An allotment is off the retirement planning list

 For most of my life there has been something of a garden.  I’m not saying that it has always been me tending it and my current garden which, in one guise or another, I have been in constant charge of since 1989, thrives on neglect.  ‘Thrive’ might not be the word but ‘neglect’ certainly is.

Every year it gets away from me and generally I start the gardening year is trying to claw something back from the state it was left in the year before.  My preference is for fruit and vegetables so they do get priority, granted the fruit looks after itself for the most part.  That said, they too will get away from me at some point in the year.   

This does not happen to my next door neighbour whose sole focus is on his vegetables and fruit (in that order of volume).  He is a very traditional vegetable gardener.  Me, less so.  I can’t grow anything approaching the amount of main crop potatoes, carrots and onions we eat.  Marrows I can live without - I get quite enough outsize courgettes most years.  Most brassicas take up too much room and need netting from the fat pigeons/butterflies.  Given where I live they can also be purchased for very little from local farm gate stalls much as main crop potatoes, carrots and onions can.  In short traditional victory garden style vegetable growing just does not work for me on an effort/reward basis. 

For the last few years I was planning an allotment when I retired.  I had sourced possibilities.   I have no idea how I would have sorted water at the most obvious.  It  looked to me as though a shed/greenhouse with waterbutts was essential (fair enough).  Getting a friendly farmer to take a very large full waterbutt down there ever so often with an obliging tractor/forklift was preferable thought not so straightforward.  Water aside, the traditional stuff more might have been a more viable option with an allotment.  Suffice to say I hadn’t got round to considering the storing of this bounty. 

Realisation has, however, dawned.  If I can’t mange my own garden now it will be more than enough to deal with in retirement, even assuming the same level of fitness whenever I actually do retire.   Getting to the other end of the village, a good two miles away is not going to be appealing when there is something, anything, that needs doing a few steps from either main door of the house and at any given time there are going to be plenty of somethings.

A standard allotment is 250 square metres.  I have 8 main beds of 3.6m x 1.2m ie a total of 34.56 square meters of growing plus Jerusalem and globe artichokes gone feral at the end of the garden and side beds of horse radish, rhubarb, currant bushes, gooseberry bushes, apple, plum, damson and pear trees.   There are also a few, well quite a few, pots with blue berries, sorrel, salad leaves and herbs amongst other things and there is the greenhouse primarily for tomatoes, chillis and peppers 

I get that allotments have paths, sheds, compost heaps, greenhouses, waterbutts etc alongside fruit and veg beds but if I can’t cope with what little I have now then an additional 250 square meters, two miles or so down the road is definitely setting myself up to fail.

…..and then there is the rest of the stuff on the retirement list I plan to do.