French allotments encore!

Okay, so what do the French think of British allotments? They think we are very poor gardeners! Seriously, my afternoon talking to the veg growers of the Aude region produced the information that the British not only can’t cook, they can’t grow either. The elderly ladies and gents who told me this had three pieces of evidence for their beliefs:

• The British who live in France buy their seeds in supermarkets instead of saving them from the previous year’s crop
• They dig up small family vineyards and lay grass for their children and dogs to play on
• They turn root cellars into games rooms, under-house garages or bathrooms.

I found it very difficult to argue with any of this! I’ve no doubt that most Brits in France don’t buy ALL their seeds in supermarkets but do a lot of purchasing by mail order (as I had a packet of pepper seeds from the Carrefour supermarket in my bag at that very moment I felt rather guilty, but hey, they were half the price of the same seed in England!), and I’m absolutely certain that most of us, presented with a vineyard the size of a tablecloth and a complex set of rules for cooperative wine production, would prefer a bit of lawn. Equally, unless you know what a root cellar is, you probably do think it’s a dark bit of wasted space in your newly purchased home.

But I don’t think we’re as bad as we’re painted. I argued that everybody I could see in the jardins ouvriers was at least seventy, while on my allotment site we had vegetable growers in their early twenties, their thirties, forties and fifties too, not just retired folk. I explained that perhaps French allotment holders would find our system complicated to understand and opt for growing what they were used to at home, rather than parsnips and other British favourites. I don’t think I convinced anyone, but it was a fascinating discussion, the outcome of which was to persuade me that this year, to keep faith with the French, I must harvest my own seed for next year …

Labels: allotment-abroad, allotment-france, allotment-seed-bed, allotment-vineyard

Allotments – a la francais

As promised, French allotments! I was lucky enough to meet a group while I was in Castelnaudary who are more or less what you could call an allotment association, although they are nothing like what we call one.

To understand French vegetable growing for the kitchen, you have to understand something about French inheritance laws. It was once the case that any land owned by a father was divided equally between his children. This meant that farms were constantly subdivided, and sold back and forth between siblings if they wanted to keep the land together. In towns, something different happened. Where land surrounded a house (which often also had outbuildings and stables) it also was divided between children. As the land was built on and new houses encroached on the divided garden, many people ended up with a separate garden, sometimes on the other side of the road! These small gardens in isolated areas between houses are often mistaken for allotments by English visitors. The true French allotment or jardin ouvrier (workers garden) dates from 1896 when they were set up to give factory workers ‘a taste of nature’ – isn’t that nice? Anyway, like our own allotments they fell in number. There were around 800,000 at the end of the second world war but by the 1970s only 150,000 were still in existence. Now they are on the rise again.

This photo is of a jardin non-attenant – or detached garden, of the first kind, which is owned partly by the houses that back onto it, and partly by the houses on the other side of the road. As you can see, it fronts a river, and there are some ingenious systems in use to raise river water by pump siphons to irrigate the land. Other than that, it looks just like an allotment to me!

Labels: allotment-abroad, allotment-irrigation, allotment-styles, allotment-watering, french-allotment