Mandy Sutter, Writer

Gardeners see things in a different way to normal people.

An ordinary family meal, for example, is imbued with more tension than a   Christmas episode of Eastenders as I watch Mr Mandy Sutter boiling to b*ggery  the kale nurtured with difficulty over the past months.

‘You’ve cooked it all!’ I moan. ‘We’ll never eat all that: what a waste!’

Mr MS is a wily creature. ‘I’ll eat it tomorrow. I like cold vegetables.’

As he well knows, I’m out all day tomorrow, so whether he eats it or throws it away I won’t be any the wiser. But I shut up. Not everyone feels the way I do about home grown veg, and I appreciate his saying something that saves face on both sides.

The gardener’s slant view extends into many  areas. Earlier this week, a friend and I took a tour of East Riddlesden Hall, a small stately home in Keighley. Despite its fascinating history and beautifully restored interior -  including two ‘Yorkshire Rose’ windows and a carved stone head of Charles I – our interest could best be described as polite.

When we got into the garden however, it was an emotional roller coaster. ‘Oh! Oh!’ my friend said amidst apple and pear trees. ‘It’s no good, I’ll just have to move house. I MUST have an orchard.’

We oohed and aahed in ‘Plants for sale’, a limited selection of herbs no different to those you’d find in any common or garden garden centre.

But what really aroused my passion was the compost heaps. There were four. Four! Imagine. All at different stages of putrefaction. And next to them was a large chicken wire drum full of dead leaves.

I’d heard tell of leaf mould and its many good properties but somehow it had never felt personal. This drum, though, with its darkening coppery strata, was a vision.  I longed for beauty like this at our allotment and (perhaps because we have spare chicken wire) it suddenly seemed possible.

I hardly slept that night. Yes, I know.  But to cut a long story short, the leaf drum is now installed and is magnificent. It may even herald the dawn of a new era, allotmently speaking.

It isn’t the only recent innovation, either.

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale ‘The Road’, father and son walk an anonymous road through a blasted landscape. Armed with little more than a tarpaulin to sleep under, they approach an uncertain fate.

This prize possession was mentioned so often that, listening to the audio book, I became strangely mesmerised by the idea of it.  Never mind the searing insight into humans’ capacity for good and evil that McCarthy offered, what I took from the book was the desire for a tarp. I could keep the compost heap warm with it.

At our local garden centre, I discovered that tarps don’t come cheap.

I could almost hear Dad. ‘£14.99 for a plastic sheet? You’ve got to be joking.’

I got as far as the checkout with it, then realised I couldn’t pay that much. I scoured the place again, as if a cheaper one might have materialised. It hadn’t. I went to the camping section to see if proper groundsheets were cheaper. They weren’t.

On the way out of the shop, I noticed something in the waste bin.  It was a large piece of thick plastic that had been used to wrap a mattress. I took it to the sales desk. ‘Can I have this?’

The sales assistant had already heard my plans for the compost heap.

‘It’s £48,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Go on, tek it.’

So I did.

Dad, hearing the story, gave a silent thumbs-up, the ultimate accolade.

Folded in half, the tarp was exactly the right size. It and the chicken wire drum make a handsome pair. And from my new, weird gardener’s-eye view, I know that when the apocalypse comes, at least we’ll have enough fertiliser.

Regular readers may have detected a sombre note in my last post.  The Reluctant Gardener had begun to wonder whether the ongoing battle with bugs, grubs and slugs was All Worth It.

But it’s amazing what a fortnight away can do.  The benefit isn’t just in my mind: when I visited the allotment this morning, it looked like the allotment of a Proper Gardener.

Various veg (written off as bloody washouts) have shot up. The courgettes have come out of suspended animation and produced impossibly yellow flowers, the broccoli and kale have stopped drooping half-heartedly about the place and are standing up straight like proper men and even the carrots, their tops almost invisible before, have a definite, if feathery, presence.

A Watched Crop Never Grows may have to become my new gardening maxim.

Of course, the sudden growth spurt may also have been helped by my home made nettle fertiliser, applied the day before we went away. And if so, the nightmare of making it may have been worthwhile.

I don’t know if you’ve ever soaked nettles in a bucket for 3 weeks? But tripping gaily about the allotment in gardening gloves and floppy hat, humming as I filled a basket with delicately heart shaped nettle leaves, I had no idea of the disgusting stages of filth and putrefaction I was going to be forced to witness.

The education wasn’t just visual. As the nettles began to decay, the water turn black, and then grow sinister white blooms and become a feeding ground, breeding-ground and general seething-ground for a thousand blue bottles, I had never smelt anything so foul.

It was unfortunate that I’d stood the buckets in front of the shed, next to the bench. Even that filth meister Mr MS was unable to drink his coffee in the vicinity. And we were all scared to move the buckets.

But the day of reckoning had to come. Armed with a Tupperware container, I approached the buckets and plunged the plastic box into the vile brew, ready to dilute it ten parts to one in the watering can.  I was holding my breath, but couldn’t resist a little sniff to see if the stuff was really that bad. It was.  The watering took an hour and a half. I had to keep running away.

But job (eventually) done. The buckets got a thorough rinseby way of thanks, the gunk went on the compost heap and the flies reassembled around the plants that had been watered with the filth. I gave those plants a mercy watering with clean water. I made a mental note not to use the Tupperware box for Mr MS’s sandwiches in future. Well, not unless he really annoys me.

Even after five washes, my fingers still stank.

Mr MS, who had not been present (he used that old chestnut of an excuse ‘I have to go to work’) blanched when I waved the fingers under his nose later.

‘God. I see what you mean,’ he said. He had been accusing me of exaggeration. But now, was it admiration I saw in his eyes? Or just wind from eating a home grown onion?

Who knows. One thing I did know at the time, though: however beneficial the nettle fertiliser was to our veggies, I was never going to put myself through all that again.

But I notice now that my new comfrey patch is coming on really well. And soaked comfrey leaves make even better fertiliser than nettles. Apparently they smell even worse, too.  But just as it’s impossible to remember feeling hungry, it’s impossible to remember bad smells. Especially after a fortnight’s holiday.

The working life is tough: don’t we know it.

Unfortunately, some of us choose ‘interests’ that are hard work too.

11 months into the tenure of our allotment, Dad and I have come to realise that although TV gardening programmes  would have us think otherwise, this gardening lark is all bloody graft. It’s tough on body, mind and soul alike.

It’s like working in a crap job. When things go wrong, no-one knows why. When things go right, one feels lucky rather than clever. And every so often, a pest appears who undoes three months’ good work just like that.

Last month, everything on the allotment (weeds excepted) stopped growing.  Some blamed it on weird weather; some on poor soil. But because the crops were on a go-slow and the slugs weren’t, most of my seedlings (carefully nurtured since February) got eaten.

No doubt I put them in too early, when they were too small. And here’s another snag of allotmenteering: it holds a mirror to one’s personality, revealing things one doesn’t wish to see.  In my case, impatience.

Impatience was why I harvested my onions too early; why, rather than waiting until 90 per cent of the tops had toppled over then bending the remaining few, I bent them all at the first sign of a tilt.  (I do have some patience, by the way, but it gets used up on Dad and Mr MS.) When I finally dug the onions up, most were no bigger than shallots.

The harvesting procedure was hard work in itself. You don’t just pick the onions out of the ground and eat them. No, you bend them over, leave them for a fortnight, lift them on a sunny day, leave them again for a few days, move them to a ‘warm airy place’ for a few weeks, cover them with ‘thin cotton’ as sun protection and finally, if you have any energy left, plait them into a bunch.

Who knew?

That’s more care and interest than I lavish on most of the human beings in my life.

And I confess to a grudge about the onions. 50 tiny ones go into the ground in October. Nine months of watering, weeding and watching later, 40 slightly larger ones come out. As Dad would say, ‘Big deal.’

As for the radishes, when I pulled them, there were no bulbs at all, just dark pink question marks of roots so hard that a kitchen knife wouldn’t cut them.

It was the celeriac and the Christmas potatoes (both bulbless) all over again.

No, allotmenteering is not the idyll it’s cracked up to be. It’s a long, slow process of learning the hard way. It’s the thin, flaccid burger you get at McDonald’s as opposed to the fat juicy picture of a burger in McDonald’s window.

But there are compensations.

What keeps me going through the darkest moments is my peas.

In the finale of the film ‘Amelie’, a lonely old man gives the most succulent part of his roast chicken to a little girl. Message: food tastes best when you share it.

Rubbish. Food tastes best when gobbled down alone with the curtains drawn and in front of a TV gardening programme featuring Monty Don.

This is especially true of home grown peas in short supply. I slather them in butter then wolf them down in great forkfuls. It’s the ugly side of gardening.

‘Monty,’ I entreat the TV screen. ‘Why didn’t you warn me it would come to this?’

p.s. The Reluctant Gardener needs a holiday. Fortunately, she’s getting one: see you in a few weeks.

While gardeners are happy to emote about weeds – ‘those beautiful buttercups’ or ‘that bloody Himalayan Balsam’ – down at our allotment few voice their feelings about their own crops.

Perhaps it seems taboo, like saying you have a favourite child. Or maybe after thirty years of gardening successes and failures, one is drained of all emotion, an empty husk.

But Dad and I haven’t reached that stage yet. Our plot fair seethes with emotion, with plants we see as ‘little beauties’ or ‘bloody wash-outs’.

Dad’s feelings centre around the effort-to-edibility ratio.

Potatoes are his favourites. ‘Bung ‘em in the ground and dig em up a few months later.  A good pound of spuds from each plant.’ (The exceptions were the Christmas potatoes, which grew nice green tops but produced nothing edible underground.  They were a bloody washout.)

His other favourites are runner beans.  ‘Little beauties. You can eat the whole thing, y’see. Not like broad beans, where half your labour goes into the pods. You only get a handful of beans, then the phone rings while you’re cooking ‘em and you burn the damn things.’

Peas are dismissed on the same grounds.

But back to broad beans, which are in fact my favourite. I planted an overwintering variety in November and my cup hath brimmed with emotion ever since.

I was amazed and oddly touched to see green shoots in winter. I was proud when the sturdy little plants withstood snow and rabbits. I was enchanted at the delicate black and white flowers and thrilled to see glossy pods stand proud. And finally I was in ecstasy (well, almost) when we ate the first pickings. They took two minutes to cook and tasted divine in that special bittersweet broad bean way.

And that’s not all. Broad beans are moderate plants. There’s a steady reliability about them, and no sudden shocks.

Spinach, on the other hand, alarms with its immodest growth. Give it a bit of sun and rain and it’s away, like a rat up a drainpipe. I once had a front garden taken over by nasturtiums, and to this day can’t stomach the sight of them or their seeds. When things are rife, I go right off ‘em.

Mr MS shares this sensibility. He admits to not liking August because of ‘a burgeoning quality’ about the plantlife. ‘Giddying’ he calls it. ‘It feels as if something is about to burst.’

My feeling about this manifests again in silliness about weak seedlings.  Chuck ‘em out, says every gardening book and seed packet under the sun. But I can’t.

Affection for the vulnerable may explain my picking out that neurotic, crazed turnip-muncher, Dog MS. On the subject of picking men, I remain silent.

Perhaps it’s to do with not having children. And yet I doubt it. There are thousands of childless couples in the world and they aren’t all watering spindly Brussels Sprout seedlings out of a specially made bottle every morning.

As an antidote to all this emotionalism, the last word goes to Mr MS.

He’s asked what his favourite crop is.

‘Err… peas?’

‘There’s no right answer. Just say what you feel.’

Fear enters his eyes. But he rallies. ‘All plants are different, and I like them all, for what’s individual and special about them.’

For a man whose top ten films are constantly under revision, this surprises me.

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ he says.

On the subject of his attitude to women, he remains silent.

Mr Mandy Sutter, not understanding that I am the designated spiritual member of our household, went on a meditation retreat last week. It was something I’d been urging him to do, to combat stress.

So I can’t explain the strange resentment I felt when he finally went, and broke all contact with me for ten days. Not even a text.

To make matters worse, I found myself unable to meditate while he was away.

He got back and found me tense. ‘You’re stressed. You need to meditate.’

‘How can I, now that you’ve taken it over?’

‘I think you’ll find there are other people meditating besides me.’

It was a fair point.

The truth was, while he was away I had developed a new obssession set to rival meditation as the Answer to Everything. The composting toilet.

I’d spent a weekend in London with my friend David, visiting different allotments. Yes, that is my idea of a good time these days.

On one site in the East End, half the plots were overgrown and untenanted.  It was green and wild, and felt nothing like London. Someone explained: no water. But the allotmenteers were getting together to solve the problem and had installed huge tanks near the gates.

I was inspired.

‘YOU could have a plot here,’ I told David.

‘Hmm’, he said.

Browsing his bookshelves later, ‘The Humanure Handbook’ came to my attention.

David is fascinated by composting. In fact he finds it the most compelling aspect of allotmenteering. His patio is a-pong with buckets of soaking comfrey leaves, his plot a-ferment with nitrogen fixers, his mind awash with thoughts of pissing into straw bales.

Having said that, I may have outdone him with my fervour for the ideas outlined in ‘Humanure’.

When he said he was the only tenant on his allotments with a brick shed, I nearly combusted with excitement.

‘Clear out the tools and stuff, and you could have a composting toilet!’ I shouted. ‘All you need is a bucket and some sawdust. You’d be intimately involved in the life cycle. Your faeces would offend you no more. They’d be as gold dust.’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

I was forced to remember I am the one who finds faeces offensive, so much so that any dung-related incidents in our household send me off into a corner to retch while Mr MS sorts everything out.

I resorted to generalities. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s a fantastic idea. It’s recycling with knobs on.’

‘Maybe,’ said David. ‘But pissing into a straw bale will do me for now.’

I was trying, and failing, to get an easy-going man to do something of my choosing, not his. It was just like home. Which meant it was time to pack my bags and take my strange passion back up the M1.

Now that I’ve been back a week, and Mr MS has returned, I find myself still keen. And  wondering if anyone else at our allotments would be interested.

There’s a triangle of common land near the gate that would make a perfect site.

Before asking around, I’d better broach the subject with Dad. He likes recycling and DIY when it means making lamps out of old baked bean tins, or drilling a hole in his teaspoon so’s he can hang it by the kettle.

He may draw the line at shitting into a bucket.

But I have high hopes of Mr MS.

I’ll have to get him off that meditation cushion first, though.