…there is also some activity in my back garden.

One of the reasons I wanted to get an allotment was the fact that I couldn’t possibly grow any veg in my back garden.

We came to Coventry in 1973 and I started working in the garden, in a small way. It was quite different then, a path in the middle, one side was a lawn the other some beds and a big dilapidated shed in the back.

Again, it was a gradual change – when the boys were small I was only too glad to have a bit of a lawn but once they were in their teens, it changed much faster.

Mike offered to dig a pond, that replaced the lawn, I demolished the shed (asbestos – what would health and safety say today?) and we erected my first little greenhouse. The beds went, the straight path changed into a squiggly one and then disappeared altogether and the end result is my idea of heaven.

There is nothing better than to sit in front of the greenhouse of an evening with a glass of chilled white wine and listen to the sound of the fountain in the pond.

Most of the plants are hardy perennial but even the annuals seem to survive from one year to another – I think the garden has its own micro-climate because it is surrounded with fences and a hedge on three sides and the house on the fourth.

Whatever it is, it seems to work and all I have to do in the spring is to tidy it up, put some annuals in and in the autumn trim things and put the garden to bed for the winter.

I couldn’t manage to have a demanding back garden, I need all my time to ‘grow stuff’ on the allotment.