The Plot Thickens

How green is your allotmenting? We all garden for a variety of reasons. For me it’s physical exercise that I enjoy, I get to meet people with similar interests, the produce I grow is better than shop-bought because it’s fresher and a variety bred for taste and I know that it’s had nothing harmful sprayed on it. I think it also satisfies a primitive need to be in touch with the land. And maybe I have a thing for Felicity Kendal, who knows.

But it’s becoming increasingly obvious, to gardeners especially, that human activity is having a negative effect on the planet and, encouraged by Friends of the Earth to “think global act local", I’ve thought about how what I do on my allotment affects the wider environment and what I might do differently.

Slug Pellets

They kill birds. It’s one of the joys when I’m digging to have the Black Birds and Robins for company and that background music is just so comfortable. I’ve never used slug pellets. I grow Kestrel and Princess potatoes which aren’t bothered by slugs and I haven’t found that anything else I grow is, other than losing one or two runner beans and the odd sickly courgette seedlings. I tried growing French beans from seed and they all got eaten so I just don’t grow French beans.

Peat

Farming the peat destroys precious habitat so it’s just not an option. Problem is that the non-peat composts just aren’t as good, though they are improving.

Water

Summers like this year just add insult to injury, but water really is an increasingly precious resource. The key is retaining what water there is, so plenty of organic matter is essential in our light soil. Light watering can encourage plants to root shallow so leaving off the water can be a good strategy because the roots are forced to go down looking for water. My Dad always fill the bean trench with compost over the winter to make a reservoir. Some commercial potato variety only bulk-up well if irrigated so just avoid these varieties. And mulching with last year’s compost is good for retaining the moisture.

Paths

A nice straight grass path looks lovely but unless it’s cut with a push mower the fuel to power the mower is just producing greenhouse gas. Surfacing the path with wood chippings on an underlay is a possibility, and you don’t have the problem of twitch growing into the plot from the path.

Pesticides

The list of pesticides that are known to be completely benign is now pretty short, and even then it’s still working against nature and nature has a funny way of redressing that balance with plagues of lady birds or hover flies or whatever. If it needs a pesticide I just don’t bother growing it or it has to struggle on. Overwintered broad beans and good because they make their growth early and you just nip the growing point out when the black fly arrive because they don’t affect any other part of the plant.

GM Plants

I’m not convinced about the problems with GM myself, but while there are concerns it would seem to be the neighbourly thing to avoid GM varieties for the sake of those who are saving their own seed. In any event, the strength of GM is when they’re grown commercially in combination with tailored herbicides so GM doesn’t have much of a role an the allotment anyway.

Visual

I’m a big, big supporter of traditional allotment values and that basically means untidy. Unfortunately, not everyone shares my appreciation of the vernacular. Being a good neighbor is important so covering the whole site in polytunnels maybe wouldn’t be nice, but on this one I have to say that if you find allotments untidy then just look away - it’s in the nature of allotments to contain crappy tin sheds, wobbly paths and plots covered in carpet. Actually, it’s the obsessive tidying that is destroying biodiversity and cultural heritage so a lived-in look is in.

Smoke

Smoke is a nuisance to neighbours and could be contributing to air pollution and the greenhouse effect, but it could also be destroying resources that should be getting recycles and reused. Basically, if it will rot then compost it because it’s difficult to have too much humus in the sandy Wash Common soil. Any woody stuff will rot eventually but hedge trimmings and fruit canes will takes years. If the site had a chipper that would make it a whol lot easier to compost, but then you have the fossil fuel used to run the chipper so it’s not a clear to me what the best strategy is here. An electric chipper run on green electricity - that would be cool.

Hedge

I love so much about hedges - they look great, they’re a vital habitat, food-source and corridor for wildlife, they can be historically significant, they separate the urban from the country and they have a wealth of cultural importance. So I’d be loath to see the allotment hedge go, but the maintenance uses fossil fuel that a wire fence wouldn’t and chestnut palling would even support the existence of chestnut coppice somewhere so it could be argued that a hedge isn’t the best thing. What it really needs is a way of keeping the hedge trimmed that doesn’t use fossil fuel.

Fertilizer

Heavy use of fertilizer in agriculture has caused problems with run-off and the pollution of water courses but is there really a problem using fertilizer on an allotment? I’ve never been a big fan of the organic movement per se and crops like onions respond well to a bit of growmore so I’ll stick with that for now.

Composting

It’s pretty obvious that every gardener will want a compost heap but there’s a bigger role for allotments to play here. Rather than compostable waste from households going to landfill what if every allotment had a scheme where you just dropped off your bag of peelings as you walked the kids to school. Less landfill, more compost, and a saving on the fossil fuel for the dustcart. It also has wider benefits because it ties the allotment into the wider community rather than it being the skulking abode, cowering behind hedges and locked gates, which is how it can look sometimes.

Pallets

Well, yes, there are a surprising number of uses for unwanted pallets on the allotment. Rather than being burnt or going to landfill pallets make compost bins, staging, raised bed surrounds and excellent sheds.

I have some more ideas but this has been a long post so I’ll leave it there for now. I’d love to hear your comments on any of this.

Famous Shedonist in his Shed

This is Jeremy Bentham, a famous shedonist, in his shed on the Gower Street allotments. Bentham founded the philosophy of utilitarianism which, rather confusingly, says that what matters is not that your shed is useful, but that it makes you happy. Dead-on Jeremy! He spent much of his time chatting with his oppo, John Stuart Mill, who kept pigs on his allotment.

My own shed has seen some good progress this week - I’ll upload the photties soon. It’s mostly clad now and I think the pallets I have are going to be enough to finish it, though I’ll probably need a few more for the matching chicken house. The fascia board is going to have to come off because I can’t nail the cladding with it in place, and this is a headache as it’ll probably damage the sarking and rafters to get it off.

Why Dig?

For the first time in years I’ve actually dug the whole of my plot. I should ‘fess-up - I got one of the many warnings to quit because my plot had gone uncultivated all year. A combination of the dreadful weather after a fantastic April combined with me starting a new job meant I didn’t have the time or opportunity at the crucial time of year and what with one thing and another I just couldn’t be asked to get over there. So I needed to get it dug or else lose it. So I just started one day at the easy end with just a couple of spits. Then the next day the feeling hadn’t left me and I got a couple more spits done and by then I was really getting into it and over the next few weeks I dug through the whole thing, putting in an hour before work and a bit more than that in the evening. And when it was finished I missed the challenge and wanted some more to do. Of course my back was shagged and that took a week to feel OK again, but I’d really enjoyed my digging.

As a kid I’d been fascinated watching out of my infant school window as the tractor turned in the ragged corn stubble and left a wake of shiny brown Essex clay in neat parallel furrows with the sea gulls like a dusting of icing sugar. It’s a comfortable image for me - a reassurance that the cycle continues, that order returns, and a reassurance too I suppose that chaos is also part of the cycle.

And when I dig a lot of the enjoyment is turning in the rubbish and seeing the plot come out clean. But is there actually any horticultural benefit? I’d always assumed there must be but I read that the major reason for ploughing was actually for weed control and not just about getting air into the soil. ploughs were designed to turn the soil in a continuous ribbon, laying it down on the weed growth, and as herbicides took over responsibility for weed control ploughs shares had been redesigned to break up this ribbon and then modern innovation is not to plough at all but to drill the seed straight into the soil with a single pass of a huge machine drawing a train of drills, coulters and harrows.

But I don’t understand how the soil keeps any kind of structure if it isn’t dug, even if it never gets walked on. Roots need oxygen, right? What I’ve seen of domestic no-dig systems involve deep raised beds and that just isn’t practical for me because of all the faff with timber and such, plus you end up taking half the plot up with paths.

I think it’s worth thinking about because in horticultural terms digging might not actually be necessary, despite the physical discomfort, I still find it a comforting thing. I’ll stick with my digging. Thought you might like to hear Famous on the subject:

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

Is an allotment shed just a shed or is it deeper than that.

There’s always been something quintessentially English about the allotment shed for me. My first site was typical with it’s variety of hovels made from panel doors and two-by-four recycled surreptitiously from the ubiquitous skips that littered the Edwardian terraces of Westcliff-on-Sea. Terrace upon terrace of post-war gardeners like my Dad had lined up on the parade ground in national-service khaki and short-back-and-sides, and maybe the allotment was the only place to express individuality. Sure, the cabbages and carrots would all line up like soldiers - it would take the hippy generation to be liberated enough to plant rows of slouching leeks that would mingle anarchically with the lettuce - but in his shed the gardener was king and no Sergent Major had the authority to tell him how to build it.

Styles were obviously dictated by the availability of materials and a functional shed could be fashioned from just four doors with a bit of something covered with felt for a roof. But it wasn’t too difficult to frame something grander with space for an easy chair or two and a stove for the Winter months, and for the Summer evenings a veranda or glazed porch, and all painted in whatever the salvaged materials had worn in their former lives, or else with whatever paint could be had from the same skip. The national-service generation brought back architectural styles from all over the world and in the fertile ground of the allotment site the shed hybridized and grew.

And that’s how it was for years. But the shed is now under threat. There are often regulations about size, height, materials, colour and siting with the local council required to grant permission like you were asking for planning permission for a nuclear waste reprocessing plant. Sometimes shed aren’t allowed at all, though tenants might just be able to rent a concrete locker in a central compound.

It’s not just somewhere to put your saved runner bean seeds and sit for a nip of whisky before Sunday lunch, an allotment shed is about being English in all it’s multicultural shapes and sizes, an unwritten understanding that you can do your own thing if it isn’t offending anyone else.

I’m going to be writing about my allotment shed. I’m making it out of pallets and packing cases so it’s not costing me anything.