In this month’s Manx Bard column, Bradley Chambers talks about his passion for gardening and admiration for springtime.

I have an allotment. Gardening is a bit of a passion for me. Not that I am saying that I am any good at it – just I like helping things grow.

March. Springtime. Renewal. Revival. It’s easily my favourite time of the year. I don’t like winter all that much. Too dark. Too melancholy.

All through the winter, most of the plot has been covered over, but now I can get everything uncovered. Out in the open. I can prepare the ground and start visiting the garden centre for seeds, bulbs, compost and whatever else I need.

All that I have had growing over the wintertime is some onions. They are doing okay but I won’t be able to harvest them until mid-June. Now, I can start thinking about sowing some broad beans and it will soon be time to get the seed potatoes in also. They have been chitting in the shed for a while.

Beetroot, kale, parsnips – simple things to grow. I never seem to do all that well with brassicas so, maybe I will give those a miss.

Do you know how allotments started in the Isle of Man? All land used to be common land, but enclosure meant that there was a need to ensure that working-class people could cultivate their own food. There were riots over this kind of thing. The Allotments Act 1928 ensured that local authorities had a duty to provide and manage land for cultivation. Even growing food is an act of defiance it seems.

There is something quite radical about it. The work that goes into it but also the genuine pride and sense of achievement that goes with cultivating your own fruit and vegetables – none of this should be under-estimated.

The physical and mental health benefits of being outdoors, working away and talking with like-minded people can be similarly invigorating and refreshing.

So, this is a poem about getting an allotment. It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines – always just the right number. I’ve split the last line into two. Ten syllables a line. I think it works.

I’ve called it, ‘Needs Work’ which, incidentally, is the feedback I generally get to all my poems. Well, nobody’s perfect I guess.

Needs Work

It needs work, says she, and hands me the key.

The gate is gone, the pavestones cracked, it needs

more than work. There’s a single apple tree

uncared for - the ground overgrown with weeds,

the sleepers which form the edge are rotten.

I think the last tenant died and, in time,

things will revive, for I’ve not forgotten

how to make things grow, and at least it’s mine:

my respite, despite the bindweed. It creeps,

into everything - meets its match in me.

The door of the shed is stuck, then it creaks

open, an old smell, a flask, dregs of tea

an unsent letter in an envelope

the pen still writes well -

where there’s life, there’s hope.