A personal take by an allotment gardener
It’s been frustrating in recent years, for seasoned allotment gardeners to see so many overgrown plots being cleared for letting, only to have them soon neglected by their new tenants, and then left altogether, and for the whole business to start over again.
Having had a good look around the site over quite a while, it seemed that a lot of the ones who didn’t stick at it were younger tenants, and so some of us wondered whether this was maybe down to things like more pressing work and family demands, but then that didn’t really explain the fact of this turning up as a pattern over just the last few years.
After looking more closely at these plots though, one thing began to stand out. That is, most by far of the failed tenants had been trying to use the recently popular No Dig Method. Below are photos, of seven such struggling or deserted plots. In some of them the remains of the beds are too overgrown to be seen. (There are lots more around the site too.)
So what might have been the problems that put off these gardeners? Well, it could be that those with busy lives thought that they could have a productive allotment, but one which took up less time and energy than one gardened by traditional methods, and all the while make a contribution to safeguarding soil life and so on.
If that were so though, then would their beliefs stand up to cool-headed scrutiny? Or were they perhaps mistaken?
For a start, the raised beds seen involve the work and expense of making wooden frames, but with the damp climate here, untreated (or even “treated”) timber will be doing quite well to last more than a single season. Wood treated with a long life preservative that works – such as creosote – is a health hazard on the other hand, never mind not being organic. So there’s one problem.
Some of the weeds, like couch grass, bindweed, or horsetails, within or outside the beds, can’t be stopped by say, covering with corrugated cardboard, and they’ll force their way through whatever, so the task of weeding hasn’t gone away either. Deep rooted weeds, like hogweed of which there’s a great deal on the site – will also have to be dug out anyway if the gardener wants to avoid herbicides.
Often, the compost with which the beds are filled will have to be bought, and lugged from source to site. This is hard work, and expensive. A full plot would need tons of it, and at around eight pounds per bag this wouldn’t be cost-effective gardening at all.
If the beds are started on unturned soil, then there’ll likely be hardpan, that is, a hard layer of compacted soil beneath it, especially at the parts of the site where there’s clay. Plenty of crops need to put down deep roots, but they might struggle to do so into this, and so they won’t thrive.
Lots of plot holders have used wood chip to stifle weeds on the paths between the beds. This stuff is a real haven for slugs though, and those’ll come out to eat such crops as there might be. If they avoid slug pellets too, and don’t use other methods of dealing with them that actually work, then they’ll be lucky to take much home to eat.
The structure of good natural soil is usually one where near the surface there’s nitrogen-rich (but often mineral-poor) humus, populated by soil life – which feed on this – and as one goes deeper one meets nitrogen-poor (but often mineral-rich) clays and the like, but with little soil life. The whole point of ploughing or digging is to mix these together, to get a good balance of both nitrogen and minerals, as well as to break up the soil so that plant roots can get into it to whatever depth is needed (a long way for potatoes and other root crops.) It’s no great wonder, that humanity has been doing this for thousands of years, then.
The natural soil of PPA is made up of fertile flood plain deposits, and in plenty of places it’ll have been made better still, by generations of gardeners digging, manuring, and liming it. It’d be a happy thing, to see more gardeners reap the rich benefits of that.
On the other hand again, we seem to have some gardeners who do very well using the No Dig Method, but it looks like they’ve put a lot of thought into how they do what they do, and into what they grow. Sometimes they’ve bought the coated metal frames, which don’t rot (or use none at all). They’ve also got rid of strong weeds before building the beds, and they’ve broken up and turned the soil beneath them. They then fill and refill the beds with compost made from the ordinary soil of their plot and its plant waste. That said, this writer’s still left wondering, if all that care in what has to be done in fact needs far more rather than less time and effort on the part of the gardener than does traditional growing?
