My maternal grandfather "Dido" was a first generation immigrant from the Carpathian mountains. Even as he worked to support his wife and fourteen kids in a mill in South Jersey, he had a small plot of land a mile or two away from the house where he grew vegetables. My Uncle Rich, who apparently never cared for the lot when he was younger, ended up taking it over as a place of relaxation (he was the local chief of police in town) and some of my earliest childhood memories are of seeing him in his straw hat with classical music blaring out of a tinny secondhand radio as he worked happily amid tomato plants and such.
I can't say this exactly trickled down to me. We had a big yard growing up and I wasn't always enamored of helping to take care of it. Sometimes when I was naughty my punishment was pulling weeds, which was akin to drilling out my own teeth without anesthesia as far as I was concerned. And my Mom will also be happy to tell anyone who asks about the dreaded "peony trip" of infamy. And yet, I do remember Dad gleefully checking on our tomato plants during summers, and some sense of pleasure when Mom and I spread mulch over the flower beds and worked the soil carefully to put new bushes in, and the sense of color and health in looking over a well-tended garden with healthy new trees and flowers were coming in.
In England, gardening is HUGE. And in Europe more generally, allotments are very popular. These are public lands given to a people's cooperative of sorts that divvy up the property into individual plots and rents them for cheap to people so they have land to grow plants and vegetables. Months ago, almost on a whim, I put me, M, and my best mate and his wife on a waiting list, and we were just notified that there's a spot for us. We wandered down today to take a look; it's about a four minute walk from our flat. Apparently they are trying to clear new sections out, so they are giving us a half plot at a minimal cost in hope that we will put in the initial effort to get it ready for proper gardening.
We chose the half section which had less brush and weeds to clear away, which happened to be the side that should get the most southern light as well. If you can see the sort of grassy footpath to the left in this, that's the line dividing the "half-plots," over to the fence and greenhouses further to the right. Our section is about eight feet wide, but goes back maybe 300 feet or more. It gets more overgrown the further back you go, but the local council is going to take down some of the bigger trees and we can make it garden-worthy in stages after we burn out some of the back brush in the fall. There's also a tiny shed in the back that we can store tools and stuff in, don't think it shows up in the pics.
Not sure how soon it will pay dividends, we might concentrate on getting it incubating and healthy over this summer, fall, and winter in preparation for actual growing next year.
Moreover, I have no idea how in the hell I'm going to do any of this, nor when.
Somehow, for someone who hated weeds, to do all this feels extremely strange and yet very comforting at the same time. I hope, and suspect, Dido would understand and approve. I think Uncle Rich definitely would. Vjecnaja pamjat
