'Oh, couch grass!' I believe this may be equivalent to swearing among allotment-holders, along with 'Damn, nettles!', 'Ouch, brambles!' and the very rude, and only used in cases of extreme provocation, 'Japanese Knotweed!'

I am not, in truth, quite the queen of couch grass yet, but this morning, as I dug deep into the turf of our new allotment, I did develop a system, of sorts, for pulling the long, white, fibrous roots out. Actually, the lovely man who has the other half to our half (I like allotments well enough but I couldn't manage a whole one) gave me the tip, which is simply to keep digging until you've made a pit at least a foot deep and there they are, poking through the sides, annoyingly horizontal.

It's no good trying to pull them out like that, obviously, because they just snap off, which is precisely what you don't want, so you dig another pit next to the first pit and then, if you're lucky, you can start to ease some of them out. And of course you discover a whole lot more.

'Do you think we'll ever clear this patch?' I asked my allotment partner, Steve, as I surveyed my pit of snared and snakey stalks.

He straightened up and put a hand on his aching back. 'The problem is, you think you've got them all out of one little bit, and when you go back to it again you find loads more.' Steve had been at it for a couple of hours before I arrived, determined to straighten out the borders of the sickle-shaped 'rectangle' we'd dug a couple of days earlier, and there were still bits of tell-tale white root poking out of it.

I sighed. 'Maybe we'll find buried treasure. Or a bit of Viking pottery. Or a skull. That would make it more exciting.' (Our allotment is in York, a city you barely need to scrape the surface of to dig up artefacts and bones.  A near-neighbour of mine found a skull when her garden wall was being relaid. The police were called; so was an archeologist. It turned out to be Roman. There are skeletons of centurions buried all over the place round here.)

Steve didn't think this was very likely because, apparently, I 'dig like a girl' - which is true, because (a) I am one, (b) I have a special 'lady fork', which is particularly designed for girls to dig with and (c) whenever there is a particularly choice - ie, deep - bramble root to excavate, I let him do it. As a favour, you understand, because he goes after them with such dogged enthusiasm.

There is, I admit, a peculiar thrill to extracting these stalks, be they subterranean couch-grass stems or the big bramble buggers. It's a bit like easing a tooth out or tweazing a stray hair. I'm not going into any more analogies because what happens between me and my dermatologist is private, but she does pronounce 'I'm going to do extractions, now' with uncomfortable (on my part) zeal.

After two sessions, we've now rough-dug one-and-bit beds, their size and position determined entirely by the areas covered by the black plastic sheeting that I threw down a couple of months ago as a mulch to kill off the grass and weeds. The council had strimmed it for us, but apart from that the plot had been untended for I-don't-know-how-many-years and was just a mass of grasses, thistles and brambles.

When Steve first showed me our plot - we'd agreed to share because, even though we're both madly busy, we reckoned that surely two madly busy people could manage half an allotment - I shrieked and said, 'But it's a hayfield!' I have photographic proof, though not of me shrieking: I took pictures of his kids in this jungle and the 13-year-old is swallowed up by grasses reaching shoulder height.

Maybe that explains the relative ease with which Steve acquired the plot. He'd expected to be on the council's waiting list for years, but this one turned up within a few months. You don't turn that kind of opportunity up when it comes along: what with the credit crunch and all, 2009 is going to be the Year of the Allotment Holder.

The fact that I'd grown nothing more than a bunch of woolly carrots, some runaway rocket and a couple of cobless sweetcorn plants in my back garden for the first time ever in 2008 did not deter him from taking me on as an allotment partner. Steve knows about my 'eco-challenges' (see 'Confessions of an Eco-Shopper') and, indeed, took part in one of them, tasting organic food for me. He also came to my book launch, which involved drinking organic wine, so he's had it pretty easy up til now.

Anyway, back to the plot, in both senses. The general advice from allotment-owning friends, of which I have several, was to cover it up, which would deprive the weeds of light and eventually kill them off. This I did, wheelbarrowing round a load of mucky black plastic from a mate's plot, and weighting it down with bits of wood and old bricks and whatever I could lay my hands on. When I returned after Christmas to inspect progress, the grass was yellowy-white and spindly and looked much easier to dig out.

What with that and the fact that the Lovely Man on the other half had made significant progress on his side of the (invisible) divide already - he has a great system of parallel beds going already, constructed a composting area, got horse-manure dug in, planted raspberry canes and garlic and artichokes and I can hardly spot a stalky white bit anywhere in his beds - I felt we had to get going.

I phoned Steve on my mobile, from the allotment. 'Not that I'm competitive or anything, but the other lot have started digging and they've done loads.' I left him two messages, one at home and one on his mobile. Steve seems to think I'm very competitive indeed but I don't know how he's got that impression.

There isn't a discernable design to our allotment beds at this stage. We've just dug where the plastic went down and are rotating the sheets to new patches, slinging the couch-grass roots and stems on top in the hope that they'll dry out a bit and we can burn them (you can't compost them because they'll just infest your compost and you'll end up spreading the stuff round even more). 

It's all a bit random, but hey, we've made a start. We've broken ground, and that feels good, even if we have almost broken our backs, too. We've muddied our new wellies (his; mine are still muddy from Womad 07 ), our new plastic trugs are smeared and dirty and our new gardening gloves are filthy, too.

But you know what? At least we're no longer - quite - allotment virgins.