On the Ledge, established February 2017, still going strong.

And I'm your host, Jane Perrone.

In this episode, I go off-peased, off-topic, and potentially off the rails, as I bring you a sample chapter from my audio book,

The Allotment Keepers Handbook.

Thank you so much for joining me.

If you're new to the show, this is not a normal on the ledge episode, if there is such a thing,

because we're not really talking about houseplants this week so if you're just new to the show maybe go back and have a look at some

of the other episodes as a starting point because this episode is taking a different tack

I'm going to give some background now about how the book came about and what I was

doing at the time. If you want to just skip to the actual chapter, fast forward to about the nine

minutes 30 mark and you should be able to pick it up there. Still with me? Okay, great. The era BC before children,

before my children were born, I wrote a book about allotments. It came out in 2008 and sold pretty well,

but in the intervening years it has gone out of print and has been what they

call in the trade a remandered. And so you can pick up a secondhand copy of this book, but you can't

buy it new. So a couple of months ago, I thought to myself, gosh, I could get the rights back

to that book from the publisher. So I did

just that. And that made me think that I really should do something with this book and what better

than an audiobook. As somebody who talks for a living now, that just made sense. So you may have

questions, what on earth is an allotment may be at the top of your list,

particularly if you're not in the UK. So in Britain, allotments are basically parcels of land,

probably about the size of a tennis court, maybe smaller, that anyone can rent. And they're owned

either by a local government body like a local council or a parish council or a town council

...