Allotment news from home

It’s been two weeks since we started the holiday now and finally emails from my parents and Sue. I had been waiting for news but didn’t like to email them and seem too needy… you know… Hi, hope you are well and how’s the allotment doing? It was good timing because I’d watched Gardener’s World last night and had felt some deep pangs whilst they talked about the vegetable garden. Usually I like to say things like "Oh, ours are bigger than that!" or "we did that last week," but yesterday I just sat there wondering whether my tomato plants had fruit on yet and wishing I could step outside and sow some autumn crops. I’d missed the garden so much I’d even picked some wild raspberries from the hedgerow earlier in the week!

Anyway, Sue informed me that she had dispatched caterpillar eggs from the brassicas and that blight had struck the potatoes. She also told me she was overrun with courgettes. No surprises there. My mum said they had picked loads… of what, she didn’t say. But she also told me that somehow in our shutting the house down routine we had managed to accidentally switch off our chest freezer! What a blow! My chest freezer was full of homegrown produce, now thawed out and refrozen. What a pickle that will be to sort out when I get home and totally irreplaceable. At times like this I wish my freezer had been full of frozen pizza, chips and ready meals and I could just ring up my insurance company for compensation. Still, on the bright side, I did put 37 pounds of frozen fruit into Sue’s chest freezer last month and for that I’m thankful!