Allotments

By Jane Eastoe

An allotment is one of the best – and cheapest ways – of getting hold of valuable gardening space to grow you own. Plus it offers one of the most relaxing atmospheres with the chance to mix with fellow gardeners. Your allotment can provide enough fruit, veg and herbs to feed most small families (and cut flowers to adorn the kitchen table) – produce that will taste and look much better than anything shop bought.

Jane Eastoe guides you through allotment life, from how to find an allotment, how to plan one out, what to grow, crop rotation, how to store your harvest plus some of the best recipes so you enjoy the fruits of your labour. Great gardening information is given for each crop – the obvious to the not so obvious – from potatoes and carrots to aubergines and chillies. What to grow when, what to grow where plus a calendar of work for the laziest to the most energetic allotment holder.

With all the details on the cost of having an allotment, self-management, and protecting your allotment, this is the easiest guide to getting starting on allotment life. In addition to all the practical gardening techniques, this eBook has background information on local authority control, self-management options, and how to protect your allotment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781907892707

Jane Eastoe

Jane Eastoe has been a journalist and author for over 35 years. She loves dogs of all shapes and sizes, but particularly her pet whippets. She is the author of several books including Whippets, Labradors, Dachshunds, and French Bulldogs. She lives in Northumberland.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Fresh and delicious organic fruit and vegetables, plus armfuls of cut flowers, are the best advertisement for running your own allotment. Nothing beats the self-satisfied glow that comes from growing your own food and cooking it for family and friends. As television cook and organic campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall puts it: ‘I have not the least doubt that I am a better cook and a happier person for having absorbed the rhythm of the growing year.’

The fantastic thing about allotments is that they enable us to realise this Good Life fantasy. Gardens are generally too small for anything other than a small nod to fruit and veg cultivation, whereas an allotment, theoretically at least, is designed to allow you to grow sufficient produce to feed your family for a year.

Running an allotment in this day and age is unlikely to be the only thing standing between your family and starvation; however, the cost savings are considerable. Seasoned allotment holders try not to buy vegetables as a point of principle, so, aside from their annual allotment rental and the cost of seeds or plants, there is no outlay. Rising food prices, allied to global food shortages and the guilt of food miles, all combine to make the allotment package more attractive.

COMMUNITY SPIRIT

An allotment also has benefits beyond food production; these plots of land are home to intensely supportive and friendly communities. People will proffer advice, hand over seeds, divide plants, help you dig, entertain your children, throw a barbecue and give away their greens. While there may be a small element of competition – who has grown the biggest pumpkins, the tallest sunflowers or the straightest carrots – this is an egalitarian community where designer labels have no place and where old-fashioned values of ingenuity, sharing and creative make-do-and-mend are celebrated instead. At best allotments are physical demonstrations of sustainable living, forging a new role within the community that involves all generations, from schoolchildren to pensioners. Allotments today are also green corridors that provide shelter for wildlife.

The physical benefits are huge; gardening on this scale will help to keep you fit as well as providing a balm for the soul. Weight-loss aside, stress, tension, anger and frustration can all be eased with a little double digging and there is nothing more soothing than the quiet and gentle activity of picking your own beans, peas, raspberries and asparagus. How can things not feel a little better when life is taken back to basics in this very real way?

Children relish allotment life and what better environment for them to start to learn gardening? You would be advised to keep some toys there and perhaps make a little space for a sand pit with a lid – the space needs to be fun for them if they are to let you get on with your work. Please remember that allotments can be dangerous places for small children – other gardeners may well leave pieces of broken glass propped up for use as required, chemicals or secateurs may not always be put away and water butts are terribly inviting if you are small.

THE RIGHT TO DIG

The practical need for man to till the soil is part of our common history – we have always required small areas of land for food production – and for centuries there has been an ongoing struggle between those who control the land and those who are desperate to use it. The Saxons were able to clear land and hold it for common usage, but after the Norman conquests, land ownership was chiefly in the hands of the crown, the nobility and the church. With various enclosure acts, problems became more acute. The first mention of ‘allotted’ land comes from late in the reign of Elizabeth I when allotments of land were attached to tenant cottages in recompense for the repossession of common land.

In 1649 one Gerrard Winstanley led a group of hungry men in protest that the common people of England had been robbed of their birthrights by the Normans. They took over common land in St George’s Hill, Surrey in a mass protest and became known as ‘Diggers’. With food prices at an all-time high, they began, scandalously, to cultivate it. Winstanley claimed that all men had a ‘right to dig’. He argued that if the common people of England would form themselves into self-supporting communes there would be no place in society for the ruling classes; all men, he said, were equal. The movement spread and although the growing of peas and beans seems mild enough, the Diggers were subdued. Nevertheless, the basic ‘right to dig’ concept still holds true today.

In the Industrial Revolution thousands abandoned the subsistence way of life and relocated to the cities to work in factories, but many were facing starvation and had no land on which to grow their own food. The General Enclosure Act of 1845 recognised that provision should be made for the landless poor in the form of field gardens – these were to be limited in size to ¹⁄4 acre (0.1 hectare). In reality there was little land made available, and even that was largely confined to rural areas. Nonetheless, the act marks the start of the Allotment Movement.

THE FIRST ALLOTMENTS

In 1887 the allotments and cottage gardens compensation for crops act forced local authorities to provide land for allotments if there was a demand for them. the small holding and allotments act of 1908 further imposed responsibilities on the parish and local councils to provide land if required, a principle that still holds true today. Significantly, the victorians introduced a small levy to be charged annually to allotment holders, to avoid the stigma that such land was only for the poor. The popular view was that allotments were to be encouraged: not only did they prevent starvation, they kept people busy and out of the ale house.

Food shortages during World War One saw the demand for allotments increase. Councils were finally forced to make proper land provision where none previously existed. The railway companies, who held small pockets of wasteland along their tracksides, allotted this to railway workers so that it could be put to productive use. Many still remain, a legacy of those years, when the number of working plots increased from 600,000 to 1,500,000. After the Great War the demand for allotments fell and parcels of land were clawed back and used for housing.

DIG FOR VICTORY

The pattern was to be repeated in World War Two when German blockades effectively hit food imports – it was quickly apparent that food shortages would become acute. The Dig for Victory campaign encouraged everyone to turn over their gardens to food production, no matter how small, and allotments were fully utilised – even public parks were used to grow food. The nation rose to the challenge and it has been estimated that some 1.4 million allotments produced 1.3 million tonnes of produce – one fifth of the nation’s food. Nella Last took part in the Mass Observation project (social research set up to study everyday life) and her diary entry for Sunday, 16 March, 1941 highlights the change of attitude:

‘After tea, my husband said, I’m going to do a bit of gardening – I’ve an onion bed to make. He spoke so importantly that I chuckled to myself. He is planning and talking of what he will plant – so much better than when I had to coax and bully him to get a few cabbages.’

Demand for land after the war resulted in The Allotment Act of 1950, which recommended a provision of 4 acres (1.6 hectares) of land per one thousand head of population. Food rationing continued until 1954, which ensured that

Reviews for Allotments

[dlga_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A superb book from The National Trust, what you would expect from the old Trust.No puffing out with fancy pictures , sound advice all at a very reasonable price to boot.But it still didn't help me with the rabbits eating my black kale..... I must try one of the other books in this series, maybe to clobber them with as a last resort, but that would be disrespectful to these excellent books.