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The Allotment Book
Andi Clevely
A practical guide to creating and enjoying your own perfect plot
This book is dedicated with love to Ruth Prentice, who devised the idea. Nice one!
Table of Contents
I vividly remember as a child helping my mother to dig up the new potatoes in our garden and being amazed that the one potato we had planted had produced so many baby potatoes. I also remember the delight of helping to pick the strawberries, which included eating as many as I put in the punnet.
The many bonuses of being brought up with a productive garden was not only the abundance of fruit and vegetables but also the fact that, because my mother was a fantastic cook, the house was often filled with the aroma of wonderful food. This was most prevalent at harvest time when she made jellies, jams and chutneys, which we used throughout the winter months and which she also gave as Christmas presents to friends and family.
Crowned the ‘queen of herbs’ by Jamie Oliver and one of Rick Stein’s food heroes, Jekka McVicar is the UK’s leading organic herb grower. Her family-run organic herb farm now grows over 500 varieties and holds the largest collection of culinary and medicinal herbs in the country. In addition to managing the farm business, Jekka is a regular TV and radio presenter and has published several successful books on growing herbs, raising plants from seed and cooking with flowers. This picture shows Jekka at work on the farm with her dog Hampton (also known as Mutty). Visit her website at: www.jekkasherbfarm.com.
I have been lucky enough to re-create these fond memories for my own children with a vegetable plot for which they have sown the seeds and harvested the crop. Growing your own vegetables and fruit not only gives you control of what you and your children eat but also the goodness of delicious fresh produce and the added bonus of fresh air, good fun and great exercise.
In this beautiful book, Andi Clevely captures the essence of the allotment, showing how it is a relaxing and sociable way to garden, and a great opportunity to meet fellow gardeners, young and old. You are guaranteed the sharing of fresh food, expertise, gossip, fun and friendship, which goes to prove that the allotment is a microcosm of today’s society without walls. More importantly, this book is teeming with valuable information based on the experience that Andi has gained over the years in his garden and on his allotment; this includes seed germination times, average yields and his recommended varieties of fruit and vegetables. He also demystifies gardening terminology and gives good basic down-to-earth information on dealing with pests and diseases, making this book relevant for both the novice and the connoisseur.
With this book I defy anyone not to enjoy the wonderful world of the allotment, from the soil to the table.
Pause for a while as you walk around your allotment, and reflect. All land has a hidden history and, unless the site is very new, you will be treading in the footsteps of previous tenants, possibly going back for generations.
Other hands turned the same soil before you, sowing seeds, tending rows of plants and harvesting produce from the piece of earth that is now yours. The biography of any allotment plot is an intimate tale of dreams and necessities, success and failure that, in most cases, is sadly unrecorded but cherished privately as part of everyday personal or family memories. The background to allotment gardening as a unique and important social movement is more clearly charted. Its origins can vary widely from one community or country to another, but common to all is the need for access to other people’s land by those with none of their own. The word ‘allotment’ means portion, in this context a rented allocation of ground, together with conditions of tenure and use that will vary depending on the owner or the culture.
The right to dig The earliest allocations were often acts of charity or benevolence, aimed at addressing poverty and hunger and the costs of relieving these misfortunes. The situation was gravest wherever ancient local traditions and conventions allowing people to cultivate common land and to pasture animals had been eroded by the rich and powerful. In Britain for example, almost from the Norman Conquest onwards, landowners had steadily enclosed land, evicting its inhabitants and dismantling well-established local subsistence economies and their elaborate heritage of safeguards, and in the process producing a whole class of rural dispossessed.
Outrage boiled over into action in 1649 when the Diggers, a group of hungry victims of recession, took over waste land in a mass trespass and began to sow it with beans, carrots, parsnips and wheat. One of their leaders, Gerrard Winstanley, called passionately on ‘the common people to manure and work upon the common lands’ and insisted all should have the ‘right to dig’, a sentiment still heard wherever urban radicals invade unused land with the intention of growing food.
Although quickly dispersed by the Government of the time, the Diggers gave direction and powerful moral impetus to the general claim to land. They turned a fundamental urgent need to fill empty bellies into political principles of social rights and economic equality that gathered support as discontent grew. Their protest gradually provoked a response, at first local and individual – a few far-sighted landlords supplied their labourers with plots for cultivation – and then more generally as crucial legislation was passed. This culminated in 1845 with the General Inclosure Act, which made the provision of allotments for the working poor mandatory throughout Britain.
Elsewhere in the world similar sequences of necessity and challenge or confrontation can be traced, often leading to land seizure or allocation, events