Aparently we were not making progress on our plot.
Re: Plot 30 Oliver Road
7.5.10
Dear Lyndsay,
We inspected on Wednesday 5.5.10. As you can see from the photograph six months from accepting the tenancy nothing has been achieved.
Obviously circumstances have not allowed you to work an allotment at it remains in an unacceptable state. The time has come for me to relet the plot. Please collect any belongings that you may have left there and come into the Trading Shed on Sunday morning when we will return your deposit for your key.
I am sorry that it has not worked out for you.
Thank you for your co-operation in this matter.
When I received this email I had a little upset tantrum as a I told ralph. I felt totally defeated. I'm not very good at being told off for things, mostly because I do try to think about how I conduct myself and I don't really do things that are not correct. That's how I try to be. So when someone says you have not done this right it's a mixture of confusion and dismay shortly followed by anger that someone could be wrong but be blaming me for the wrong issue. Luckily on this occasion the anger didn't take too long to take over from the dismay. The problem lies in that I also have a tendency to be beaten by the fact that once someone else thinks they have put me right, pointed me in the correct direction or informed me on how things should be done, I have a belligerent defiance of following that course of action.
So when the anger set in and I had realised that they were wrong, we had made all the progress we had planned to and had a path ahead to forge along, I did not ever want to go the the plot again as why should they think I was there on their direction? It's that same as when my mum reminds me it's my dad's birthday when I had remembered already and had already planned to send a card.
It's ok now, I grappled with my ....... (I'm not sure what the word is, I think it's a bit like pride but that's not quite right) and went on down as we had planned. I think it now looks more like how they would hope. There is some kind of obvious patch of mud for growing stuff in.
I should have expected a less than smooth ride with the allotment but I had really thought that the secretary was a sensible lady. We have a plan for the plot that is a little different from the accepted norm but not so far from some of the plots. I said before that I wanted to implement a smaller version of my helpful hedge on part of the plot, to grow a kind of food meadow hand in hand with our mini orchard wood of apple trees and fruit bushes. Mostly wild plants or weeds. I like the grass that grows up tall, I like the dandelions and forget-me-nots.I want to go to a space that is lush and green and a bit like our patch of woodland edge or glade, that we can happen to grow some other stuff that gives us food. But somewhere that is lovely to go to, like a trip to our very own botanical garden. And this starts straight away, not in 4 years when we have finally suppressed everything that grows here on it's own accord. No black plastic for us, bad.
I was mostly annoyed at the statement that nothing had been achieved. This was just not true as lots had been done. I think what they meant was that not enough progress had been made according to some standard that had been imagined. There are no rules to determine this, you are meant to use the plot to grow things and not plant huge trees. How dare they?
We sent a nice big email reply detailing what we had been doing and saying how shocked we were to receive notice without any discussion.
We got a reply saying that we were let off and they will check again next month. It also had a lot of well meaning advice and anecdotes about how much could be achieved and how a lot of people are not able to go super often but manage to make really good progress. And how we could look at some nice photos of how people have overcome difficult plots, it was so very patronising. I'm definitely no expert and this is the first allotment I've had however I do know a bit about growing and I'm not a novice. I welcome advice but not when people dish it out based on their assumptions of your knowledge. I am young, I don't wear scraggy gardening clothes, our plot has weeds on.
I am a passionate gardener and a park ranger. I would say that my understanding of the earth and the way that plants grow is a lot more developed than many of the plot holders, particularly those that strip their patch bare and plant rows of onions and potatoes and beans every single year and spend all their time eradicating all other signs of life. Miserable.
Rar, rar, rar.
So here are some of our lovely vegetable plants that we have be growing at home until they are big enough to go to the plot, possibly this week. You can't say that we hadn't been planning to grow anything.
(Personally I think that the first photo looks great, admittedly it looks a lot more over grown in the picture than it does in real life,you can see any of the areas we've cleared, the permanent bed we've put in or the junk that is no longer on the plot because we hauled it up to the skip. It seems to me someone took a photo and then looked at the photo and not the reality.)
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