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

Allotment weather and first steps on the plot

Well what a weekend! Blazing sun on Saturday, enough to burn even the most well sun-creamed allotmenteer’s nose, gales and rain on Sunday, and a Monday of persistent rain, mist and misery. We’re in a bit of a finger’s crossed situation, we won’t know until this evening whether our temporary (old sheet) windbreak actually help up through the vicious weather, and my big fear is not just that it blew down, but that it scythed its way across several neighbouring allotments, taking the tops off people’s Brussels Sprouts and wrecking their bean wigwams as it went!

We’ve got tomatoes to be planted out, once the weather settles (assuming it ever does) plus some beans, although the peas have been dire this year once again – either Sussex doesn’t like peas or peas don’t like germinating for us, I’m not sure which! We were going to try a special local variety this year, but we forgot (as usual) and by the time we went to buy them, they’d sold out.

We’ve also got to move a water butt that will (eventually) take the water from the shed guttering to give us a lovely, reasonably constant source of irrigation, and some wood to make fences. It’s difficult, to be honest, to know where to start – plant up as much as possible, then worry about structural things like paths and walls, or work on the structure first, and then plant up once we’re sure the plot will be somewhat protected and easy to get around. We’re open to good advice, if people want to offer some!

Labels: allotment-planting, allotment-watering, allotment-windbreaks, new-allotment