Tidying up the plot

After a walk across the site, we realise we must prove ourselves. Most of the other lottie holders are in their 50s and 60s and very old-school. Most take great pride in having hammered together sheds made out of skip-raid stuff and sellotape but their beds are tidily boundaried. The asparagus stands to attention, the leeks ramrod straight, all raspberry canes are exceptionally well behaved. Red cabbage heads wait politely in line. Even the CD birdscarers dangling in the wind look polished. We're a bit more cheered by our immediate neighbour, an older Portuguese guy, who lives in a terrace round the corner from the site, where he grows more greens in his front garden facing the town's East-West axis and often fries whole fish on a little portable barbecue of an evening (which he's probably line-caught himself). His plot looks organised but not anally so. We also discover further down our path, which in any case is quite far in and off the main thoroughfare, that there are more scruffy plots like ours.

We start by dragging up all the rubbish out of the ground and piling it up near the front boundary. There is a surprising amount of scrap metal and the two piles are massive. There is also a lot of broken glass and plastic rubbish and a rusty chest freezer with the lid missing. God knows what this was used for. Getting rid of it will cost us dear.

The piles of rubbish have sent a reassuring signal to the Allotment Secretary. We're serious about this. When we turn up again, the metal in the piles has disappeared. We have no idea who it was but are greatly relieved. We pack the rest into sturdy bags and skip it. The chest freezer will have to wait.

I get very neurotic about the large compost heap when I discover gnarly bits of half-molten plastic in it. There are several old drums on the plot, one of which contained ashes and similar plastic blobs. Our predecessor has evidently burnt anything and everything. I freak out about Seveso-style dioxin poisoning and refuse to spread the compost over the newly-dug beds. I spend hours on the internet trying to find out how dangerous the stuff is. The results are inconclusive. Breathing in burning plastic is worst, it's not great in the soil, a soil test might help. How do I get a soil test? My inertia kicks in – I'll just leave it where it is, on the corner compost heap. We're only giving this a year's trial to see whether we can hack it. If we want to continue, we need to deal with the compost heap.

Another problem associated with the compost heap is old carpet. Somebody has been trying to compost old plastic-fibre carpet with plastic backing, or maybe used the carpet to cover the compost and then forgot to take it away again. There's now a massive layer of disintegrating rug backing with plastic-fibre loops in red and blue dropping through the mesh. Thousands of them. This stuff doesn't compost, it just degrades into smaller and smaller pieces. I despair at what some people come up with. Then I look across to another neighbour, an old guy who has been here for over 40 years he said. He is currently building a new greenhouse out of skipped windows. Love the recycling ethos but, hey, those old glass windowpanes? Well, he just breaks them up, digs a hole in his plot, throws the glass in and covers it up! Heaven help the poor sod who takes over that plot one day and sticks his hand in the ground during weeding.