What the hell were we thinking?

Above: The plot from hell, overlooked by the shed of doom!

Oh dear! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Oooooh d... well, you get the picture.

We - that's my partner, D, and me, M - like food. We watch programmes about it on the telly. Not that wretched Gordon $%&£*! Ramsey - we hate him. And we don't like Jamie Oliver either - there's something schizophrenic about the manner in which he'll be all ethical one minute, like a zoo keeper telling off Rotherham mothers for feeding their caged children chips through a fence, but the next he'll be trying to get you to fork out your cash for whatever high fat, high sugar rubbish that his supermarket paymasters want to push that week. We kind of like Rick Stein, although he can seem a little insincere, but our favourite is Hugh Whiffle-Sturnwhirler ... just kidding (sorry about the cheap gag!) ... Fearnley-Whittingstall. Not only has Hugh helped me to shrug off years of prejudice and the belief that everybody with a double-barrelled name is an inbred fool and a waste of oxygen, his charming, enthusiastic, ethical and logical approach to food - whether it has roots, feet, fins or hooves - is inspiring.

However, what has inspired us most is that D is actually a fantastic chef (I call her that advisedly, as she makes the very good point that all too often men are called chefs while women make do with the title of cook) who makes lovely food of whatever kind she turns her hand to. I like cooking, make decent chilli, curries and stir fries, but I am not in her league and feel thankful every day that I'm with someone who cares enough about us to make such great grub.

We've been getting organic deliveries from a local, Sheffield wholefoods store for a couple of years, and the next logical step was to start growing our own. We've got herbs in the yard of our redbrick end terrace. The yard's a nice size. If you're careful you can almost cover the floor with one opened out page of broadsheet newspaper. We tried growing onions from sets last year. They went in tiny and after months of care and nurture came out ... tiny, but still fresh. You needed about six of them for any job, but never mind.

Anyway, because of our space issues we put our name down on the waiting list for an allotment. At the beginning of the year, I bought D Jane Perrone's excellent 'The Allotment Keeper's Handbook' joking that "this will be the year we get our own plot", but believing that it would be years down the line. Sure enough, within the very week we get a letter from Sheffield City Council offering us a plot at a secluded site in the south of the city (good alliteration, eh?). After just over a month of sending back and forth paperwork and cheques and what have you, we've finally got the keys. We've had a look. Oh dear! Ooooh dear!

The thing with D and I is that we tend to solve problems by arguing. We get grouchy and shout and swear and when the cussing and hollering's done, usually we'll have got through whatever job we needed to do and we can get back to being friends.

We're going to be arguing a lot over the next few months.

The plot is rather overrun, particularly with bramble. There's a patch of some weird leafy green thing that we can't identify and a deathtrap of a shed (seriously, it's amazing that the damned thing is still up after the earthquake the other week). On the plus side, there are two water butts, a couple of rusty wheelbarrows, at least one of which still works, and various other discarded equipment that might be put to good use.

This brings me to the point of this blog. Inspired by the idea of fresh, homegrown veggies on the table, spurred on by experimenting with new culinary delights, we will do this. We will turn this wasteland into a fertile, productive plot which will provide most of our vegetable food. If we can do it, and we don't know our brassicas from our elbow, others like us could do it too. If we record our successes and perhaps more importantly our balls-ups, others may be able to learn from our experiences. And if nobody does, well at least we'll be able to read back over these pages when we're feeling down and see how far we've come.

We've got our flask, some thorn-proof gloves and a selection of salvaged tools very kindly bought for us us by D's mum.

Time to get mucky.