'It is really a club," says Victor Hislip, clanking the soil methodically with his hoe. "If you are at home and you're feeling a bit down, you take the fork and the hoe and come over here, and you'll meet someone and have a chat. They're exceptionally nice lads," he adds.
The "lads" are almost all retired men, and the "club" is a pair of big fields in south Dublin's Goatstown, where there are about 60 allotments. The land is earmarked for road development sometime down the line, but until it is sealed away under tar, it sprouts wheelbarrows of potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas and broadbeans. You know the older gardeners' plots by the ruler straight rows of weedless vegetables and the orderly wire cages carefully protecting vulnerable crops. Johnny-come-lately tracts, on the other hand, tend to feature expensive netting from the garden centre and miniature cloches made from severed mineral water bottles.
Victor's patch is neat and tidy, as would be expected from a man who used to teach night classes in horticulture. A third of it is - remarkably - given over to a handsome lawn. "Last year I had a mishap" - eelworm - "with the potatoes here, so I decided to grass it over. They say it's seven years before you can grow potatoes in the same place". In a year or two, he'll plant something else here, but in the meantime "it's clean. If you leave it lying vacant you're breeding weeds and dirt to spread everywhere". The lawn is lined with chrysanthemums, a yellow button variety: Jante Wells.
It is Victor's only concession to frivolity. The rest of his lot is devoted to serious vegetable production: Swiss chard, calabrese, cabbage, broadbeans, potatoes, beetroot, scallions, onions, lettuce. All are grown on a three-year rotation plan, and are fed with compost improved by the corpses of those weeds that dare to raise their heads above ground: "If you allow a weed to seed, you have seven years weeding", he says, sharply uprooting a precocious groundsel.
Victor's allotment, in common with many of those here, feeds the family all year round, "I rarely buy a vegetable. Very seldom". It also grows "my prize-winning onions": taut, healthy bulbs thrusting out of the soil. Sown on January 1st in the greenhouse at home, they were planted out at the beginning of May. They will continue to swell until October. "I'm doing it to grow the largest onion, to get into The Guinness Book of Records. I'm trying hard," he says keenly. "I've had one 4lbs in weight, but it was ugly. I'll do it eventually."
Adjoining Victor's territory, and within easy observation distance, are more would-be mammoth onions. "I got them from Victor," says John Roberts, his neighbour. "We're supposed to be competing." Victor's are considerably bigger - which appears to give John as much pleasure as Victor.
John cycles to the allotment every day, and parks his bike against a tall clump of lovage. Besides offering shelter for the cycle, he finds it "good for soups and things, I use it a lot in stir fries". The lovage is just one of a dozen herbs that John grows, including French tarragon, basil, garlic chives and tansy. The latter, smelling strongly of floor polish, is supposed to "be good for keeping flies away". And sage, he has read, repels carrot fly, so he lays pieces of it next to his fleece-covered carrot row, as a double protection. He has no idea whether this procedure works, but says it can do no harm. "I won't say I'm an organic gardener, more semi-organic."
Whatever his horticultural principles, John manages to grow many crops beyond the regular allotment theme of cabbage, potatoes and onions. Besides these stalwarts, in several varieties, he has fat asparagus, just finished; yards and yards of garlic - ready for lifting and sun-drying on the flat roof at home, scorzoner ("a lovely vegetable, but I was the only one eating it"), celery (ditto - and so, because he has read that celery seeds are useful in the kitchen, he is letting it go to seed) and sorrel, cucumbers, courgettes, tomatoes, gooseberries, raspberries and blackcurrants. In all, there are 60 or more different crops crammed into his 90 by 30yard strip.
Keeping it all on the go is hard work, but it's worth it for the quiet satisfaction of the harvest. Today it's early potatoes - Sharpe's Express - and from under the spent foliage, he lifts pale, smooth tubers, dozens to each plant. Nearby, Victor - to whom size matters - watches with great interest. He comes over with a bag of his own spuds, a queen-sized specimen perched on top. "What do you think? Is there any difference?"
The exhibition of garden sculpture at Gallan, Mangerton Road, Muckross, Killarney (mentioned at the end of last week's column) will continue until August 16th. Inquiries to the Frank Lewis Gallery, Killarney, Co Kerry. Phone (064) 34843