When I first started renting an allotment in the Sixties, I was showered with friendly advice from elderly plot holders who told me they had been doing it for 35 years.

The other day I was idly digging away when it struck me that I have been gardening for nearly as long.

The old gardeners who gave good guidance have long gone to the great allotment in the sky.

Unfortunately I have not been able to emulate their skill in spite of nearly matching their experience.

I tend to have brown rather than green fingers. Too often my beans are has-beens and there have been few fruits to my labours.

This year I have had abject and inexplicable failures with courgettes, cucumbers, marrows and strawberries. My lack of horticultural skills added to the vagaries of the English weather have conspired to produce these crop calamities.

But for every failure, there is a compensating success.

Potatoes are growing in abundance. Onions have been wonderful and I have grown spinach to the point where my whole family has become heartily sick of it.

I have noticed few people with full-time jobs like me make a go of allotments because their time is limited. But there are so many others who do not undertake full-time jobs, such as pensioners and students, that I am always surprised more plots are not taken.

Make no mistake, there has been a big decline in allotment cultivation since I first started. In Brighton and Hove there are vast swathes of land which barely seem to be touched.

Yet growing your own fruit and veg, even with intermittent success, is a wonderfully rewarding hobby. It is cheap and the food is fresh. When you bring in a cabbage or a lettuce you know nothing has been sprayed on it.

There are all sorts of wildlife on the allotment. This week I have seen several foxes and a frog in my water butt is keeping me company.

Early in the morning hardly anyone else is there. It is a time of great peace which is unusual to find in the heart of a big town with a population of 90,000 people such as Hove. But there is plenty of activity on Sundays, when gardeners chat at the excellent sales pavilion off Weald Avenue which is run by the local allotments association.

The main reason people do not run allotments is laziness. On average it takes half an hour a day, or an hour during the main growing season, to keep a plot going. There is a fair amount of hard labour involved, especially in digging over a new plot for the first time.

When allotments were created, they provided space for working men to produce their own fruit and veg for families who had little spare cash and no land of their own. Now most people do not take the time or the trouble because they can pick up fruit and veg, often organically grown, at the local supermarket.

Few new or young gardeners ask this particular gardening greybeard for his advice - probably because they have seen the state of my plot.

Yet I intend to keep going until, perhaps, I can follow the example of my neighbour who simply dropped dead on his allotment one morning at dawn. Not a bad way to go.

Until that day, I can supply any vegetable you like - as long as it's spinach.