‘The’ll have ter scut it off.’

Well today I handed over £4 and became tenant of allotment no 16. The elderly Yorkshire Oracle of the Allotments surveyed the weedy plain with me (and this pic doesn’t do the jungleiferousness justice):

and advised me to ’scut it off’: to hack off the top few weedy inches, pile them to rot down and work the soil beneath. Here is what an hour’s scutting off and twenty minutes turning over looks like: I probably have ten or twelve times that area to tame, and there are weed roots like bloody pythons down there. It came with the decrepit shed you can see, and divers piles of nettle-tangled crap, rusting wheelbarrows and bits of lichen-covered garbage deposited by the previous tenants who fled leaving a mysteriously padlocked trunk.

Why am I shoving an allotment into my already crowded life? Because the voices are telling me now is a good time to get the hang of growing ones own food.