Allotment Guide | Food | Channel4.com

Date Published:: 25/10/2007

Allotment advice

While you await your plot it is worthwhile doing a little preparation, and the internet can provide the perfect kick-start for your gardening adventure.

The National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners has long been recognised as the national representative for allotment gardeners.

Allotments UK provides a comprehensive guide to the subject with an excellent forum where gardeners swap hints and tips.

Allotment Growing is a more personal site, offering advice, forums and recipes as well as a brilliant diary updated regularly that takes you through the gardener's year.

Also indispensable is a gardening handbook to keep on-site that will help you tell your weeds from your Winter Savoy (allotments are not very wi-fi friendly).

There are plenty to choose from but of the newer ones, The Allotment Keeper's Handbook by Jane Perrone will get you started.

Where to get started

Try and get a plot near a water supply (this will save on endless traipsing back and forth with heavy buckets).
If you have children, get them involved with their own corner of the plot and their own tools.
Your plot should be within easy walking or cycling distance.
Be sociable. You may need some watering doing when on holiday.
Growing organic crops is not easy. Think carefully before committing yourself to this, especially if you are inexperienced.
Some crops are more pest-proof than others, so choose these for your first year.

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Please can some-one help us.We have formed our own allotment association the only problem we have is we have no land!!!! Our local council can aquire some land but it is 5 miles away which straight away alienates quite a few people who either don't drive or schools who do not find it cost efficient or people who generally do not find it a 'green way of growing your own'. It has taken 4 years for the council to get to this point which is in my mind and a few others is totally unexceptable. We do not want to loose the opportunity or this land but on other hand we feel like we are leaving other people with nothing which is not good for a community. I am a mother of 2 children aged 8 and 4 we have a very small space in our garden in which we have grown carrots,courgettes,tomatoes,lettuce, potatoes and some fantastic runner beans that the childrens great grandad passed on to us just before he died which is a great topic of conversation when we are picking them. It has been great for all of us not only doing things together but has got the children away from the television and its a great sense of achievement especially when it tastes better than from the supermarket because its been imported and lost its true taste. I also feel its important for the children to know where their food has come from not from ie. tesco or morrisons .please help with thanks Emma Gould (a very inspired Hugh Fernley-wittingstall viewer)

Posted by Emma Gould on 15/10/2009 13:30:09

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Best of the bunch is surely http://www.growveg.info Very easy to find stuff

Posted by greenf on 02/10/2008 13:18:13

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Jamie At Home Guide to keeping an allotment

Contents:

Allotment advice

Where to get started

More Jamie At Home How-tos

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