Our Lady of the Allotment

I spent most of this morning at the Sacred Plot, doing a bit of weeding and harvesting with Mick, my co-tenant down there, and mulling over a few options about things to do over the next few months. It's been a pretty good year for us so far, and it's almost reached a point where the allotment is looking after itself. There are a few weeds and brambles covering the ground, but there's also an awful lot of fruit and veg. It's a far cry from when we first took it on four years ago, when it was basically an overgrown rubbish dump, with bits of wood, piping, smashed glass and household junk scattered all over the place. In order to aid with the clearing up and initial digging, we started a rumour that there had been an apparition of the Virgin Mary there, and we tried to encourage pilgrims to come and take home weeds which had been blessed by Our Lady of the Allotment. Unfortunately, the locals proved to be a faithless lot, so we painstakingly had to clear the ground ourselves. The proposed plan to turn the shed into a shrine fell by the wayside too.
These days the Sacred Plot is a semi-autonomous state; it has its own legislative processes, and its own parliament, which is the King's Arms pub on Hall Road. It has applied to host the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, the 2020 Olympic Games, and it hopes to send a man into space before the end of the decade.