and abandoned my work-at-home uniform of shapeless old tracksuit bottoms and stained dressing gown in favour of a skirt and jacket.

But from the moment I clap eyes on the blonde, bright-looking clerk, I know she isn’t going to budge. I work steadily through my points anyway (as they say on Mastermind, ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish.’) But she doesn’t find it necessary to answer any of them. She just uses the ‘broken record’ technique, repeating standard phrases about the long waiting list and about not making an exception. It would be annoying if it wasn’t so admirable.

‘I understand your point of view,’ I say. We both keep saying that.

Then unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears. ‘It’s just the thought of Dad dying. And my having to give up the allotment so soon afterwards. And the shed he’s built.’

What a sob story, I think, even as I feel a sob coming on.  This poor woman’s working day is probably one long procession of people entering her office and bursting into tears.

But her face softens.  ‘We act on the information we’re given,’ she says. ‘We have to. But the name on the rent cheque doesn’t always tally with the name of the tenant. We make a note of discrepancies, but we don’t follow them up.’

I thank her, not sure I’ve understood.

But when I get home, Mr MS is clear. ‘She’s told you how it’s done! When people pop their clogs, no-one tells the council.’

The idea of concealing Dad’s death doesn’t appeal. ‘So the UK is like an old Iron Curtain country now, where people kow-tow to officialdom then quietly go away and do the opposite?’

‘Or,’ he says, ‘you decide to enjoy it for what it is now, then let it go.’

‘Nothing lasts, you mean. Everything in the conditioned world is impermanent. Clinging causes suffering.’

He pulls a face. ‘If you like.’

‘I don’t like,’ I say. ‘This isn’t about what I like.’

‘Well,’ he says. ‘It’s that or the embalming fluid.’

He’s got a point.

Ever since we got the allotment, Dad has said, ‘We need somewhere to keep our tools, don’t you think, stop ‘em getting pinched. And we need somewhere to go when it rains, to sit and watch all the other b*ggers get soaked.’

I’m taken aback by this robust view of things but later, in B&Q, I notice a shed for a hundred pounds . I ring Dad. He refuses to be drawn. ‘Let’s just play it by ear. There’s no hurry.’ So it’s with some surprise I answer the phone the following evening to find he’s spent the day driving around DIY warehouses researching sheds, then gone back ordered the B&Q one.

Dad likes driving, especially since he bought his tiny red Peugeot. Getting rid of the old car was a wrench because he and my Mum had driven ‘as far as the moon’ together in it. But he’s warming to the new one. ‘It’s a pretty flimsy affair, ‘ he says. ‘But then, what do you expect when you buy a car for £5,000 ? I must say, at eighty-seven I never thought I’d be driving a car described as having ‘cheeky looks’.’

He often modifies the things he buys and this car is no exception: he has jacked the seat up with a plank of wood and let air out of the tyres to make it a ’softer ride.’

But back to the B&Q shed. It’s arriving at his flat the following afternoon.

‘You don’t mess around,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to start calling you Ted the Shed.’

‘Or Shedward,’ he says. ‘The only problem now is how we get it down there. Some of those pieces are pretty big. And heavy. But they’d probably fit on the roof rack of your car. Yes, I reckon we can manage it, between the three of us, what do you think? If we take our time.’

The ‘what do you think?’ is rhetorical.  What I think is that our plot is a very long way from the gate. I hatch a plan to hire a man and a van, perhaps without telling anyone.

But when Mr Mandy Sutter hears of this, he takes charge. He rings round local removal firms and arranges for the shed to be collected, giving Dad time to carry out a few modifications first.   ‘After all, it’s a pretty flimsy affair,’ Dad says. ‘But then, what do you expect when you buy a shed for £100?’

Council regulations state that ‘huts’ on the new allotments be made of timber, and be no bigger than 4′ x 6′ . Although this seems unfair (in the established bit, they’re made out of all sorts and the goat allotment shed is the size of a small detached bungalow) I’m relieved there’s some kind of limit on things.

The regulations also say sheds must be ‘raised on bricks or blocks’. This makes sense: we’re by the river. And the river, as the people walking the back path so endlessly tell us, floods. So Dad is also building a base. I’m not there when the menfolk manhandle the base and shed pieces down to our plot. But when we all go down at the weekend to put it all up, I’m impressed.

No one at the allotments knows quite what to make of the flood rumours. Two devil-may-care folk have erected their new sheds flat on the ground. Our neighbour’s shed, by contrast, is on stilts.

Dad, though, has got it exactly right. His base will position the shed a foot off the ground, high enough for any flood waters to pass through and back but not so high we feel we’re in a tree house.

Even more impressive, he puts the shed up more or less singlehandedly. He just doesn’t allow us to help much, no matter how anxiously we buzz around trying to. Mr MS has to content himself with putting together a self-assembly bench.

The result? A smashing little garden shed and bench in the dappled shade of the wych elm. I can’t wait for it to rain again now, so we can sit inside and watch all the other b*ggers get soaked.

There’s one thing you can rely on when you’re camping in Wales. Bwrw glaw. Or as we call it in England, rain.

Last week, as Mr MS and I sat in various Welsh fields watching water pour glutinous down the windows of our camper van, it was with a strange mixture of feelings that I looked back to the long hot hours I’d spent the week before, carrying water to parched ground over considerable distance.

I may not have mentioned how long the walk between the allotment tap and our plot is. It’s 250 yds. In allotment-speak that’s seven greenhouses, two sets of goats (one set pygmy, one full-sized) three sets of chickens, two rubbish dumps, one twenty foot hedge topiarised to look like the Arc du Triomphe and the sight of three allotment holders on the established bit watering their engorged produce with hosepipes.

The chore is made worse by being a solo job, as Dad doesn’t walk easily over rough ground, and Mr MS doesn’t walk anywhere if he can help it. A tactical error on my part has contributed: the watering cans I bought are not the standard 2-litre, stout plastic sort in forest green. They are diddy pink ones with black spouts. Well, I liked them.

Dad and Mr MS could buy their own watering cans, I hear you reason. True. But our family doesn’t run on reason: Dad, though having money to spend, won’t spend it (his last purchase was a plastic rake from Poundland, and even then he negotiated a discount because it was missing a tooth). And Mr MS, although he would like to spend money on all sorts of things, can’t because he hasn’t got any.

To be fair to Mr MS, he has done the watering with the pink cans more than once, prepared to risk being called a ladyboy for the sake of the rainbow chard.  Far from damaging his reputation, one lady allotment holder offered to fill his cans with her hose.

Dad, Mr MS and I have only got a few  plants in on our plot anyway, pushed hastily into ill-prepared soil in that first heady week and not hoped to come to much. For once, the low expectations of life we share are a blessing. A cup of berries? God bless you, squire.

Other people in the new bit are assertive, and the air fair bristles with a sense of middle-class entitlement, despite the fact that no-one has paid a penny yet and won’t have to for 2 years. But then, it isn’t really about money. People are investing time and effort. So they have been demanding to know when the council plans to install the promised tap.

Consequently, the men with metal detectors have been out again to find the  water main. And they’ve found it on the plot next to ours, where they have dug three deep rectangular holes and put a red and white stick in one of them.

There’s no tap there just yet, mind.

So I suppose there was one advantage to all the rain last week – the allotment got thoroughly watered without anyone having to lift a can of any hue.  I must say it was hard to focus on this benefit in Wales, while living at close quarters with a sodden beast (I’m talking about Dog MS here by the way).

There’s one thing you can rely on when you’ve finished camping in Wales, however. Heulwen. Sunshine. The ground is already drying out again.

So for the time being our neighbour will have to go on filling large plastic drums with water and rolling them to his plot. Another will continue digging a ditch, hoping to expose the underground beck. Mr MS will go on reflecting on the nature of civilisation and how, over history, humankind has always endeavoured to move water away from the places they don’t want it and towards the places they do. And Dad, who would like to tell the council to stuff their tap, and the £17.50 a year they propose to charge for it, will go on researching a water pump to dredge the river that runs infuriatingly close to our plot. So far, including generator and groundworks, the project cost stands at £2,500.

Fences do funny things to people.

The allotments’ back fence is uber-secure. Its mesh rectangles are too narrow for a foothold, its height sufficient to stop anyone hauling themselves up, and rules and regs stipulate no sheds near the fence to break the fall.

It has all been thought out. Of course, anyone could walk in through the front gate, which is never locked. And no-one can walk in through the heavily padlocked side gate marked ‘allotment holders only’ because  none of us has a key.

But back to the fence. It may be a barrier to physical entry, but it can’t stop other kinds of interference. Dad says ‘if you want to talk to people, garden.’

It’s extraordinary how much the people who walk the river path want to talk.

‘Hah! Rather you than me. Looks like a JCB job, that.’

‘The river floods here, you know. Come November, all yer caulis ‘ll be sailing off downstream to Burley.’

‘Of course, this place is overrun with rabbits. Fast as you grow it, they’ll eat it.’

As a teenager, I worked the tills at Sainsbury’s. You had to check the watermark on big notes. As you held them to the light, customers usually said, ‘I know it’s a good ‘un: I made it myself this morning!’

It’s the same with the comments that come through the fence. People always think they’re the first who’s ever made them. Secret curmudgeon that I am, these days I stoop to examine particularly fascinating weeds when anyone  passes.

Barriers are appearing on the inside, too. Trenches are being dug around plots and rabbit proof fences erected, made of chicken mesh stapled to thick posts.

In the first Elysian fortnight, us dozen or so allotment holders in the reclaimed bit banded cluelessly together. We wondered communally what to do about tussocky ground, tree stumps, the lumps of rusty metal that lurked under the nettles. It was all for one and one for all.

But now that boundaries are forming, alliances are too. Certain males have bonded over rotavators and biodegradable weedkiller; others have bonded over compost heaps. Certain females have bonded over how useless their husbands are and how you might as well build the sodding shed and put the flipping fence up yourself.

Two allotment holders don’t have a fence: us and the cowboy-hatted man who uses his children as water-carrying packhorses (the council have been out with metal detectors but can’t find the water main to install a tap).

He and I stand on a corner, nervous. We have things in common, even though he’s got raised beds and I don’t prune my fruit bushes.

‘We’re not having a fence,’ I say. ‘I’m just putting wire round individual crops.’

‘Yes well, why not? I mean, it’s doing the trick, isn’t it?’

‘What about you?’

We gaze at his towering beans (he’s had his plot longer than us) with their pretty black and white flowers. Unprotected.

‘Rabbits don’t like broad beans,’ he says. ‘Or potatoes. Or rhubarb. Tell you what, that Ian might have rotavated, but he’s not done his digging, and his weeds are coming back up.’

This subtle shifting and shafting is of no concern to Dad.

Since Mum died 3 years ago,  he has sometimes gone days on end talking to no-one but Mr Mandy Sutter and me. But now he holds regular conversations through the back fence and across the regulation 1m high chicken wire. He reports back loudly that although certain people are ‘nice chaps’ and ’seem to know what they’re talking about’ others are ‘idiots’ who ‘probably wear gloves to garden in.’

The subtleties are also lost on Mr MS, whose belief in courtesy dictates saying good morning to everyone and stopping for a longish chat, especially when sent back to the car to fetch the spade that means he’ll have to do some digging.

As I write, he looks over my shoulder and paraphrases sociologist Richard Sennett, saying that barriers help strangers stay cordial.

Maybe. The allotments are certainly in transition. When everyone’s got used to the fences,  perhaps things will settle down. I look forward to it.

N.B. The Reluctant Gardener is away next week: see you the week after!