Rosey's allotment - what a mess!

When Rosey tootled off to Africa to be a good person for six months, she gave me the dubious honour of becoming the Custodian of Pinkerton Acres, her allotment! I have to admit that I hadn’t been near the place since November and as everything looked very asleep I decided to leave it for a while. Rosey is due back next month so I thought I’d better take a look and see if anything needed doing. When I got there I couldn’t believe my eyes! In the words Rosey would use ‘oh....my...God’! If I was to say it had become overgrown it would be an understatement! While the spring flowers in peoples gardens have put off making an appearance until quite recently Rosey’s little bit of Eastbourne has been growing at an alarming rate!


The winter was such a harsh one that you would have thought than anything vaguely alive in November would have had the life frozen out of it by now. But obviously not. Have you read the book The Day of the Trifids? I’m sure it was a scene similar to the one that greeted me that gave John Wyndham the idea for his very scary novel! Now I’m not a great fan of sprouts at the best of times, but when they grow on massive stems taller than me and resemble green footballs they are even less appealing! As for the leeks, they looked like tree trunks! And the ground below, you couldn't see it for weeds and brambles.


Did I tell you Rosey planted a gooseberry bush? As you know she loves children which is why she is so good working with them. She’s always had this fear that she’ll grow into old age having never got round to having kids of her own. The thought of marriage doesn’t appeal to her and she doesn’t approve of what she calls ‘artificial celebration’ which she says should only be used on cows. Well, she always maintains that her parents found her under a gooseberry bush and so she thought she’d grow one of her own. We’d like to think that she’s only joking, but she always has a very serious look on her face when she mentions it. One of our friends laughed at her once and she told him that he was born under a Gastrolobium bush then strutted off to the loo. Well that wiped the smile off his face. Actually it wiped the smiles from all of our faces because we had no idea what this particular botanical object was. And in case you don’t know either I later found out that it’s a highly poisonous Australian charmer which covers itself with attractive flowers but has a habit of killing off livestock. Anyway, the gooseberry bush seems to be ok but it doesn’t appear to have produced a small person just yet!


So what I’ve done is to get together an allotment task force which will assemble on mass at the weekend armed with spades, machetes and flamethrowers in an attempt to make some sense of this jungle! I’ll let you know how we get on.