The National Trust is opening up space for 1,000 allotments on its land. This news frightens me. I am not scared of vegetables, apart from celeriac. It's more the image this conjures up. You don't think of the National Trust as having a load of muddy patches. You think of pristine lawns and speciality architectural grass. And now immediately I'm thinking Dig for Victory campaign during the second world war with Hyde Park in London being churned up because of a dire emergency just round the corner. All because of the Germans, the lawns were covered in goats and the banks of the Serpentine were marred by the stench of a piggery. Actually, that's not true, you don't keep pigs near water in case they fall in, and plus they are very clean animals who don't stink. But the Blitz spirit is all very well; what if it's accompanied by a Blitz? The goats, by the way, were reared for milk. Who knew our grandparents' palate was so adventurous and cosmopolitan? If we were prepared to eat goat's milk by the 1940s, you have to ask, did we really need to have that huge war?

Andy McLaughlin, the head of communications at the National Trust, disposes of this mental picture.

"It's a mixture of land, some of it walled kitchen gardens that have fallen into disuse, some of it's agricultural land - we have 2000 smallholdings, we could reclaim some of that - and we have other areas of arable land. It wouldn't be bits of park," he explains. But what says next strikes a chill into my bones: "We're also doing it to plug the skills gap, so that people who are growing their own vegetables for the first time can learn from our experienced gardening volunteers."

I had only just vaporised the spectre of the credit crunch being as devastating as a massive-scale aerial bombardment, and now he raises the skills gap. The recession isn't as bad as a war, but we're heading for an environmental apocalypse anyway, in which the ability to grow your own carrots is going to be really pretty crucial. McLaughlin did not actually say that. I just inferred it.

The recession is confusing, and for reasons beyond, "but where did all the money go? Surely that cricket man can't have spent it all?" On the one hand the recession dovetails quite neatly with a general message of austerity that's emanated from environmentalism since its beginnings, but that the mainstream has only in the past five years taken up. They do work pretty well together, greenness and the end of capitalism, like two ponies in a trap, and it wouldn't do us any harm to learn how that works, either, but later, later ...

We have to spend less; that's OK, we have nothing to spend. We have to generate less stuff; that's OK, too because nobody will buy it. And yet the tension between environmentalism and economic collapse emerges as soon as you start to think about anything longer term than next week; people talking about the economy do so in cycles. Nobody's saying it won't be painful, but the aim is recovery, a return to the status quo before we, inevitably, mess it all up again. We want a correction, we can't live like delinquents all our lives, spending money as if it were just theoretical notches on valueless bits of plastic ... well, some of us can live like that, but we can't all live like that. And yet we don't want a total reversal. We cannot all start saving, business will seize up completely and we'll be mired in this for years. Nevertheless, we need to rediscover the mind-set that leads people to save instead of spend: rediscover it, and then not listen to it. It would help if we were all doing different things, if I knew you were saving, I could offset you by buying a car.

Such sharing of valuable information is the kind of thing the internet is meant to be good for, and yet I know nothing of anybody's spending patterns. I don't think I'm being deliberately naive: there is genuine complication here, the opposite of greenness, which is not complicated at all. That is a straightforward, just stop it. Stop spending, stop importing, stop travelling, just stop doing all this stuff. Take all that energy you once used to get to Marbella to grow a lettuce. You will probably even get a tan, but only on the back of your neck and the bit where your vest doesn't meet your trousers. These two ponies aren't pulling the same trap after all, these ponies are having a fight. I wonder what that looks like; probably somebody in Hyde Park during the war could have told us.

I was amazed to discover that there are 100,000 people on the allotment waiting list. I've ummed and aahed for ages thinking of a way to say this, but there's only one: it must be all almost-old people. Mate, I am as soul sick as you are of people surveying their own generation via dinner parties, but I have canvassed all my friends and all my sister's friends which - I can verify with the aid of Facebook - verify is nearly 300 people (some of whom are the same), and the closest we have to an allotment is the following: one couple has a wormery; one has a field attached to her house in the country, but she is so unusual she has already been in Sainsbury's magazine. "She had her kids at 24," my sister said, as though the interjection of this knowledge said it all.

This person - I do know her name but I feel bad dropping it. I feel that she belongs to supermarket chain - had already broken the trammels of convention, and leapt into the future, by having children earlier than, I don't know, 34. No wonder she grows her own foodstuffs. She probably powers her shower through a solar panel made out of a radiator. Other than that, it's just a load of people with "living" basil on their windowsill (it's not alive, just eat the bloody thing and put it out of its misery).

All my uncles have an allotment, but if you have to wait until your 60s, well, that is an incredibly long waiting list. You could get into the MCC or the Groucho sooner than that, though at least on an allotment you will never be swindled by a tycoon or offered coke by Keith Allen. Something else to bear in mind, if you do put your name down, though I should point out there will be 100,000 people before you, is that the yield on a plot of land is always bigger than you expect. My uncle Richard always says, "Do you want some asparagus?" I always say, "Yes", and then he'll give me, like, a crate of it. Like it's fallen off the back of a lorry. I always feel like I'm being fenced.

For nearly 10 years, I've been trying to devise the quintessential Guardian-reader whinge, which I could then make into a badge, and I would no longer have to carry around or even read the Guardian. And it just crept up on me. "My family went environmental, and now I've got too much asparagus!"