The Project

I want this blog to form part of a Social Anthropology study of Pickard's Field allotments. The blog would therefore be the fieldwork notebook.

Last week, I started writing down who's who on each allotment. Now, I want to photograph each allotment holder with his/her/their allotment. This requires a bit of nerve, because I have to go and ask total strangers if I can take their photo.

Of course, that's not all this project is. As an artist, I want to take high-quality photographs of what I see, and also I ought (terrible word) to draw what I see down there.

The blog is also a receptacle for what I learn about gardening. I'm learning all the time, from my own experience, and from the advice given me from other allotmenteers. The fact that half the allotment-holders were born and raised in Italy and their roots go back to peasant farming in Calabria sometimes before WW2 is a gift. Virgil, another Italian, wrote his Georgics as a treatise on farming, but, like him, I don't just want to write a dry old tome: the allotments are an endless source of stories, and I want reading about them to be a pleasure.