I do not have an allotment. I sort of wish that I did but I do not think that I have the time, the knowledge or the staying power to make a go of it. Well, that’s my excuse anyhow…
But I do lots of vicarious allotment gardening – mainly thanks to my good friend Sarah Langton Lockton, ‘garden lady’ at the The Lady magazine. Her well worked allotment provides us with delicious salads and vegetables for our monthly jigsaw evenings, not to mention snippets of juicy allotment gossip!
I therefore feel quite entitled to get steamed when a ‘planning initiative’ threatens some well loved and well worked clutch of allotment gardens – providing real, fresh (unprocessed and horsemeat-polluted….) food for local residents.
That is what is happening in Watford at Farm Terrace where 65 allotments have flourished on an ex-sewage farm site since 1896. Developers are promising new plots and a community garden two miles away in return for turning Farm Terrace into a new ‘health campus’ and housing – but do we believe that this will really be an improvement?
Well, the very active Farm Terrace Allotments Society certainly does not think so. They are fighting hard to save their allotments – currently applying for them to be designated a ‘community asset’. You can check out more at their website – www.farmterrace.btck.co.uk. Nor does John Walker of Hartley Botanicals – check in here for his informed and impassioned defence of Farm Terrace and allotments in general. Then, if you are convinced, you can, like me, vote on the 38 degrees website to support their campaign.
Voted! I’d love to have one too, one day, but am too busy and lazy in equal measures. Only a few left in my village now too. Such a shame.
When we retire?……. The trouble is that the waiting lists are so long that if I wait until I finally get round to retiring, if ever, I will be ready to be put under it, not work it!!!
Er, did anyone else there notice the mention of ‘jigsaw evenings’…?! Sounds like a very thinly-veiled excuse for wine to me 🙂
Organic red sharpens the focus – didn’t you know?….
If they have been going since 1896 why the heck should some developer come along and think they have a better title to the land. Clearly an alternative plot two miles away is no alternative at all. Communities develop organically and trying to shift this one two miles down the road – were it to happen – is no alternative at all. They should move the ‘campus’ two miles down the road.