Mandy Sutter, Writer

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.

It’s official: today is the first day of autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats called it in Sept 1819.

I thought that owning an allotment would make me immune from vegetable gifts.

I have had to think again.

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.

It’s amazing what a fortnight away can do. When I visited the allotment this morning, it looked like the allotment of a Proper Gardener.