With all the interest in allotment gardening I thought it would be nice to have a bit of a review of some of the essentials for the novice gardener.

This is a Bokashi compost bucket. The idea is that you put your kitchen scraps in the bucket with a sprinkle of Bokashi fairy dust. There’s a lovely range of Bokashi stuff available with a particularly attractive starter pack of two buckets and a bag of the Bokashi formula for just ninety quid, or a big bag of the jollop for just sixty five quid. Just google “Bokashi bucket". Alternatively you can use a bucket from the pound shop, and if you want to help the compost heap along just piss on it.

Next time I’ll be looking at raised beds.

I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.

And is there anything more English than an allotment, and what’s more, an allotment with a shed on it!

As an actual war-cry I’d guess Whitman’s Yawp! was closer to reality, but there’s no denying the courage and resolve evoked by Shakespeare’s Henry V before the half-breached walls of Harfleur.

I think about the one hundred thousand people on allotment waiting lists in England, waiting with modest stillness and humility, and I wonder that now’s not the time for them to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, and do something about winning more allotments, because if there’s one tenant waiting for every three that’ve got one, then the game’s afoot.

It’s game-on after that nice bit of rain and the weeds are off to a good start. This is the over-wintering onions, and they’re not doing very well. I put them in rather late - middle of November I think, and that’s six weeks of root growth they didn’t make to get them through the winter. I lost most of them, but what’s left is worth saving because they should make good onions.

Troublesome weeds in this bed are the purple dead nettle which sets seed again very quickly, and a mat of tiny things that I think are tansy [Edit: actually it’s probably feverfew] {Edit: no, mugwort]. One year’s seed is seven years weed is so true.

Eat Seasonably is the first initiative from We Will If You Will, a consortium of the great and good inspired by a challenge from Gordon Brown:

I believe there is even greater scope for business and the voluntary sector to work with Government to mobilise individuals to take action. So I have asked Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust and Ian Cheshire of B&Q to recommend how this might be achieved.

Gordon Brown November, 2007

It brings together Landshare, who are connecting people who want to grow their own with the land to do it, and both the RHS and Garden Organic, who are organising advice for all the new gardeners.

And to give us all something to aim for they’re encouraging every single one of us to get together with friends and neighbours over lunch on Sunday July 19th and have an afternoon of fun and games. It’s absolutely brilliant. It has to be far and away the most concerted effort to get us into our gardens and allotments since the World War Dig for Victory campaign.

But where does it leave allotments? Gardens let through Landshare will be allotment-like, but mostly they won’t actually be allotments. There are other successful forms of cooperative agriculture for sure, but the allotment movement has almost two hundred years of history and development and it’s only the allotment movement that has the capacity and tradition to make the initiative self-sustaining.

So what are the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners doing, and what are the Parish Councils doing?

By slothful neglect a building will be brought low: and by idleness of the hands the house will fall to pieces.

The RHS are auditioning for the Voice of Wisley tomorrow (Wednesday). They already know that talking to your plants makes them grow better but they want to find out what kind of voice does this best, and they’ll be testing a variety of texts from prose and poetry to nursery rhymes. You’re invited to audition tomorrow at Wisley between 10.00am and 2.00pm, just turn up at the gate and say your there for the Voice of Wisley - but you still have to pay to get in!

I’m a little cautious about the idea. I can see that it could have applications in agriculture where a field-trialled voice could be played in commercial greenhouses, but successful recordings won’t be cheap. The commercial success is likely to encourage allotmenteers to experiment, and that’s going to be quite hit or miss. Take the Mediterranean vegetables; address aubergine, courgette and peppers in polite English tones and they’ll just ignore you, become insistent and thier growth will slow to a standstill. Then there’s the question of language: Few of our vegetables are English natives. For example, French beans are going to be ill-disposed to encouragements in English, but anything other than an perfect French diction will set them back drastically.

Ohayo gozaimasu, O genki desu ka?

It does however raise the possibility of the technique being used as a non-chemical herbicide. For example, Japanese Knot Weed is very hard to eradicate conventionally, but greet it with familiarity and over time it will find the shame unbearable.

Ten years has made a big difference on allotments. Pre-Hamilton dinosaurs are all but spent, this is the age of the post-Hamilton allotmenteer, conditioned by BSE, H5N1, salmonella, and foot and mouth scares; awake to the reality of anthropogenic climate change; and motivated by a flange of TV personalities.

I find myself a little concerned about where this is all taking the allotment movement. I’m pleased that so many folk are discovering the pleasure of growing their own, but it’s changing allotmenteering and I don’t want that to happen.

Councils are responding to the shortage of supply and increase in demand by making allotments more expensive. They’re also making allotment plots much smaller - two poles isn’t unusual where ten poles was the rule. That obviously limits how much you can grow, but it’s also changing allotment tradition because ponds, lawns, flowers, and sheds, are being squeezed out, sometimes by allotmenteer choice, sometimes through regulation by the council.

What we need is more allotments. Lots more. Received wisdom is that allotmenteering is popular, but all that means is that for the first time in ages there are waiting lists. Thing is there are only something like 300 thousand plots nationally, whereas there were almost 1.5 million plots after the war so the current popularity is nothing like where it needs to be. We need a serious dig-for-victory campaign - at least a doubling of allotment provision in the next three years, and that’s just the start.

But who’s leading the allotment movement? The National Society Allotment Leisure Gardeners? Hardly, they’re just a bunch of tired old codgers sitting on their hands. The National Allotments Gardens Trust? Oh, mercy! The Allotments Regeneration Initiative? They’re a possibility, but I can’t see that they’re doing anyting other than spending their funny money. There’s now the South West Counties Allotments Association, the new voice of the allotment movement, and a new voice it needs, but they’re not it, at least not yet. It’s a problem, there isn’t any organised movement, and we need one now more than ever.