There is no vetting of people who obtain allotments in Brighton and Hove, but I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that there should be. Not that I’d want interrogations about how much horticultural experience you have, or your ability to tell wilt from blight at fifty paces, but one essential qualification for enjoying an allotment is sensuality.

Note that I say enjoy, not maintain. Anybody can manage an allotment, but to turn it from a vegetable production system to a place that provides pleasure, as well as solace when you’re low, and fascination all year round, you have to surrender all your senses to the experience of growing things.

You have to be prepared to get your hands dirty, not just because growing fruit and vegetables is mucky work, but because the best way to tell if your soil is warm enough to plant seeds is to stick you finger in, as far as you can, and feel the temperature. Of course you can buy a soil thermometer, but that doesn’t teach you anything about the soil, and unless you carry it with you at all times, it doesn’t give you the arcane power to visit somebody else’s ground and pronounce on whether their broad beans can be planted now, or need another week or so in the seed packet.

You have to learn the nature of your plot and its little peculiarities. That requires you to touch and taste: to feel the ground beneath your feet and know that this bit is compact and needs to be broken up with compost, while that bit is lovely and friable and ready to have spuds planted in it; to wonder why your runner beans at one end of the row do so much better than the others and to snag a couple from each point to snap between your fingers for freshness before tasting their sweetness and moisture content. If you’re the orderly type who pulls on your gloves and harvests, robot-like, from one end of the beanpoles to the other, you’ll never work out that somewhere in that line there’s a problem – a hunk of chalk or a pile of old bricks, buried deep, that’s starving the roots of nutrients.

Take pear trees. You can prune a pear tree in winter without ever knowing your way around its mysteries. But if you go out on a late winter’s morning and take off those gardening gloves and simply walk your fingers along the branches, you’ll find out something quite amazing: live wood is cold, and dead wood is warm. It always seems it should be the other way round, but because live wood contains icy dormant sap, it is colder than the dead wood which has a dry core. So getting in touch with your pear tree lets you find all the dead wood which needs to come out.

And if you’re not going to enjoy your plot, with all your senses and as wholly as possible, why bother to have one? Why not just invest in some veg boxes delivered to your door and leave the allotments to the rest of us? We might be a bit more chaotic, and a bit less organised, but our allotments are not vegetable factories, they are inspirations, havens, love-objects and pampered family members, all in one.