We’re lucky enough to have room to grow vegetables in our own garden, and we look out over a strip of allotments a quarter kilometre long by 50m wide from the back windows, so if we ever needed some more space we could perhaps branch out within sight of home.
Except, and there’s always an except, allotments have become notoriously difficult to get a hold of. No longer the preserve of welly-wearing, pipe-smoking, flat-cap sporting diggers, they are the kings of the new cool, with a whole new generation putting shovel to soil in the quest for own-grown (if not quite home-grown) vegetables.
The National Trust reckons there are 100,000 people on currently on allotment waiting lists, and I know of someone who could only convince his council to give him some growing space when he proved to them, via Google Earth, that there was a long-neglected overgrown spot in an allotment close to his home.
So it’s good to see that the Trust is setting an example by creating 1000 new allotment spaces on its own land over the next three years. Combined, they could produce 50,000 sacks of potatoes or 2.6 million lettuces. Pretty impressive.
Now it wants other organisations to get involved, with ex-Gardener’s World presenter Monty Don drumming up support:
If every organisation and company did the same then it would transform the health and well-being of the nation as well as significantly contribute to our national food supply. In this time of crisis and chaos this is exactly the kind of practical enlightened action that will rebuild and create a better future.
But how many businesses could do that? Very few offices are going to have a garden at the back – certainly where I work we don’t – and even those that do may well be renting their premises rather than owning them outright. Particularly in major cities.
Could you see your employer letting you grow vegetables around its building?
If not, do you live close enough to a National Trust property to take up the offer if it let you did in its own back yard?
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