Allotment clearing, tours and planning

We are planning for next year. Several people have talked to us about the ‘seven-crop’ system and it makes a lot of sense. Basically you just grow seven key crops that you know you’ll eat.

Hmmm … except we already have nine raised beds, which would just become nine weedbeds, if we didn’t keep them full of something.

Perhaps we need to buy a lot of weed suppressant and just cover up a lot of the plot? Ugly idea but a functional solution. At least it would kill off our thistle army.

Anyway, we’ve decided we didn’t grow enough peas, that we want more potatoes (or a greater variety of potatoes) and that next year we will plant our garden area, so we actually have somewhere to sit down. But that’s as far as we’ve got.

In the interim, we have a series of allotment tours happening next weekend, in both Brighton and Hove (we're Hove, actually) but at present we are very short of takers. You can book here: Allotment tour - it’s free! And we have a fantastic shop selling seeds and tools and so forth.

And that raised a question in my mind. We are constantly being told that there are people wanting to grow their own etc, and our waiting list is VERY long for a plot, so why aren’t people clamouring to come on a tour?

Any answers? I wondered if it was because it’s an outdoor thing and the weather might not be good … but perhaps it’s some kind of communication gap between the allotment and the general public. I really don’t understand – I thought people would be chewing our arms off for a tour, and I wish I could find out why we aren’t getting much take-up.

Labels: allotment crops, allotment-tour, allotment-weeds

Allotment Tours and Site Inspections

My allotment site has several new site representatives – they are each responsible for visiting and reporting back on a block of allotments. Because I’m also pretty new, I grabbed the chance to go round with them, as our Site Supervisor showed them allotments that met the various categories we use for inspections:
*100% = an allotment in full cultivation
*75% = the standard every allotment should meet after it’s been in cultivation by a tenant for 6-9 months (depending on the season) where three-quarters of the allotment should be in cultivation
*Weed notice = a plot that hasn’t been adequately cultivated
*Termination notice = this happens after three weed notices have been issued or when some other circumstance means that the tenant has broken their tenancy agreement.

Of course we, like most allotment volunteers, don’t actually get to issue any notices – that’s done by the council who own the land on which we grow our crops. So sometimes a site rep will ask for a weed notice, or a termination, and the council will issue that notice but then the tenant will write to the Council and manage to get the decision reversed. This can cause grief on the site, where neighbours may have been complaining for months about weeds or trees or rubbish, and expecting their site rep to ‘sort it out’, only to find the rep has been overruled by the Council. On the other hand, sometimes the Council gets information we’re not privy to, for example when an allotment tenant has a long term illness to contend with but still hopes to return to full health and to their plot – and obviously, nobody wants to remove one of their incentives to recovery by taking away their allotment!

So it’s a bit of a balancing act. As an example, one gent has been asked to cut down trees that are preventing other allotments getting their fair share of sun. On our site, the rule is no trees over 2 metres in height. He’s cut the trees on one plot, but he has another plot on which the trees are still full height … so we start the process all over again.

It’s been fascinating to take the site rep tour, and it’s given me a new insight into how difficult it can be to solve the problem of an ever-increasing waiting list alongside the current tenant’s rights to deal with their plot as they choose. And I’m glad that I’m only the Secretary …

(And in case you're wondering, this plot would be given a weed notice!)

Labels: allotment-site-representative, allotment-termination, allotment-tour, allotment-waiting-list