My allotment story
A plotted history
So, why do I want an allotment? Well, who wouldn’t?
Mostly I have an allotment because being outside is so very good for my mental health. I don’t have a garden (well, not a private one – I live in a flat with a communal garden that is overlooked by a busy road) and I am not usually well enough to go traipsing around the countryside.
However, being a single mother with various physical health struggles, as well as the mental health ones, and being painfully averse to asking for help, this has made my time as an allotmenteer rather challenging.
Several years ago, one of the few actually supportive GPs I have seen over the years urged me to return to rheumatology to see if I could get some help with the debilitating health issues I had been experiencing since about a year after my seven year old child had died. I was nervous about going, since decades of mental ill health, chronic fatigue and other vague physical health issues had taught me that seeing a doctor was unlikely to bring help, and was likely to bring dismissal at best, and condemnation at worse.
But Dr L (she has since moved GP practices - how I miss her!) assured me that her rheumatology colleagues were lovely and that she really wanted to find me some help, after years of me trying to improve my health issues alone. I pointed out, with a laugh, that her experience, as a medical professional dealing with other medical professionals, was likely to be a little different to mine, a working class woman with a history of poor mental health, but that I was willing to try again.
When I moved to the flat I now live in, it was late in 2007. I was married and had two small children. I was training as a midwife and we thought the move would be temporary. With no private garden, I had to make plans for how I would get some outdoor time, both for myself and my children. Now, it turned out that the children couldn’t have cared less about the lack of garden, much preferring Lego and computer games, but, still, I managed to turf them outside on a regular basis to visit Southampton Common, which was on our doorstep. I used to joke that it was my garden, and that it was better than having your own garden because someone else did the mowing.
But I wanted my own piece of land to garden on, so I applied for an allotment. For my non-UK readers, allotments are an important part of British culture, although they are also found across Europe. I believe they are similar to community gardens in the US, although allotments in the UK are a group of individual strips of land, each cultivated by an individual or family (sometimes nowadays shared between a couple of friends). There is an excellent article on the history of the English allotment here. Anyway, I put my name down on the waiting list for the closest allotment. The waiting list was 10 years.
Eleven years later, in 2018, by which time it was just me and my younger child, I finally got the call telling me that I had reached the top of the list. Did I still want an allotment? Errrr, yes please! But my physical health had deteriorated dramatically after the death of my oldest child. Was I going to be able to manage an allotment on my own?
I summoned all my mental and emotional strength and went to the rheumatology appointment trying to convince myself the doctor would be sympathetic towards me. By this point I had decided that the joint pain was probably a somatic expression of my grief, and was trying to deal with it through long term therapy. Therapy I was paying for out of my disability benefits. I told the rheumatologist this. After examining me, she agreed with me that I didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis (a big relief). She then turned to me and said, ‘I think what you need is to stop spending your days watching talk shows on the television. Get yourself outside and stop seeing yourself as a victim.’
I held things together long enough to explain, in a shaky voice, that I almost never watched television, I did spend time outside, despite the exhaustion and pain I was experiencing, and that, although I had literally been the victim of several crimes (another time, folks!), I was working really bloody hard to overcome the issues I had faced, alone, with almost no help or support. I left. I waited until I had got as far away from the clinic as I could, before having a meltdown. Loudly.
When I arrived at my new allotment, the weeds were almost waist high. I had struggled to even walk from the city centre car park to the council offices to get the key. The allotment had no fruit trees or bushes, no strawberries or raspberries, nothing useful growing except one ancient rhubarb. There was heaps of rubbish. How on earth was I going to deal with this? On the plus side, the plot was flat. It had a shed, so I didn’t need to lug tools back and forth, and there was running water (no loos though) so that was all helpful.
At first I was afraid of spending any money on it. This is often a fear when your finances are precarious. Even when you can see the future savings, the worry of wasting money on a venture that might not work out holds many people back from trying new things. Thankfully I have a reasonably high risk tolerance (thanks ADHD), although it is paired with anxiety. So I will do things, like get an allotment, or buy an expensive Panasonic bread maker, but then have to deal with the anxiety of it afterwards. Seven years and many excellent loaves later, I am still always relieved when I open the lid of the bread maker and see a perfect loaf of bread.
Slowly I cleared the allotment. I hauled the car loads of rubbish to the tip. I worked from the back forwards, creating a soft fruit patch with currants and gooseberries and blueberries at the furthest end. By the following spring and summer I had cleared half the plot, and I had crammed that half with a haphazard assortment of vegetables, grown from seed on every window sill and clear surface in my flat. I had done it!
Then my health relapsed. The plot got overgrown. Once I was better, I returned and got to work again. Another relapse. The plot got overgrown again. This time a ‘Failure To Cultivate’ notification from the council landed on my doormat. So, in order to give myself the chance to get on top of things slowly and gradually, I put most of the plot under thick, black, damp-proof-course plastic.
What I had neither the time nor the emotional strength to explain to the rheumatologist was just how hard it has always been for me to admit to weakness or need. Far from seeing myself as a victim, I have had to learn to concede that I am not as strong or as independent as I would wish. After ending my marriage, I learned, through the peer support I got on the Women’s Aid Pattern Changing course, that before I could call myself a ‘survivor’ I needed to admit the painful truth that I had been a ‘victim’.
Admitting to weakness is scary for all of us. If we can pretend we are strong, a ‘survivor’, independent, we can believe that we have total power in our life, and can therefore achieve whatever we want and need to do. Of course, seeing ourselves as people with the agency to make changes in our lives is important (and, for some people, this is the more important lesson to learn – to take action, to try something new), but it isn’t the whole story. We are affected by outside events and circumstances. We get hit by disasters, we find that a decision we made in good faith was a poor one, we discover that structural oppressions exist. We can only do the best we can with what life gives us.
A turn around happened with the convergence of several factors. My sister offered me her old greenhouse, which would mean not spending time and energy each spring trying to juggle hundreds of seedlings in my tiny flat. My health had picked up a little. I had discovered Charles Dowding’s ‘No Dig’ method.
I tried again. My dad came down from Somerset and brought the greenhouse over from my sister’s. I slowly peeled back the black plastic, one bed at a time, revealing a mass of white bindweed roots, sitting on the surface of the soil. While my dad assembled the greenhouse on his days in Southampton, I cleared the bindweed roots, laid thick cardboard and then added layers of well-rotted manure and compost on top. While my dad placed panes of glass in the greenhouse, I created paths of grass and wood chip and planted up the beds with potatoes and beetroot and leaf celery. While my dad laid concrete slabs salvaged from my sister’s newly landscaped garden, I planted raspberry canes and strawberry plants. I found an old patio table and chairs going for £30 on Facebook Marketplace, and, discovering that my dad was in Southampton with his van that day (what luck!), went and collected them.
And, step-by-step, one bit at a time, slowly but surely, it was done. It looked amazing!
What I wish I could have told the rheumatologist is the following: ‘I have tried, all my life, so incredibly hard to do the best I could with what I had. Like a lot of neurodivergent people, I have tried much harder than average for worse results.
‘In recent years, since the death of my son and the end of my marriage, I have done everything I could think of to improve my health. I have seen doctors. I have tried changing my diet. I have taken supplements. I have been as active as I could, including having an allotment, despite the exhaustion and the crippling pain, which is like toothache in my hips and hands when it is bad. I have spent my savings on seeing a private psychiatrist and getting my ADHD diagnosed and treated. I have scraped together the money to go to a private menopause clinic and to get the HRT I need (because the joint pain started after my periods stopped when my son died). I have tried all the ‘Just One Thing’s that the late Michael Mosley suggested.
‘Despite struggling with lack of focus due to ADHD I try to learn new things. I have never in my life sat around watching television, feeling sorry for myself. I read, although I am a slow, sometimes struggling, reader. I knit, despite the pain in my fingers. I study, even though I have a poor short term memory. In my 40s I transferred the credits I had gained at the University of Southampton to the Open University, and finally finished my English degree (with the first I had been on track for. Again, despite the struggles with undiagnosed ADHD. And PTSD too by this point). I am slowly, and not at all surely, training as a proofreader through the Publishing Training Centre.
‘So, if you look at me, and see a mentally ill, overweight, working class woman with ‘social issues’, and you think you know who I am and what my life is like, you are wrong. You know nothing about me. I am not a victim and I am not lazy. I am trying incredibly hard, despite being dealt a bad hand. I didn’t come to see you because I want to be ill. I came because a GP saw me as a unique and valuable person, and saw how hard I was trying, and thought I deserved help and support. And she was right. I do.’
I wish I could say that the turn around I made on the allotment in 2023 was the end of the struggle and that now my allotment is a beautiful and productive plot. That my health is fully sorted out and that I am no longer hampered by my ADHD or depression or anxiety. Alas, no. The HRT is helping my joint pain and tiredness, but it hasn’t fixed all of my physical health issues. My mental health has been hugely improved with therapy and ADHD medication. But I am still struggling. This is what my allotment looks like this summer.
At the suggestion of the council’s Allotment Officer, I contacted a group called Community Roots, which is part of Southampton Voluntary Services. They have an allotment in the city where people can volunteer and socialise. They have recently set up a scheme where they travel to the allotments of people in the city who are struggling, to help them get their allotments back on track.
I have had so many negative experiences of asking for help that I was nervous about reaching out to this group. But two weeks ago a small group of volunteers came and spent several hours clearing a large portion of the allotment, and getting it back under its plastic. AND they are willing to come back! I like to think that the tea and coffee and chocolate biscuits, and my sincere gratitude, is encouraging them to return.
So, I am trying to learn to ask for help. I am letting my family help me more. I am figuring out ways David can help me from 4000 miles away (and we are figuring out how to close that distance). I will look for other ways to let people who can, support me. I want to get my life, as well as my allotment, back on track.
And so, I am going to ask my readers for support. Next week I will be transferring from ESA (Employment and Support Allowance – the inappropriately named out-of-work disability benefit in the UK) to Universal Credit. I wish I could say I wasn’t anxious about it, but I am. I also feel utterly ashamed of being in this position. I want to change it.
One potential positive about Universal Credit is that it will be easier (I am hoping) to work and earn money flexibly. I am not reliably well enough, mentally or physically, to get even a part-time job, but I can try to work when I can. To start with I am writing on Substack. Later I will try pitching some articles as a freelance writer. I can, slowly and maybe a little more surely, work through my proofreading training course, and get some work doing that further down the line.
While I am doing this though, I am going to need help. One important way you, as one of my readers, can help is by subscribing to this newsletter, if you haven’t already. I am so close to having 100 subscribers – please help me reach that target! Please like and share my articles on Substack, or via email, or by word of mouth. The more free subscribers I have, the better!
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And lastly, I think one thing I need most of all is mentorship. I need writers who are further ahead on this path to share advice, suggestions, contacts. So if you can help with that, I would be enormously grateful!
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Bye for now! Emma
Next week…
Emma, thank you so much for this piece. I felt so many different emotions reading it - anger & outrage at the arrogant, ignorant attitude of that dreadful-sounding rheumatologist, pleasure & gratitiude for the kindness of the allotment volunteers, your dad and original GP, profound care & admiration for you amid all that you've been through. And also delight at the photos - you've created something beautiful, tangible & real there with your own hands and heart even if it's not looking at it's 'best 'right now (inverted commas just cos aesthetic judgment really doesn't sound like a pressure you need to place on yourself). Good luck - and I'm glad you shared this space and all the experiences it embodies with us 😍
I think you’re amazing, and your allotment is darling even when (maybe especially when) it’s all wild. I see there’s an Allotment Police, but them notwithstanding I think you’ve done a marvelous job!