Just before the panic set in, we walked up the high street to our allotment, the children weaving behind and around us on their bicycles. The weather was starting to break — spring sunshine; the air clear and chilly, but getting warmer. We unlocked the heavy padlock on the main gates and walked down to our plot, for the first time in months. The grass between the beds was lank, damp and winter-shaggy: in need of a haircut. The standpipes were still off. And in the front bed, where we had planted a row of bulbs just before we abandoned the allotment to overwinter at the end of last year, yellow daffodils had pushed through, and behind them the foliage of tulips, yet to flower. Now, as we settle into lockdown, the allotment remains blessedly untouched. After a fleeting period of uncertainty when orders to stay at home first landed, the UK government clarified that allotment-holders would still be allowed to go to their plots — though whether such visits fell under the exercise exemption or errands for provisions was ambiguous. At the time of writing, that has held — and at least one of us is here for an hour or two most days. The atmosphere is unchanged. Though, of course, we wear gloves when we unlock the gates.
The allotment is where, in summer, we grill sausages on a rusty little barbecue and eat early evening meals with warm ketchup off plastic plates at a broken-legged table. This is where we fill bags with gluts of figs, with bruised and sticky plums; where the kids gorge on raspberries from the cane and truffle under low foliage for strawberries; where last year’s pumpkins ripened and swelled before Halloween; where, one year in two, the tomatoes run riot and where my sweetcorn is routinely slightly disappointing. It is our ramshackle happy place — a place of refuge. That refuge may be more than figurative this year. As I stood there surveying the site in its winter’s neglect, I felt just a little blessed to have it. As I say, this was just before the panic set in — that startlingly brief moment between coronavirus being a routine news item and the understanding that it had the makings of a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. But the vibe was there. The first anxious “What if?” was tickling in the back of the mind. Purple-sprouting broccoli © Lucy Ranson for the FT 'The allotment remains blessedly untouched' © Lucy Ranson for the FT Grass had crept over the edges of most of the beds, and dandelions and other weeds constellated the rough ground. But the broccoli — a hardy plant that pushes up through the winter and gives its crop just as spring begins — had started to do its thing. We cut as much of it as we reckoned we could reasonably cook in the next week or so, leaving plenty to later. Then, with a trowel in the damp earth, I dug and plucked and shook clods off tussocks and lobbed them into the weed bag. I turned over the soil and then pushed broad beans down an inch or two into it in rows. Actually, two inches deep, and nine inches apart, to be precise: I googled the Royal Horticultural Society website, which told me how. We are hobby gardeners, and we learn from our mistakes, of which we make many. Recommended FTWeekend Live Q&A How can I grow my own fruit and vegetables?
Now, the allotment could come to be more than just a hobby' Even in ordinary times, there is more than just anecdotal evidence that gardening helps mental health. Studies suggest it reduces anxiety, alleviates depression and improves fitness. If we are to spend three, four, even six months confined to the house doing nothing but schooling our three kids and watching Netflix, regular trips to the allotment could be a psychic lifesaver. But the bug — the fear of the bug — is a worm in this apple too. A tiny sliver of my thought, looking at the abundance of broccoli, thinking of potatoes ripening in the ground, imagining the glorious glut of broad beans a few weeks from now, is of the prospect of food shortages.
There is something febrile about the way we are shopping and hoarding. Supermarkets are rationing goods. The fortunate bitch about the difficulties of logging on to the Ocado website. The less fortunate, dependent on food banks, do not always know where their next meal will come from. Will I soon — if things get really hinky — be grateful to know I can feed my family for a few days with produce grown here? And then, catastrophising again, I wonder if that thought will not be the first to occur to others, if I will not come here in a crisis to find a mob has already swarmed in and picked everything bare. Am I going to end up camping out in the shed with a pitchfork? That is mad thinking, but mad thinking now flits — just flits — across usually sane minds. 'Will I soon — if things get really hinky — be grateful to know I can feed my family for a few days with produce grown here?' And when I look around at my friends and neighbours in the allotment, I see that most of them are nearing 70 or older. One of the pleasures of this plot has been that it brings us into contact with people of a different generation and background from our middle-aged, media-class, children-having peers. At least as much as I google the RHS, I ask advice from Theresa and Paul on the next-door plots, from Richard on the one opposite. When do I plant this? Where should I prune this? What on earth is this stuff? How come your leeks are working and mine are dead? The cheery exchanges, the compliments on a bumper crop, the donation of a surplus or of a handful of pondweed to help seed a recently drained pond, or a few gratefully received seedlings — these are part of the life of the allotment.
'I still remember the slight glow I felt, politics set aside, when Jeremy Corbyn jogged past and complimented my beetroot' Sam Leith: ‘This is a place where — since your plot is your sovereign territory, and it is rigid etiquette to ask permission to step on to anyone else’s — social distancing is automatic’ Will this continue as a place of refuge and recuperation? Will it, as now, offer older people community and purpose? We know that loneliness can kill as surely as a viral infection, so this is not a trivial matter. If they are confined at home, will their orderly beds grow unharvested through summer, ripen and rot? For now, there are no marauding mobs of broccoli thieves to be seen off with pitchforks; no ominously overgrown plots to mark and mourn. There are only dandelions to dig by their deep roots, neighbourly salutations to exchange, beans to be pushed into the soil, and the annual promise of renewal — the tulips, yet to come into flower.
Sam Leith writes the FT’s “Art of Persuasion” column and is literary editor of the Spectator
