An Englishman’s castle is not his home. It’s his shed.  Four weeks into my great experiment of becoming an allotment holder and I now have that most important element for all male allotment holders: my own shed.

Although (interestingly) 40% of the fellow allotment holders appear to be mothers concerned about the safety and quality of food they give to their families, it is only the men who have the all-important shed.

My wife found the shed for me, advertised in the local paper. This was, in no small way, connected her annoyance at always finding compost, garden forks, seeds and buckets of ‘best organic dried chicken manure’ rolling around the back of the car. She had decided that I needed at least a 6’ x 4’ shed (sheds still come in reassuring imperial sizes rather than being 1.35 x 3.6 metres) to accommodate my tools and wheelbarrow and all the other garden implements I have been quickly accumulating.

My second-hand shed is perfect, I need some shelving, possibly a chair, and I’m even toying with the idea of a camping stove and a kettle. But it is perfect; the man’s equivalent of a woman’s handbag. You can keep all sorts of things there just because you just might need them.

In discussions with her friends, my wife also let slip that she felt a 4’ x 6’ shed was also a suitable size for me to sleep in if any marital disagreements are not settled amicably by bedtime. The amount of time I am still spending on digging over the allotment in the evenings and at the weekends has proved such a hit that two male friends have also now taken on allotments. This followed calls to the local parish council by their wives, who are also now looking for sheds for them of at least 6’ x 4’.

My back-breaking digging is now starting to earn the admiration of my fellow allotment holders, although just using a lawnmower would have made it look better. I have six beds: two have been covered over with plastic sheeting to kill back the weeds; two beds have been dug over; and the remaining two will be completed in the next week.

But now the difficult part begins. I have to decide what to plant, and where. My avid reading of gardening and allotment books has now seen me begin the planning process and learn about the need to rotate crops; runner beans need to go into a different bed from last year (luckily the sticks still in the ground give me some idea of where they went) but I’m having to guess with other things. The long term planning is also difficult; I can’t plant the runner beans bought too early from the garden centre yet, but I should be planting the purple sprouting broccoli for next January and February; I think

I can see now why Alan Titmarsh chose to go from gardener to author and male pin-up for women of a certain age. But, despite the cold weather, my onions have started to grow and I have loads of runner beans, French beans and sweetcorn sprouting in pots on window sills all around the house. I’ve got packets of seeds (in my wonderful shed) for lettuce, carrots, leeks, beetroot and peas - all waiting to go into the ground. It is still very hard work and I’ve yet to eat anything I have grown but the satisfaction I get from the work is incredible.

My allotment books have also thrown up some further interesting facts which I can bore my friends at the pub with. Did you know that 1 in 18 people in the UK has an allotment? Any parish without an allotment must provide one with piped water and fencing if five people in the parish request an allotment space. The space each allotment holder receives is set by government and should produce sufficient fruit and vegetables for a family of four. Oh, and you can’t sell produce grown on your allotment, but you can keep chickens or rabbits.

With that last fact in mind, I’ve just sneaked a book on raising rabbits for their meat into the house bought in the local charity shop. Tom and Barbara Good may have had pigs but I might just have Peter Rabbit instead.