The little tricks are there on screen, including advice on what to do in winter, such as starting tomatoes on top of the television on Boxing Day. “That’s all real,” laughs Boyce. Covering weeds with cardboard to kill the weeds and planting potatoes that will dig the land for you are all in there, too.
But it is the characters who really take the film along: Jackson’s bossy allotment chairman, John Henshaw’s suspicious gardener, who gets his wife to visit the doctor and pretend to have his ailments to get a prescription, Rodney Ditchfield’s rule-book hectoring man at meetings, and many more.
“They are all pretty recognisable and based on real people. But once you get an actor who does not resemble the real person physically, you kind of lose all that,” says Boyce.
He hopes people will go to see Grow Your Own because it is a funny film, but there are other aspects. Margrit Ruegg’s scheme, providing allotment sites in Wavertree for stressed refugees, is threatened because of funding problems: “So it would be brilliant to give her a bit more profile.
“And the film was made with Art in Action, a community arts projec, based in Bootle, that was basically about photography and outdoor pursuits but which more recently has gone into film making. So we want them to be better known. Carl came up through that scheme and we hope to make another film with them next year.”
As for how the film will succeed with the public, he is unwilling to predict. “It’s got no stars, is not exactly high concept and does not have any women taking off their clothes. It is coming out around the same time as Shrek and our budget was about the same as one press breakfast for Shrek. But with a wet weekend and a good review, it may catch on.”
The Dingle allotment, alas, is no more. But it should still look pretty colourful in a drab landscape. “It has been sown with wild flowers from the Wild Flower Centre in Knowsley,” Boyce reveals.
