National Trust Allotment anyone?

Well the news this weekend is that the great and the good are being asked to turn over some ‘spare’ land to help families grow fruit and veg. Tim Smit, founder of the Eden project, has thrown his support behind the scheme which has a twofold focus of improving health and cutting carbon emissions from food imports.

Forgive me if I sound just a bit jaundiced about this. The National Trust is ‘donating’ 1,000 plots of its own land. 1,000 plots. Right.

We’ve got over 300 plots on our allotment site alone. Our waiting list is about four years long, even with us dividing standard plots in two. 1,000 plots. That’s not even a drop in the ocean – it’s paltry. Nice word, paltry. I should use it more often.

Those nice folks at British Waterways, who manage the UK canal network, are also giving some land (funnily enough they are also giving allotment land to the 2012 allotment creation initiative being run by London Mayor, Boris Johnson, hope it’s not the same plots being counted twice) and even turning some barges into floating gardens apparently, and Tesco, B&Q and Suttons are giving free plants and seeds.

But back to the National Trust – it’s created plots at 40 of its sites, which will become available over the next three years via the campaign’s website, Eat Seasonably

Now I've got the hang of this - 40 plots over three years is 13 plots a year, so we should have all 1,000 by ...2085. Hurrah!

The website will also have “veg doctors” drawn from the 390,000 members of the Royal Horticultural Society and Garden Organic who will give advice to the plot holders: that should be fun, giving 39 experts per NT plot – nobody should be short of advice then, even if they’re a bit short of places to put it into action. And for folk unable to obtain proper allotments (ie most of the population) those experts will be able to help you turn window sills, terraces or urns into vegetable patches. Urns. Sounds like we’re expected to invade the local funeral director’s office and fill his memorial pots with sunflower seeds.

In other news, our kale is off to a roaring start and it is just possible I got out of bed in a bad mood this morning – normal sunny service will be resumed as soon as I’ve had some toast and honey.

Labels: allotment-kale, allotment-waiting-list, garden organic, national-trust-allotment, royal horticultural society

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