On the Shelf: Minding my Peas and Cucumbers

You might recall that one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to read one of my unread books every month this year, and to decide whether each one keeps its place on the shelf, or needs to be turned loose to find a new owner. In January I read The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek. February’s book was Minding my Peas and Cucumbers, by Kay Sexton – quirky tales of allotment life, it says on the cover. According to my notes it has been on the shelf, unread, since 2011.

You can tell by the little pink markers in the photo that there were plenty of pages I wanted to refer back to. I like to read uninterrupted, and make my notes later on. My first set of sticky notes were plastic, and when they (inevitably) got grubby and lost their stick, I had to throw them away. Now I have paper ones, which I can write on, if I want to, and which can be recycled when they can no longer be reused.

Anyway… the book.

For most of the book, Kay Sexton doesn’t have an allotment of her own. Living in London, she finds that allotments are rarer than hen’s teeth, and that you can live out your whole life on a waiting list. But Kay is enterprising, and offers out her services as a plot-sitter, taking care of people’s veggies when they’re on holiday, or working people’s allotments for longer periods of time when – for whatever reason – they need to take a break. It allows her to get her hands grubby, and grow her own grub, but means there’s no point investing in perennial crops or water butts, when she could be moving on at any moment. In the end, she gets onto the committee at an allotment site, and is given an unkempt plot to work back into shape, but she doesn’t have an official tenancy, so she calls it Not My Plot. Most of the ‘action’ takes place there.

K