This year, for the first time since we moved from Manchester I have sketched a plan for each of the plots. It's all there in red and blue biro sketched and scribbled on the reverse of discarded lesson plans and worksheets - greenhouses, trees, vines, and the bath that may (one day) turn into a miniature pond with frogs. It's my aid to rotation (please don't email me for advice, consult the experts for such pithy sayings as cabbages follow beans).
To plan well as a gardener you need to discard sentiment. The strawberries in this picture have already been removed to the brown bins, or otherwise 're-homed'. Today I have done the same with a bed of self-seeded beet spinach. A couple of years ago I would have left it alone, to regenerate after the winter depredations of pigeons. But now deeply tap rooted as it was, it is gone.
Planning isn't hard when you love what you are doing, when you have a public library with helpful reference books to hand, and most of all when you have had nearly six years in the allotment community battling, manuring and enriching Essex clay.
Planning on paper makes you visualise the plot, doodle little dots for daffodils, shade in areas of sun and shade, review the whole seasonal schematised layout. Planning makes you do what you promised, bring unused parts under cultivation, enlarge beds, got out and buy seed potatoes to chit and garlic bulbs to plant.
Christians like to quote Jeremiah 29:11 on inspirational cards to each other when going through hard times. Plans could be nebulous. So often our plans stay in the mind's eye. But if you write them down and then put them into action you know that they work. God writes plans down and they are good plans. Here's the quote given to the prophet who bought a field, the man whom God sent to uproot and to plant. "For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."
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