Lockdown and Dig Down

A few days before lockdown, full of the shock of its inevitability and with two small and energetic children in tow, I visited my mum’s allotment in Penparcau, and for the first time ever picked up a fork and asked where I could dig. "Hard or easy?” Mum asked; I opted for a really weedy rough spot and like so many people in response to this pandemic, I dug. 

I’ve always hoped I’d get green fingers one day, but until now couldn’t keep a pot plant alive. I was worried about having kids for this reason - a proven nurture deficit - but figured children are louder and more demanding and less easy to forget on a windowsill for weeks. Something happened in the days after lockdown though, and the plants got noisy. As human beings retreated and quietened down, reading news feeds in big-eyed silence, the natural world filled the void. Goats wandered through Llandudno, sheep settled down in a drive-thru MacDonalds, a blackbird made a nest right by our front door. The blue sky was plane-trail-free. In the silence I felt like I could hear the buds on the trees unfurling; passing bees bumbled noisily.

I bought seeds, onions, and potatoes on the last day that non-essential shops were open, mum lent me a trowel, a fork and a watering can. I don’t have a garden or yard, but live near the castle, and the lovely circular patch of earth in the park caught my eye as we passed the locked playground one day. Many of these patches used to be formal rose beds, but since austerity the council have had to downgrade their efforts and now seed them with very beautiful wildflowers. But this year the department responsible has been sent home or redeployed, and the land was due to stay bare except for dandelions around the edge. 

At the beggining, starting with what we had

I felt sheepish heading in with the buggy piled with jerry cans of water and tools, but got only smiles. A few times the police have stood nearby and watched, but haven’t yet asked me to leave. The patch has a little fence so people can pass us at a distance; my baby waters things with her beaker, pulls up plants and tries to eat worms; my four-year-old can be genuinely helpful for whole minutes at a time, and is getting to see where food comes from - what it takes to grow a vegetable. We sit and watch the birds come for the worms after I’ve dug a patch and talk about whether we are happy for the bird or sad for the worm, or how it’s possible to feel both at the same time. We are a little part of the circle of life for a change, rather than just having “I want! I want!” tantrums in Lidl aisles. We get our hands dirty with clean earth, rather than feeling constantly tainted by invisible virus. We can be part of the planet instead of locked away from it. We are redefining ‘work’ for a little while too - labour that yields results, that is visible to the children rather than always done away from them and only ever by shutting them out or shutting them up.

Mum left me plant donations - forget-me-nots and strawberries, marjoram, mint, comfrey, raspberries, and nasturtiums, and I’m growing seedlings on the windowsill to transplant - pumpkins, sunflowers, peas and cabbage. Jane from the Penglais Community Garden left me lettuces and broccoli, and another friend left a few tiny hen’s eggs in the undergrowth at Easter, in a homemade basket from her children to mine. Someone put a banana peel on the potatoes, and someone else left a painted pebble under an artichoke branch. Aber Food Surplus’s Heather planted some salad leaves and radishes and Dorothy cycles by and waters them now and then. It’s become a quiet place of community as we all pass over each other’s paths. I greet the growing things like friends. I feel slightly active in this time of strange impotence. I’m being a bit more careful with food waste at home, letting food management and the value of grown things take a bigger role in this emptier life. As usual one good thing brings about another, one thread of connection resonates along all the others.

Now that I’ve been a gardener for about a month and everything I’ve sown has germinated (except for you, Chinese Gooseberries, what happened to you?) I can make sweeping philosophical statements. Gardening is all about communing with the future. I’m trying not to get attached to my patch - we’re unlikely to eat any strawberries from it as they’ll not grow until next year when it’ll be back in council control. Will the garden still be here at harvest time? Will the fast-growing radishes be ready before lockdown is over? Will children be allowed back into the playground before the sunflowers along the railings bloom? Is a dog right now digging it all up in a frenzy of freedom? So it’s about the very short term future for me - sneaking out this evening on my own to water the lettuces and enjoy not being talked at for half an hour, whispering at the Chinese Gooseberries on the windowsill and wondering if they might yet appear tomorrow, collecting seaweed with the children to put on the potatoes, repotting seedlings on the doorstep in companionable silence with the blackbird and wondering when her eggs will hatch, filling my time with a new vocabulary of growth and life and pricking out and hardening off. Thinking about the roots that go down into the sandy earth, all the growers here before, from the market gardeners carrying their produce into the castle courtyard 700 years ago, to the council rose experts when I was young. 

After lots of hard work, love and digging

There’s nothing at all in my diary, no idea of how this year will pan out, just hours and days filled with the total necessity to be relaxed in so many layers of uncertainty or else have my anxiety catapulted back at me by uneasy, restless children in a little hothouse flat. The necessity to relax my grip on control, but hold on to the certainty that life longs for itself, to gaze at tiny sprouts looking for the sun, and to learn to wait.

First-time gardener Hannah has been planting a patch by Aberystwyth castle as her lockdown exercise. If you’d like to help or do something similar she’s happy to lend tools and pass on seeds and seedlings - send her an email at hannah@hannahme.com