The theme for August 2021 is National Allotment Week, from 9-15 August.
This is our focus for this month, as part of our project plant2connect, which has a separate website at:
butwith supporting information provided here.
National Allotment Week
An allotment is a great way to ensure you get a regular supply of fresh fruit and vegetables! Allotments are plots of land given to local community members so they can grow their own fruit and vegetables. The tradition dates back hundreds of years, to when poorer people needed the land as their main source of food. Nowadays you rent an allotment from your local council or a private landlord. The waiting lists for Allotments are long, so if you’re thinking about getting one, then you should apply straight away. Most people who rent them make good use of them.
The picture comes from the Gransnet website, that also provided 7 Good Reasons to Keep an Allotment
1. Exercise
Keeping an allotment is a great form of exercise. From the more intensive clearing process at the beginning (here’s where you ask a family member or two to lend a hand) to the planting and watering later on, this is a brilliant form of exercise because you get to decide the pace.
“My husband and I took took over an allotment earlier this year and after a lot of work digging and clearing we’re now planning what to plant next year.”
“I have a huge allotment which keeps me fit.”
2. You eat more fruit and vegetables…and they’re free of pesticides
If you do your homework and plan your new allotment carefully, before long you’ll have more than enough homegrown, pesticide-free, super-nutritious fruit and vegetables. Whether you’re trying to eat a little healthier or just can’t get enough of fresh peas, getting an allotment is a great way of encouraging a more nutritious diet.
“I always loathed broad beans until a friend with an allotment brought me a bagful of freshly picked beans. I could have dined on the smell alone.”
“We had carrots, parsnips, sweetcorn and potatoes from the allotment for tea tonight and tomatoes from the greenhouse. Followed by homegrown blackberries, which were sweet and juicy.”
“We have lovely lunches of whatever is ready. A typical lunch is beetroot, fennel, courgettes, garlic, onions etc roasted in olive oil and balsamic vinegar with garlic bread to mop up the juices.”
“Each day I’m gathering strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, broad beans, the last of the rhubarb, and a few Bramley apples. I love it when I can pick fruit and vegetables minutes before they’re needed.”
3. Help the environment
Allotments are good for the environment because growing your own food will reduce your personal carbon footprint compared to shop-bought alternatives – and you will limit the packaging used.
Growing organic vegetables will also benefit the environment as you help limit the amount of pesticides and other harmful chemicals in the soil.
4. Sense of community
Keeping an allotment is a great way of making friends. You’ll quickly get a sense of your ‘neighbours’ and the allotment community to which you belong. While there are many joys of allotments, from fresh air to homegrown produce, looking after your little plot makes you an active part of the local community.
“Your new best friends are the other allotment holders. At the one down our road they bulk buy everything you might need and share goods and seeds too.”
5. Routine, project work and daily maintenance
If you have recently retired and struggle a little with the lack of daily tasks and routines, keeping an allotment could be the perfect solution. As well as keeping you busy, maintaining an allotment is a project which requires planning. Seeing a project through from start to finish or, in allotment terms, from clearing to produce can be extremely rewarding.
6. Saves you money
Once you get the hang of things – and your allotment starts to give back – growing your own produce can be a very cost-effective way of living, especially if you grow perennial fruit and vegetables.
“When I see the cost of raspberries in the shops, I think growing our own makes total sense.”
“It’s hard work keeping up with the allotment, so writing down all the lovely fruit and vegetables we get does remind me of why we take the trouble.”
7. Allotments and grandchildren
It’s no secret that children love the magic of DIY and growing your own produce on an allotment is no exception. Get the grandchildren involved in the planting and watering and visit the allotment together every few weeks to check-in on their little projects.
“Produce that is picked and eaten immediately is so much tastier and our grandchildren love picking their own food. They are thrilled during the asparagus season and eat it like sweets. I grow peas in large pots at home for them to eat raw.”
“Recently, my granddaughter was offered some asparagus to which the little madam said ‘I don’t like Sainsbury’s asparagus. I only eat freshly picked asparagus from Nanna’s allotment’. I offered her brother strawberries yesterday and he politely said ‘no thank you’, then discovered they were fresh off the allotment and changed his mind.”
The Awareness Days Events calendar (site) reports:
Many of you will have attended events in your local area as part of National Allotment week to celebrate how important allotments and other open spaces are for you and your local community. Allotments have many benefits. They bring people together and unite them through their shared love of low-cost, healthy fresh fruit and vegetables, physical exercise and social interaction.
Allotments are a valuable resource and both you as individuals and as community groups take immense pride in their up keep and produce. As allotment holders you are already active in your local community. However did you know that there are powers available that can help you and others in your local community shape and improve the neighbourhood in which you live? These powers, known as Community Rights, give recognition to valuable community assets such as allotments, pubs, local shops and community centres and can help ensure that these assets continue to be of benefit to local people.
You are able to list your allotment as an Asset of Community Value and this is where the Community Right to Bid comes in. It can help to protect vital community assets such as allotments in your neighbourhood. Allotments add to the wellbeing of local communities and you and your neighbours can therefore nominate your allotment to be put on a list of Assets of Community Value by your Local Authority. If an Asset of Community Value is then put up for sale, local community groups can pause‚the sale for six months while they raise the funds to bid to buy it.
Nearly 100 allotments have been listed by local community groups across the country. Are you one of them? If so you can now apply for an ACV Certificate to celebrate your allotment.
Email community.assets@communities.gsi.gov.uk for more details about getting a personalised certificate for you to print out and display to let everyone know how much your allotment is valued by your local community. For more information about assets of community value and how to protect them please visit http://mycommunity.org.uk/programme/community-asset-ownership/
The Department for Communities and Local Government has also produced a simple guide to community rights called You’ve got the power?’
You can also have your say in the way your neighbourhood develops in the future. Neighbourhood planning enables local communities to shape the places where you live and work. Over 1400 communities have started neighbourhood planning in their area and around a third of the neighbourhood plans which are now in force include policies on allotments. If you’re interested to find out how you can get started, there’s lots of information here: http://mycommunity.org.uk/programme/neighbourhood-planning/
If you’re involved in your local area, you can also join the My Community Network to chat to experts and connect with others who are also passionate about their community. Through the Network, you get:
- Access to live discussions and expert advice on the forum
- Inspiration and tips from other people from across the country
- Quick responses to questions about community activity and programmes
- Networking with like-minded and experienced people
- Coaching and mentoring from experts in the field
- Invitations to free learning hubs and event
And from the National Allotment Week 2021 website itself:
Our theme in 2021 is Plotting for the Future; we will be celebrating the contribution that allotments make to a sustainable future.
Here is what our President Phil Gomersall had to say in 2020,
"This year every week has been National Allotments Week, with more people than ever realising that growing your own food is a great way of eating healthily, getting some outdoor exercise in the fresh air and acquiring new skills. Plot-holders have also benefited from the contact with nature and the easy camaraderie on allotment sites, helping to retain their mental health and stay positive during these worrying times.”
Benefits of allotment gardening
Social Capital
Gardening is good for you and allotment gardening offers additional benefits that help to ameliorate loneliness and enable citizens to contribute to society, especially beyond retirement. Hundreds of allotment holders volunteer on their association committee and give up precious time, helping to manage and maintain sites. Even on a site with no allotment association plot-holders are part of a community of like-minded people, many of whom are eager to share their knowledge and spare produce. The social contact offered by gardening in an allotment environment helps to combat the lack of social capital embodied by loneliness, which has the equivalent risk to health as consuming 15 cigarettes daily and is twice as harmful as obesity.
Mental well being
There is a growing awareness of the role that gardening plays in both preventing and alleviating mental ill-health. Many allotment gardeners will tell you that a spell on the plot nurturing plants and contemplating nature makes them feel calmer and more hopeful and there have been recent studies that have measured this benefit (See link to “A case–control study of the health and well-being benefits of allotment gardening” below).
Healthy activity
The physical benefits of regular spells of gardening help plot-holders to keep fit even if they have sedentary jobs, the physical exercise also contributes to their mental well-being. Gardening can also help to maintain good gait and balance in older gardeners and help with cognitive decline.
Spending as little as 15 minutes a day out in the summer sunshine can build up your levels of vitamin D, if you are fair skinned. And for those whose skin is naturally darker, anywhere up to 90 minutes of sun exposures will help your vitamin levels. However, gardeners do need to be aware of skin cancer risks, Melanoma is the fourth most common cancer in the UK and on the rise. So make sure that you dress appropriately and wear sunscreen on exposed areas. Click Here for more advice for gardeners.
Fresh, local, seasonal produce
If managed properly, an allotment can produce enough food to supplement a family's weekly shop, with fresh fruit and vegetables over the year. Allotment gardeners can choose to garden organically and avoid ingesting chemicals that are likely to be present on shop bought fruit and vegetables.
In a survey of National Allotment Society members nearly every person said their love of allotment gardening comes from the fresh air, home grown produce, healthy lifestyle and like-minded people this activity offers.
Sense of achievement
As many new plot-holders discover, growing vegetables requires acquiring new knowledge and skills and the satisfaction gained from eating their first home grown tomato or new potato makes them taste even more delicious!
Contact with nature
Working a plot year- round means that allotment holders experience the seasons, witness the behaviour of birds, insects and other animals and gain an understanding of the eco-system. This appreciation of the natural world also has the potential to inspire more environmentally aware behaviour by themselves and their children.
In 2018 the UK Government produced a 25 Year Environment Plan, which acknowledges that connecting people to their environment will also improve their health and well-being. A study in the Netherlands showed that every 10 per cent increase in exposure to green space translated into an improvement in health equivalent to being five years younger, with similar benefits found by studies in Canada and Japan.
Allotments during the pandemic
For many people their allotment plot has been a refuge during the covid19 pandemic, a place where they could exercise during lockdown and spend time safely distanced but in company with like- minded souls. For plot-holders who were shielding and unable to visit their plots - the allotment community helped to keep on top of the weeds and harvest crops on their plots. Two National Allotment Society members tell their lockdown stories - CLICK HERE to read Elizabeth's story and CLICK HERE to read about Sara's lockdown experience.
Research around the benefits of allotment gardening
One of our members has written a piece about a social prescribing project in Dursley, Gloucester where allotment growing is prescribed by doctors on their Hospital Allotment
CLICK HERE to read the article and CLICK HERE to read the evaluation of the project.