Why allotment life is still a little


piece of heaven by Elizabeth Ware


When Belinda Hayes, started growing vegetables at an allotment near Southampton 11 years ago, there were enough vacant plots for new tenants to choose whichever plot they preferred.


Today, Weston Allotments has a waiting list and, like waiting lists all around the country, it is getting longer.


According to a recent survey, 20 per cent more people are putting their names down for allotments this year than last. Interest in allotments has grown so much in recent years that some are now opening to visitors under the National Garden Scheme. Why this sudden increase in popularity?


Is it simply, as a recent Daily Telegraph article suggested, that growing our own vegetables ticks all the healthy living boxes in terms of diet, exercise and low carbon footprints? Or does having our own patch of land to tend provide us with something more?


Two of Belinda’s fellow allotment tenants, Edna and Ray Jones, are a great advertisement for the benefits of growing your own vegetables. This brother and sister team may be well into their 80s but they look much younger.


They’ve been involved with the Weston site for more than 80 years. Edna remembers riding there on the bar of their


father’s bicycle. They still have his signed and sealed Allotment Tenancy Agreement from the 1920s. After their father’s early death, their mother continued to grow fruit and vegetables at Weston, always hoping to win the Hampshire Federation Trophy for the best allotment.


Allotment chairman Belinda Hayes - she never takes her mobile with her to the allotment


Today, Edna and Ray each have their own beautifully kept plots which they work on together every afternoon. Their meticulous planning and hard work consistently


pay off. They have won the much coveted Trophy 11 times. Their mother would have been very proud.


Their father was a baker and worked a night-shift. He would come home in the early morning to see his family and then go off to the allotment for a few hours before he went to bed. Edna is sure that the pleasure his allotment gave him was not just about producing fruit and vegetables for his family.


It


was also a place where he could escape from the pressures of home and work and enjoy some peace and tranquillity.


Edna and Ray Jones’ allotment where they work together almost every afternoon


Eighty years ago, the allotments were surrounded by farmland and didn’t have a water supply. Water had to be carried a quarter of a mile uphill from local ponds. Ray remembers hearing skylarks overhead and watching birds nesting in the hedges dotted around the site. Today, things are rather different. There is an active committee that keeps everything running smoothly. There is running water, toilets and a shop on site. The skylarks have gone and some of the old allotments have been lost to housing. The problems with jays and rabbits that Ray remembers from his childhood may have disappeared but the vegetables are still attacked. Now it is by the urban equivalent: pigeons and mice!


30


Country Gardener


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