What the allotment taught me about hurry

The plot is a half, plot 14b, and I have had it for three seasons. The first season I grew almost nothing and blamed the soil. The second I grew a great deal and gave most of it away in a slightly aggressive fashion. The third season is the one I want to write about, because it is the one where I finally understood the thing everyone had been telling me.

The thing everyone had been telling me

You cannot make a season go faster, and nearly every mistake a new grower makes is an attempt to.

Sowing three weeks early because March had a warm week. Planting out before the last frost because the plants looked ready and I was impatient. Watering a seed bed twice a day because it felt like doing something. Digging over ground that was too wet, which sets the structure like concrete and costs you the whole bed for a year - that one I did in my first February and paid for until August.

Every single one of those is hurry, and the plot answers hurry with a delay. It is the most literal feedback loop I have ever been in.

What Ray does

Ray has plot 9 and has had it for twenty-six years. He arrives, most days, for about forty minutes. He does one thing. He looks at everything else. He goes home. In April, when the rest of us are down there for whole Saturdays in a frenzy, Ray is doing forty minutes and getting better results.

I asked him about it in the second year and he said something I have thought about a great deal since: "You're trying to finish it. It doesn't finish."

You are trying to finish it. It does not finish. There is a version of this sentence that applies to a house, a career, a body and a friendship, and Ray is not interested in any of those, only in the leeks.

The third season

This year I went twice a week for an hour and did less than half of what I did last year. The plot looks better. Not because less work is magic, but because an hour twice a week is spread across the season, and a Saturday frenzy in April is not - the frenzy weeds ground that will be weedy again in a fortnight while the thing that actually needed doing that week goes undone.

The onions failed anyway. Onions have failed all three years and Ray says it is the position, which he mentioned in year one, and which I did not act on because it would have meant moving a bed I had just built.

Off the plot

I have not managed to generalise this as neatly as I would like. But I have started asking, of things that are annoying me, whether they are actually late or whether I have simply decided they should be finished by now. It is a surprisingly high proportion of the second one.