25/11/2010 – Ella Montt headed from the University to the Allotment Plot at MERL by bike. Optimistic bright sunshine earlier in the morning had given way to a blanket of dull grey cloud and the temperature plummeted, making the bike ride far from exhilarating, as the sharpness of the cold hit the body in motion. Ella Montt extracted the garden fork and her fairtrade gardening gloves from the shed, then crossed the grass to the Allotment Plot. Observation of the Brassicas that are being steadily eaten by wildlife, prompted Ella to return to the shed to collect an amount of horticultural fleece that had been stored there since last winter. The fleece was stretched across the Brassicas and the newly sprouted Broadbeans, to aid the plants protection from the wildlife and elemental forces. Bricks that had been collected from the pile by the shed were situated to hold the fleece in position. Ella’s nose dripped in the cold.
Ella started to dig some Parsnips with the fork, then she remarked to Captain Swing that all the Parsnips should perhaps be removed from the soil, because their foliage was dying down and the ground may soon become too frozen to dig if the snow that had been predicted, arrived in the course of the next week. Ella feeling slightly lot mental dug up the rest of the Parsnips that would be stored until needed for consumption. As the root vegetables were dug, Ella came across traveling rhizomatic root shoots runners from the Mint plants. Some Mint root shoots had been removed on a previous occasion and taken to Allotment 326 to propagate new Mint plants. Ella decided to leave the newly discovered rhizomes to show to Deleuze later, she left them to grow across the Allotment Plot. Each traveling Mint rhizome was punctuated regularly with tiny Mint seedlings with their own root systems developing joined to the main plant runner. Ella was fascinated by this, because it was a visual production that could be left as a mapping of plant intention, each potential new plant joined to the whole plant origin and would spread at the plant’s will, or if Ella intervened with her human objective and separated the Mint seedlings from the original plant, she could propagate more plants from their new root systems. Ella was still thinking about the Mint plant later. She hoped that both Deleuze and Guattari would be as pleased that this particular rhizome was growing through her Plot. Captain Swing commented that on an energetic level the Mint plants intention emphasized a connection between one Allotment Plot and another that Ella had already strengthened by transporting part of the plant’s rhizome from Allotment Plot at MERL to Allotment Plot 326.
Harvest on 25/11/2010: Parsnips Halblange White = 3lb 11oz = 1.7Kg, Leeks Almera = 5oz = 140g.