The best book I've read

The rose chafer

The rose chafer looks like it should be on a necklace or a ring but I saw it yesterday on a chilli plant given to me by a friend and which I'd planted in the polytunnel.

I was digging up lettuce being reduced to lace by caterpillars, putting them outside in the hope they'll recover and birds will do the insect control for me. It was there, immobile, shining.

Like most things that live in the garden the rose chafer has its own role and its grubs are good for the soil even if it does eat roses, so I welcome it. If it eats the chilli plants, I'll pick it up and move it, but until then it's a sign the allotment's healthy and supporting more than me.

May's been a month of immersion - preparing plots, sowing and planting. Two friends and an allotment neighbour have provided the bulk of my plants because I was away at a critical growing time but my own seeds are now coming on. I've put french beans and runners out and repotted round courgettes to grow larger before they too fend for themselves. Sunflowers, lettuce, basil are to come.

Polytunnel early May

The big event was ordering half a ton of compost to build up the soil. Spring's been too dry and the plot's like dust. There's so little topsoil above the chalk below us but I'm now able to plant into the compost, hoping for more worm action too, because I'm digging less. I have three black compost bins and four other home-made compost heaps on the plot, but even that's not enough to keep the soil healthy.

My swing away from digging coincides with leaving large patches of self-seeded flowers for bees. Borage appeared early and Sicilian honey garlic has spread to several parts of the allotment. Every year the comfrey comes back in the same two places, on either side of the gooseberries, under the plum tree and it hums with bees.

Sicilian Honey Garlic

Demands of sowing, preparing and planting mean May and June preclude almost everything else apart from one day a week of work, seeing family and friends. Any writing I embarked on in winter stays in its folders. I struggle with myself, I feel guilty for my own inattention but the green tunnel of the path, nesting blue tits, wrens and blackbirds, the golden slowworm on the top of the compost, have me in their grip.

If I were to track my movements on a typical allotment day they'd make a cat's cradle of small trips to and from the water butts, polytunnel, greenhouse, shed, compost bins, tables, from the newly planted hazel tree at the top, to the old plum at the bottom, I zig zag between currants and lavender, planting out sweetcorn and watering onions. I marvel at the mullein moth caterpillar with its yellow and black markings continuing its beautiful destruction.

Comfrey

If I'm writing in my head I'm not aware of it but somehow I feel that this is more urgent than anything else I might do at the moment.

When I pick elderflowers to make cordial I smell childhood. It's so early, there's one other person around in the distance, trees curl over the path, the elder releases its scent, cow parsley (Queen Anne's lace/wild chervil), is still potent and sunlight comes through branches like it does in cine film.

Borage

A badger has dug up a bumble bee nest, probably soon after I'd been there with Giya and a friend of hers and sat by the fire as the sky darkened and robins chased the last of the light away.

The nest in the shed is a box of song. A crow carries off a small rodent. It's the best book I've read.

Bee friendly plants - a list from the University of Sussex
Wildlife gardening
Sussex butterflies
The Kings Fund report Gardens and Health

Oxeye daisies - typical meadow flowers