Spring, the time to build garden supports for sweetpeas, peas and climbing beans. Howard has his hands on a beautiful bundle of hazel via his local spoon-carving community.
There are tall heavy poles for the French bean structure (we will be growing blue Blauhilde and an Italian yellow). There’s also shorter, thinner sticks for peas and flowers (mostly heavy-scented Spencer sweet peas from specialist supplier Roger Parsons) with the skinniest branches to be threaded inbetween.
We meet on an early-March Sunday morning. The spring sun is up, the wet weather has finally relented, though our plot daffodils are still stunted and under attack by birds.
We stand and soak it in, debate where to place the poles, though the size of the plot largely limits where they’ll go. I am lugging a 3kg ball of coir string – be careful what you wish for – from a specialist garden supplier. My Christmas gift to myself, it will likely last as long as me.
Howard sharpens the heavy sticks with a hand axe while I set up the sweet pea tents. Sorting through for the thinnest horizontal branches for the tendrils to cling to. Tying the tops with coir.
March is the time the plot shifts from late winter to early summer. From horizontal to added vertical. From 2D to 3D. It is still a little early for sowing into the ground so I have ordered in a couple of seed modules to get a bit ahead. For now, they will be used solely for sweet peas, and later for Thai red corn.
There is just us here for a couple of hours. A woodpecker drums on a nearby tree. Robins and a shrieking jay fly by. By the time we leave there are four tipis waiting on an early summer and the germination of seed.
Now, how is your garden planning?
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
