The hardest thing about gardening? It might be learning the gardeners’ lingo

There was a time when “weed” and “chilling with my hoe” meant something quite different to me. Now it means pottering around in the vast green lung nestled in the top of East Finchley. Two years after my wife applied for an allotment plot—and immediately forgot having done so—we got a call out of the blue saying a plot had come up. Would we like to go and see it?

I had my doubts. Here was a large patch of land, substantially overgrown—long grass and some…