AUDIT
Allotment Bench Interview:
Trellis Patron, Professor Sir John Curtice
We caught up with Professor Curtice on Sunday afternoon via video link. He kindly rushed home early from his allotment in Glasgow’s West End to answer our questions. I’m pleased to report there was a sumptuous vase of freshly picked home-grown peonies just over his right shoulder on view in the video call. With a full time workload, albeit at home rather than on campus, lockdown life has not opened up a glut of gardening hours. But without the frequent trips to London that were a feature of working life before Covid19, there’s now a little more time to dedicate to the plot.
What is your….
Favourite summer season plant? It’s got to be the peony. My wife asked for some as a birthday present four or five years ago. Being early April, it was about the right time of year to shove them in. There are a few different varieties, planted in an area of ground that wasn’t being used productively. They do have a short season but they’re easy to grow, they survive the frosts and they are probably about the only thing on our plot that might just generate a bit of fellow allotmenteer envy. If you wanted to help someone understand the wonder of nature, you could do worse than get them to look at a peony – they’re such intricate flowers. Every weekend, or at least every other week from the daffodils in mid-March through to Michalemas daisies in September, we try to have some flowers to bring home from the allotment to grace a bit of the flat and these peonies have pride of place.
Best summer season gardening tip? Perhaps it’s unusual, but the honest truth is, my tip for a successful summer season is not to give up gardening in October. What you get in summer is essentially a product of what you do in the autumn (especially) and in winter. For instance, if you prune well in winter you get a better crop in summer. We have to remember that gardening is an all year-round activity – you can’t ignore it for half the year. If you’re on top of the weeding and other jobs in March, you’re far more likely to have a successful summer. Of course if you only have access to a garden for a few months in summer, then you can grow things that give you a quick reward, like radishes, maybe grown in pots with a succession of other crops that don’t need too much maintenance. Even standing in a garden looking at the dim light when it’s 2 degrees at 3pm on a January afternoon is good for you. The things you do in winter have a much longer-term impact, a lasting reward, whereas weeding done in summer quickly needs doing again.
Favourite area of your allotment in summer? We’re lucky enough to have a full plot though it’s still not a large space. A fair chunk of it is given over to summer fruit: a lot we inherited, raspberry canes, gooseberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants and we added some strawberries. It’s essentially a two-season allotment – summer fruit and winter veg. The joy of eating summer fruit from the plot is really hard to beat. I’ve just brought some gooseberries home with me and I’m about to make a gooseberry cake, which my wife loves. One of the things I like to eat in the mornings is croissant with jam: I don’t quite keep myself in jam all year round, but I get very close. The jam making along with the picking and growing can get quite frenetic of course…
Tell us about your favourite time of day at the allotment? We used to go on weekend afternoons, Now we’re doing the weekly shop on a Friday, we can go to allotment plot on Saturday morning. That’s the one thing that has changed in the wake of lockdown. Mornings are nice and quiet and I find I’m less tired, I get more done. It’s not so hot either. I’ve discovered the glories of morning at the allotment. We rarely go in the evenings, although it’s often a nice time to go. Evenings in April have a particular magical quality – the first point in the year when you can have some evening time in the garden.
What’s your least favourite task on the allotment? That’s easy. We’re all responsible for keeping the weeds down on the paths surrounding our plot. The path we care for is full of very tough grass. Pre lock down, at least, I tended to do this a couple of times a year with a hired strimmer. As that’s no longer possible, I am doing the job with my father’s old grass clippers. I’ve never got around to the back breaking work of digging the weeds out. So, it’s an area of ground that needs taken care of. It doesn’t produce any harvest or profit us but requires work all the same.
Who was your gardening mentor? It has to be my father. Before we got this allotment, we went to an open day and put our names down. You usually have to wait a while but when we did get our plot, I had some idea of what to do, although I read a few books too along the way. My parents had an enormous back garden in Cornwall, probably the size of 8 or 9 allotment plots. I spent summer out there among the fruit. There were redcurrants, white currants, blackcurrants, rhubarb, potatoes, apple trees. Like most children, I was mostly interested in playing, but I was given my own little plot. And I was dragooned into picking the fruit at harvest time, of course. In turn, my daughter wasn’t interested in the allotment when we first had it, but now she’s introducing her children to growing things in pots. These things are carried on through the generations by osmosis if not by direct education.