Farming talk....

Some friends of mine have just taken on an allotment for the princely sum of £16. I said that I thought £16 a month to be fairly reasonable and they replied, no that it was £16 a year! Blimey, is it worth the bother of collecting it? I thought, but it seems that that is the rate over at Trench Wood allotments. They intend to erect a shed and hire a flippin great plough machine to rotavate their patch. "How big an area do you get for your £16?" I enquired. "Five rod," came the reply. What the heck is a rod the rest of the gathering said almost in unison. We then had a rather light-hearted drunken conversion about rods, poles and perches with each of us having our own theory about the area a "rod" would cover. Some bright spark had the idea of looking in the dictionary! (why didn't the rest of us think of that?!) It seems that they are all old fashioned agricultural terms for measurements of length, a rod being 5 and a half yards or 16 and a half feet. It also transpires that a rod of brickwork is a unit 16 and a half ft by 16 and a half ft by one and a half bricks thick, which equals 306 cubic feet of bricks (which has nothing to do with allotments but interesting none the less.) I'm looking forward to eating some of the produce from these rods next summer if my friends get their act together, so get digging girls....