What a garden teaches about patience

I took on the plot in January, which everyone at the allotments agreed was either the best or the worst time to do it. Best, because there was nothing growing yet to kill. Worst, because there was nothing growing yet, full stop, and the plot looked like exactly what it was: a rectangle of cold clay, a collapsed bean frame, a shed door held shut with baling twine and a rusty fork standing upright in the middle like a flag on a conquered hill.

It is a small plot, roughly the size of two parking spaces, on a slope at the edge of town between a railway line and a row of back gardens. There are forty-odd plots on the site. Some are immaculate, edged with boards and labeled in neat capitals. Some are mostly couch grass and good intentions. Mine, the man on the next plot told me kindly, had been “resting” for three years. He said it the way you might describe a relative who hasn’t left the sofa.

Winter: clearing the ground

The first job was simply to find out what was there. I spent four Saturdays on my knees pulling bindweed, whose roots come out of clay like white string and snap if you hurry. Hurrying, I learned within the hour, is pointless with bindweed. Every broken piece becomes a new plant. The only way through is slow: ease the fork in, loosen the soil around the root, follow it with your fingers until it gives. By lunchtime my hands were raw and I had cleared a patch about the size of a bath mat.

It was the first lesson the garden taught me, and it kept teaching it all year: the effort you put in has very little to do with how fast things happen. You can work hard and see nothing. You can stay away for a week and come back to find the peas have doubled. The garden runs on its own clock, and your job is mostly to notice where the hands are.

By February I had dug two beds, wheeled over a barrow-load of manure from the communal heap, and laid cardboard over the rest to smother the weeds until I was ready. Then I did the thing every new plot holder is warned not to do and does anyway. I bought far too many seeds.

Spring: learning to wait

Seed packets are optimism printed on paper. Each one shows its vegetable at its glossy, abundant best, with instructions that make the whole business sound effortless. I had twenty-two of them in a shoebox by the back door, and I sowed most of them far too early, in trays on the kitchen windowsill, because it was March and I could not bear to wait any longer.

Half of them grew tall and pale and toppled over, reaching for a light that wasn’t strong enough yet. The rest sat doing nothing for so long that I gave up and tipped the compost onto the plot, where, three weeks later, a cluster of tomato seedlings came up in the middle of the path.

Iris, who has the plot across from mine and has been growing vegetables for longer than I have been alive, watched all this without comment until one morning in April, when she leaned on her fork and said, “The soil has to warm up, love. You can’t talk it into it.” It was the most useful gardening advice I received all year. She followed it with a dozen of her own leek seedlings in a yogurt pot, which is how most things are passed along on the allotments: casually, without ceremony, in a container meant for something else.

So I waited. I learned to lay my hand flat on the bed in the morning and feel whether it was still cold. I learned that the first outdoor sowing is a kind of bet, and that it is fine to lose it and sow again a fortnight later. I learned, from Iris and from failure, that a row of carrots that hasn’t appeared after three weeks probably isn’t coming, and that there is no shame in starting the row over. That last one took me longest.

Summer: too much, then not enough

Nobody warns you how quickly it turns. One week in June the plot looked thin and anxious, all bare soil and string lines. Two weeks later I couldn’t see the path. I had planted six zucchini, which is roughly five more than any household needs, and they began producing faster than I could pick. Miss one for a few days and it becomes a club the length of your forearm. I left bags of them on neighbors’ doorsteps. I made soup, fritters and a relish I am still working through. At one point I grated one into a loaf of bread and served it to friends without telling them.

Then, after a wet week in July, the slugs came and ate an entire row of lettuce overnight, leaving only the stalks standing like tiny green chimneys. Then a dry spell cracked the clay so deeply I could slide my fingers into the gaps. Then the beans, which had been magnificent, caught a blight I still can’t name and browned from the bottom up in four days. Summer on an allotment is abundance and loss happening in the same bed at the same time, often to the same plant.

I found this harder than the waiting. Waiting at least has hope in it. Losing a crop you have tended for three months feels personal, even though it clearly isn’t; the slugs do not know who you are. What helped, oddly, was the water trough at the bottom of the site, where people gathered with their cans in the evening to compare disasters. Everyone had lost something. Someone always had too much of something else. By the end of a conversation you had usually traded a bag of beans for a bunch of chard, and the loss had turned into a story.

Autumn: what stays in the ground

In September I dug the potatoes, which is the closest thing gardening has to opening a present. You push the fork in well away from the plant, lever up the soil, and there they are, pale and cool, more than you expected or fewer, but always a surprise. I knelt in the bed and picked them out of the earth with my hands, and understood, a little late, why people keep doing this year after year despite the slugs.

Then came the slow work of putting the plot to bed. Clearing spent plants. Spreading leaves and compost over the empty soil for the worms to pull down over winter. Pressing garlic cloves into rows, pointed end up, knowing they would sit in the cold for months before anything visible happened. Garlic is the plainest lesson in patience a garden offers: you plant it in autumn so you can eat it in summer, and in between you simply have to trust that something is going on underground.

People asked me, more than once that year, whether the allotment was worth it — the hours, the bus ride with a fork wrapped in newspaper, the failures. In vegetables alone, probably not. I could have bought everything I grew for less than I spent on seeds and manure. But that was never really the exchange. What the plot gave me was a different relationship with time: slower, more seasonal, less interested in results this week and more curious about what was quietly happening below the surface.

This is my second summer on the plot. Last week I lifted the garlic, which had spent the whole winter doing, as far as I could tell, nothing at all. The bulbs came out fat and papery and smelling sharply of earth, and I laid them on the shed roof to dry in the sun. The door still closes with twine, though I’ve replaced the twine. I sowed fewer seeds this spring, and later. Iris noticed, and said nothing, which from her is high praise.