Market Garden
Heated debate over garlic - Michael Wale looks at the politics involved in running an inner city allotment
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| Warm autumn boosted broad beans hopefully for a good spring harvest |
WITH the new season now here, this past winter has certainly not been a dead period. The discussions, the polite "allotment speak" for arguments, have in some cases reached a crescendo covering subjects as diverse as the method employed to choose new plotholders to which sort of garlic to plant.
With a waiting list of more than 70 would-be allotment holders, the job of choosing who is to get vacated plots is the most difficult and powerful of the lot. I got my first plot years ago as a sweetener for playing bowls for Shepherds Bush cricket club. There were plenty of allotments available in those days, but as the then secretary was also an official of the bowls club I went to the head of the list. Before then there were dark rumours of money changing hands for plots in the back bar of a local hostelry.
Joe Hughes, our chief plot rep, has to be a diviner of humans judging whether they will tend a plot well or not. Often it is those who present as the keenest who turn out to be the worst, and lose interest quickly, then we are left with a poorly tended plot for most of the season. It is strange, too, that the English history of love for other people's land and absent landlordship is still alive and unwell on modern British allotments. Suddenly come October, when the rents are due there is a sudden flurry of digging on hitherto unkempt and unloved plots. We even have one member, who tried to get an extra plot, sending his workmen to dig his ground. Not exactly in the spirit of our membership.
Joe missed his mission in life. Instead of spending all his working days on various construction sites he should have been out there negotiating for the United Nations. He is a genius at solving the most difficult of human disagreements, which sadly happen all too frequently on our allotments. First of all he listens to all sides, discounting that greatest allotment site diseaserumour. Gradually he re-builds the scenario and comes up with a solution, which he puts over to all sides both firmly, yet gently spoken.
The waiting list of more than 70, is par for course in London, with a cross capital list of more than 4,000 people wanting plots. Worse news for us is that we are on private land, which removes most of our rights. The dreaded spectre of a road dividing our main plot has re-appeared. We have to receive a year's notice for any change, and the pressure grew until the calendar date for it to be served passed. The more actively green society can become, the more chance we have.
The annoying thing is that we also have to deal with the enemy within. When the local planning committee gave the road the go ahead one member said we didn't know what we were doing and should write to the Secretary of State. The point is that if we upset our landlord too much we could lose everything.
As for our method of selection for new plot members, that has also been fiercely challenged. We have always used a mixture of place on the list and positive discrimination sometimes in favour of youth, who will re-place us in the future, women, ethnic minorities, and people who will actually do a good job. We want the right mix of modern inner-city society, and this is what the committee led by Joe has done. But for some members this was not acceptable. The politics of allotments!
As we wait with excitement for our annual order of seed potatoes, onions, shallots and seeds to arrive on a truck from Tuckers far off in the West Country, there has been a heated difference of opinion over what garlic to plant. Looking at the impressive field of garlic grown by one of our expert Croatians I wonder what all the fuss was about. But the seed companies have to make money, and the fashion this past winter was to sell special bulbs of garlic, costing up to £2-50p each. Years ago I remember an annual expedition to Southall, which is like entering a part of India or Pakistan with its wonderful fresh food shops, and varieties of Asian food , to buy the garlic with John Bowtacz, a Ukrainian who would go nowhere else, as it was cheap and fresh. It seemed to come up all right in those distant days, but now gardening fashion has struck, and the rumour swept around our plot that ordinary garlic bought locally would not grow, and you had to invest heavily to get the right results. Well, I contacted one of the Kent farmers, Mike Mallett, who comes weekly to sell his fruit and veg at Hammersmith's farmers' market. He says that even the much maligned Chinese garlic grows perfectly all right for him. But he sold me a true Kent version, which I used in cooking, and planted the rest. But the wretched garlic rumour mongers had really worried a lot of our members, who felt they could not afford to send away for these pedigree varieties. So I spent the winter spreading the word of Kent garlic.
Other things I have found this winter are that the autumn planted Aquadulce broad beans like an acid manure, so I spread the horse manure we get from the Buckingham Palace stables thinly across them. Whether it is the Royal link I do not know, but they certainly grew strongly. Meanwhile, I save the contents of my carefully tended collection of compost bins until the arrival of spring to throw out onto the soil.
We are always in search of more space, but get little help from our newly-elected allegedly "Green" Tory council. The council's parks department came for a "consultation" in a little used park just around the corner from our main site. Our chairman John Hancock, who is in the prison officers' union at nearby Wormwood Scrubs jail, where some good gardening is going on, came with me. We were taken aback by the naivety of the rather young officials. It was my idea to replicate the work going on in the East End at Hackney's Clapton Park Estate.
It is quietly revolutionary dating from when John Little's Green Roof Company won the contract to look after the estate's surrounds against all the big companies. His first move was to go to the residents' association and ask them what they would like. They had never been asked before, and came up with several imaginative ideas such as planting colourful wildflower seed around the austere estate perimeter, and in a really revolutionary move asking for areas to be dug so that they could grow their own vegetables. This took place, led by an army of Turkish women, among the 1,200 residents. The great thing as far as I am concerned is that they did not fence these areas in, and vandalism did not take place.
When I suggested the same approach to the Ealing Parks delegation they looked blank. You would think a department might be informed about what was going on in another area of London. The people who turned up for the consultation were mainly older local home owners who complained about the behaviour of the estate's young people.
As I'm always consulted on fighting allotment battles and after the long, and in the end inevitable failure, of saving the 100-year-old Manor Gardens site, which is to be concreted over as a pathway for the four weeks of the London Olympics, I am trying to keep out of battles for the time being, but I was alerted by the MP Fraser Kemp for Houghton and Washington East who raised in Parliament the plight of the pigeon racers and allotment holders on the Ryhope allotments who face eviction by a mysterious company. He called for the local community to take over the site. And so say all of us.
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