I'm really keen on the idea of getting an allotment. Food prices are rising at an alarming rate (even boring old rice has gone up 63% since last year) and with the price of oil well past $100 per barrel, it's likely that things will only get worse.
There's a long waiting list for most of the allotments in Lewes, although as most of them are occupied by elderly men the turnover must be quite high. All I need is a very cold winter. Also, I would imagine that if the supposedly forthcoming economic recession really takes off, councils will be under more pressure to provide plots of land.
I once ran an allotment with three men I used to meet in my local pub in Twickenham. It was a disaster. One of the men was a very left-wing politics lecturer and wanted to instigate five-year plans and quotas. The second man was from a moneyed background and his only experience of gardening was watching labourers toiling away on his parents' land. The third man was obsessed with potatoes.
If we'd spent more time digging and less time planning and arguing, our allotment might have been a success. Sadly, in the case of allotments, democracy doesn't always work. I shan't make the same mistake again.
2 comments:
Well Mrs Self and I are taking our first tentative steps into growing our own, in a very minor way. Pots, tomato plants, courgette seeds and free carrot seeds we got with a Boden catalogue...
We put the tomato plants out last Tuesday and when we got up on Wednesday three of them were dead. It didn't say on the box that it was too cold to put them out in April...
As an Australian, I was always intrigued by the idea of allotments. Here people used to just have big backyards they grew food in, though now they're all being subdivided to fit 3 houses on one block, with no room for gardens. It seemed odd to be able to trust people to not mess with your growings when they're not just outside your house for you to keep an eye on them.
My wife and I would love to start growing our own vegetables (we do still have a backyard), but Adelaide's in an ongoing many-year drought with heavy water restrictions, so it seems a bad time to start.
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