I cannot quite believe that I am writing this, but after years and years and years of hoping and waiting, I’ve finally got an allotment. Ever since I graduated from university, I’ve wanted a big space of my own that I can dig up and plant with crops that are hideously expensive in the shops. Somewhere to escape to at the end of a hair-raising week.

Unfortunately, I’ve also moved house five times since 2007, which has made the climb to the top of any allotment waiting list nigh-on impossible. But now that I’m settled in a town in the Chilterns, I put my name down on my local parish council’s list, and within five months, I was offered a plot.

“The last tenant had not cultivated the plot for some time, and has only just relinquished it,” the parish secretary wrote in her email. This conjured up all manner of horrors, and even though I was already beside myself with excitement at having a bit of earth to call my own, I forced myself to hold my breath until I’d visited.

So one frosty morning last week, I visited the site. It’s ten minutes away from my home. It is in a very sweet little village. It has running water. The rent is £10 – yes £10 – for the whole year. And it looks like this:

I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve a plot like this. There are about three dandelion plants on the whole of the 50 metre allotment. The soil is a rich, friable loamy light clay, which runs deep. The site is open and sunny.

As I’ve had about five years to plan what I want to do with this allotment, it hasn’t been hard to draw something up that I can now work with. My plan is to grow crops that are very expensive or difficult to obtain in the shops. And crops that I utterly love.

The other side of this plan is that I do have a very busy life. Normally I’ll only be able to visit the plot at weekends, and sometimes during the week when I have been working on an early shift. So realistically, very hungry and thirsty crops are out of the question. No tomatoes, no peas, and definitely no salads. I’m going to trial pumpkins this year, but if they prove to be too much hassle, they’ll be replaced.

The overall plan for this allotment is fruit and perennial vegetables. These are the most expensive to buy in the shops, and they happen to be the things I love eating the most. They require more effort at the start, but once they are in the ground, there is less upheaval, less watering less digging, less – dare I say it – weeding.

Here is my plan, which is of course subject to change, madcap ideas and minor disasters:

You can click the image to view a larger version if you wish.

This is what I’ll be growing: Summer raspberries, autumn raspberries, asparagus, blue honeysuckle, tayberries, Japanese wineberries, loganberries, tummelberries, veitchberries, marionberries, salmonberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, redcurrants, blackcurrants, globe artichokes, pumpkins, saffron, comfrey and cut flowers. There’s a bed in the plan called ‘mystery’, which will either be for another unusual perennial vegetable that catches my eye, an apple espalier, or something that takes my fancy later on as I put the allotment together.

When I told a few fellow gardeners what I wanted to grow, they balked at the amount of cane fruit. But cane fruit has always been my passion. One of my favourite photos of me as a child is this one:

Yes, that’s me, stuffing my little face with blackberries from the garden. When I was a few years older, I remember the blackberry canes at the back of our garden: a long mysterious wall of fruit. I spent hours picking fruit from those bushes, and would run back to the house, hands bloodied with the juice of the crushed berries.

And even now, in my mid-twenties, berries are the fruits I’d eat the most of if I had the money. I love them all, from the tangtastic loganberry, to the soft juicy raspberry and the complex wineberry. I’ll be planting some rare berries that I’ve never grown before, such as the salmonberry and the marionberry, partly to satisfy the collector in me, and also because you simply cannot buy these fruits. They will be all mine.

I’ve ordered the first consignment of plants for the plot from the wonderful Victoriana Nurseries. I’ve ordered:

Asparagus ‘Jersey Knight’ x 5
Asparagus ‘Crimson Pacific’ x 5
Artichoke ‘Romanesco’ x 1
Artichoke ‘Imperial Star’ x 2
Raspberry ‘All Gold’ x 5
Raspberry ‘Polka’ x 5
Raspberry ‘Valentina’ x 5
Tummelberry x 1
Tayberry x 1
Japanese wineberry x 1
Gooseberry ‘Invicta’ x 2
Rhubarb ‘Victoria’ x 1

And this weekend I started digging out the beds. I lifted the turf off each bed and stacked it into a neat and solid pyramid at the end of the allotment. This will rot down to provide a wonderful loam.

The next step is to enrich the soil as much as I can. I’ll be digging in very well-rotted horse manure to the cane fruit beds next weekend, and then planting the bare-root canes within a couple of days. On other beds that won’t be touched until spring arrives, I’ll be double-digging horse manure and creating trenches for my kitchen compost. When it comes to planting them up, I’ll also add shredded comfrey leaves.

I know this allotment isn’t going to be easy. But the five hours I spent there at the weekend were truly wonderful. For the first time in weeks, I forgot about work and stopped feeling quite as grumpy as I have been recently. I even sent an email to a colleague saying that someone else would have to help them out because I was at my allotment. If there’s one thing this plot will do, it will help me forget about work. And I don’t believe, really, that things are only fun if they are easy. My friends who run marathons, who spend hours carefully painting ceramics, who train horses and who write plays would agree. So wish me luck, and stick around to find out more about my wonderful new allotment.