Growing things from seed

I'd hate for you to think we're johnny-come-latelys to this vegetable lark. We are, I'd just hate for you to think that. To be fair we have had three allotments over the years, but in all honesty we (by which of course I mean Anne) were never able to do it quite the way proper allotment owners do.

They:
Cost of allotment £16
Cost of half of allotment middle-class newbies can't manage £0
Cost of shed taken from next door's abandoned allotment £0
Cost of scaffolding planks for borders provided by dodgy white-van cousin £0
Cost of endless bits of plastic and wood pilfered from skips £0
Cost of incredibly useful cloches £1.99 in Aldi
Cost of seeds swapped, and kept back, and free in magazines and occasionally bought £1
Cost of manure that allotment has delivered in one free-for-all pile on April 2nd and which you have to camp out overnight to get dibbs on £0
Overall cost per vegetable 0.1pence

We:
Cost of 72 gardening books all telling you the same thing £990
Cost of two sheds to house shiny new tools and someone to build them £800
Cost of three raised beds using railway sleepers (creosoted to poison the veg) £280
Cost of greenhouse - to burn the cucumbers - £400
Cost of plug plants to replace all the tomatoes that were raised by seed but eaten by dog in copy-cat easter egg hunt incident £65
Cost of grow-feed, slug-pellets, vitamins, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture etc that all good middle class seedlings need to survive according to the Guardian weekend gardening page £125
Overall cost per vegetable £2.10


I'm not kidding. Next door have just built a raised-bed so deep it's got a diving-board at one end...


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