A singular source of joy

A love letter to plot 25Nb

Foxgloves forever.

Ten months ago, I signed some paperwork and paid a £30.82 annual fee, making me the proud and slightly terrified steward of a 50 square meter plot of land. About one mile from where I live, it’s located at one of Leeds City Council’s allotment sites, which is part of the UK-wide allotment system.

Allotments have a long history in Britain, dating back as far as the Saxons, as a way for poor, non-land owning folks to have somewhere to grow food. Today, they remain as a quirky and undeniably lovely part of UK culture, even though Brits still somehow find reasons to complain about them.

I promised myself that I would wait a full 12 months before writing a post like this. I needed to be cautious, humble, and sober-minded. I needed to let the vagaries of the growing season kick my ass a little bit. But you know what? For once, I’m going to tell cool-headed sobriety to fuck off. Because in the last ten months, this project has served as a singular source of joy in my life.

If you’re not a gardener, I know that it’s not particularly interesting to read another person tell you how exciting it is to eat a sun-ripened tomato. So I’m not writing this to try and convince you to garden yourself, but rather, to invite you to think about how you might find a space like this in your own life.

Much of the work of living a meaningful life right now — and how I view my work as a writer — is reminding myself and others how to be human. I mean that in the most fundamental meaning of that term: the beauty, the heartbreak, the friction, and limitations of it. All around me, with each passing week, I see people sleepwalking away from that, happy to be carried along with the tide of investment-backed, AI-assisted living. A new normal defined by pointless convenience, aggressively mediocre entertainment, pathological avoidance, and mindless accumulation. As they drift along, these people seem unaware of what they are losing in the process.

I think our complacency and inertia in this moment — our tendency to acquiesce to the norms of a broken economy and society because it just feels easier — is one of the biggest challenges we face. To fight against this in our own lives, I think we need to do more than just think, read, and post our way out of it.

We need to feel in our bodies that an alternative exists, even in small pockets of our lives. To seek out places and experiences that are governed by the value systems that allow all living things (including us) to thrive. To remind our nervous systems what it feels like to spend time in them. It’s not an intellectual experience, but a connected, embodied one. Because of that, AI can’t touch it.

And what’s been wonderful about the allotment, is the ease with which it’s allowed me to do that. It doesn’t feel like homework, or self improvement, or any great effort — it feels like joy. And it brings a sense of confidence and steadfastness that seeps into other areas of my life, including my writing. One that reminds me why I’m here, why it’s worth it to swim against the tide, and to help others see the value in doing the same.

So as summer approaches on Plot 25Nb, I’ve written a list of qualities I’ve noticed about this allotment project. The way it invites me to think, to act, and to feel, even if only inside its gates. My hope is that you might be able to find a space like that, too.

Shout out to my husband for making me these fancy sign posts.

Not a task, but a relationship

I would describe my gardening know-how ten months ago as firmly still in the beginner category. Advanced beginner, if I’m being generous. I’d volunteered in a community garden for a couple years, starting during Covid lockdowns, and had a modest container garden at home, but it really was nothing impressive or special.

More so than experience, what I needed to take this on was good old fashioned chutzpah. I needed to override the intimidation of starting a new big project I didn’t know much about. I needed to give myself permission to not be good at something right away. To experiment, to make mistakes, and to literally dig in to what is a natural antidepressant: the soil beneath me.

At the beginning, when I was feeling daunted by the task, my friend Philippa told me not to think of this little plot of land as a responsibility I was taking on, but rather, a relationship I was entering into. To allow it to shape me as much as I shaped it. She was exactly right, and I’m proud of myself for finding the energy and boldness to start. Because once I did, the energy seemed to keep regenerating itself.

(This

Lia Leendertz

book has been endlessly helpful and a reliable companion on the plot.)

Unscripted interactions

If you are imagining the people on the allotment as a collection of crunchy millennials who shop at Whole Foods and create Ballerina Farm-style content for Reels, it’s not like that at all. In fact, allotments in the UK are notorious for being Old Boys Clubs, frequented by the types of dudes who might typically regard a millennial woman with an American accent with grave suspicion.

Often, these old school gardeners insist on the primacy of using pesticides and slug pellets, which are frowned upon by younger gardeners (including me). They watch newbies with the assumption that it’s only a matter of time before they will give up.

Despite this generational and philosophical mismatch, spending time on the allotment has still been a new and surprising source not of friends, but people in my life. Older people, mostly, but also people from places as far-flung as Peru and Zimbabwe, as well as lots of people who have lived in the place I now call home for their entire lives.

There’s also lots of low level gossip, which I love being party to. Sometimes Ben, the more cantankerous of my two retirement-age plot neighbors, leaves me notes scrawled on the back of envelopes about what I’m doing wrong. (I’ve been told people haven’t persisted on my plot in the past due to this kind of behavior).

Instead of reacting to this, I’ve accepted that just like me, Ben is here on the plot working through some stuff. When it gets to be too much, I put up a polite boundary in the most British way possible — “Really must be getting to it now, Ben!” — put my Airpods in, and get to work. But mostly, I ask him questions, seek his advice on this or that, and relish the moment when I get to break the news that the sweetpea seeds he insisted I sowed too early have actually germinated just fine.

The point is, the garden isn’t just a place to grow things, but to practice the art of unscripted interactions and relationships with people with whom you have nothing else in common but the land where you live. It’s the kind of place where the entire assignment is that you keep coming back.

Fifty square meters of zen.

Bending time

If I had to average the amount of time I’ve spent at the allotment each week over the last ten months, I’d say it’s no more than 90 minutes. There was a large upfront time investment clearing the plot when I first got it, and during the winter, when everything was dormant, there were weeks where I didn’t go at all.

Now, most of my visits are not hours-long work sessions, but quick visits of about 25 minutes. A bit of watering, adding to the compost pile, one planting task, pulling some weeds. It’s in and out, a few times a week.

Like every modern human alive, I seem to have too little time and too many responsibilities. So it’s been somewhat mysterious to me why this time commitment has not resulted in more stress in my overloaded life. Quite the opposite. The best reasoning I can come up with is that the time I spend there is additive — it offers me something in return.

If I go to the allotment for an hour, I then don’t have to go book an expensive exercise class, or find time for myself, or go for a walk, or take a break from a screen outside, or do some nervous system-regulating activity — because I’ve literally just done all of those things. As we progress into the growing season, I don’t even have to go to the grocery store to get greens for dinner, because I’ve just taken care of that, too. When I take my son with me for short visits, I’ve even done some exemplary parenting — we’re outdoors, with no screens, and learning about plants!

It strikes me that this is how human beings used to live by default. Their daily actions, responsibilities, and labor did not work in opposition to their wellbeing, but were in fact supportive of it. Which is perhaps why time seems to bend when I’m there, in a pleasurable and noticeable way. It’s doesn’t feel like another choking obligation I have to white-knuckle my way through, but rather a curious and welcome break from the relentless pace of life.

Interrupting capitalism’s logic

I did some crude math, and found that in the last ten months, I’ve spent about £200 on tools, seeds, plants, and other random garden ephemera like nets and organic pest control. Otherwise, I’ve used or repurposed what I already had, scavenged things from the free pile, and been given stuff by others. To be frank, I could have spent a lot less, but when I think of all the other ways I could have spent £200 pursuing some dubious goal of youth, beauty, or wellness, I’m okay with it.

Especially because I can feel the logic of the garden rewiring my brain a bit. It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine then end of world than the end of the capitalism, but in the garden, that cynical take just doesn’t land. This entire system operates with a circular intelligence that if the tech bros found out about, they’d probably try to get VC funding to convince us they invented it themselves.

I think a lot about how, in theory, I could grow the entirety of next year’s garden from the “waste” of this one: By saving seeds at the end of the growing season, propagating existing plants or taking cuttings from neighbors, making plant protection and supports out of discarded or broken objects, and of course composting the waste from this year.

I grew this kale.

In a favorite essay of mine, the writer

Ross Gay

calls this “jenkiness,” a quality of thrifty creation which allotment sites are known for:

“Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators’ swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one’s relationship to commerce, perhaps,” Gay writes. “The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.”

A few days ago I planted out the pumpkin plants I grew from seeds I saved from year’s Jack O’Lanterns. To feed the seedlings, I used the compost that resulted from hundreds of ordinary days of coffee grounds, onion skins, broccoli stalks, and banana peels. I told my son the small plants in the ground are going to turn into pumpkins soon, and he asked me if it was Halloween yet.

That simple act was so entirely antithetical to the entire culture and economy I live in. It is cyclical, regenerative, elegant, and sustainable. It makes so much sense, and participating in it heals some part of me that feels perpetually upset about the state of the world.

Why? Because when I’m at the allotment, crouched down on the soil, using my hands and letting the sun beat down on my soon-to-be-even-more-wrinkled face, I realize that this world really does still exists. Right here, underneath my feet, in between my fingers. I am part of it, too. All I have to do is spend time here to remember how it works.

Don’t bring your to do list

In my professional and home life, I am a pretty regimented person. I like lists, organization, and order. However, at the allotment, I’ve noticed that I am not like this. And crucially, I don’t have to make any effort not to be. My tool storage box is a mess, and I just can’t seem to find the energy to care about it.

Things are never done here. When you finish dealing with the weeds, your reward is more weeds. The compost pile is in a perpetual state of needing to be added and subtracted from. There is no inbox zero. The unending cycle is the entire point.

And it’s all un-optimizable. The plants don’t care about my timing. Progress happens non-linearly, seedlings seem to be languishing and then suddenly, they are ready, and shoot upwards. Some things will work, some things will die or be eaten or never germinate at all. It’s really not up to me.

Even though I keep a note on my phone of what I need or want to do each month, I usually end up ignoring it. Because at the allotment things just kind of … tell me when they need to be done. If that sounds mystical, that’s because it is. There’s an emergent creativity and welcome lack of urgency that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in my life. It comes as a huge relief.

Be a good neighbor

As a plot holder you are supposed to mow the grass paths in between plots, and use the strimmer to get the edges. This actually stresses me out, because the communal, diesel-operated machines are loud and I’m scared of breaking them.

Which leads me to a confession: I have only cut the grass once. And the reason? Jerry, my other plot neighbor, keeps doing it for me.

A prior version of me might’ve taken offense to this. That this old white man assumes I can’t cut my own grass because I’m a woman! But the truth is, I am absolutely thrilled about it. I take little pleasure in cutting the grass, and it would eat up a lot of time that I could be spending on more gratifying tasks. Jerry is also much better at it, because he’s been doing it for years.

Once spring hit and the grass started growing again with abandon, I started to feel guilty. I brought it up with Jerry, and told him he really didn’t have to do it for me. He said, “Listen, I cut their grass over there, because they are very old, and it really doesn't take me much time to do yours too. You seem like a good neighbor, you show up and keep things tidy, and good neighbors are a good thing to have here.”

“That’s very kind, and I really appreciate it,” I said.

I’ve never meant anything more.

One delightful thing about Yorkshire is there are inexplicably fairy houses everywhere.

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