Back on the Allotment

Gardening with the RHS

Royal Horticultural Society

Home & Garden, Leisure, Hobbies

4.4 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s National Allotment Week – a time to celebrate our country’s vast network of allotment plots and re-invest in our own dedication to growing fruit and veg. So for this week’s show, we’re taking a wander through a variety of allotments, getting a behind-the-scenes look at the techniques growers use to get the best out of their crops and examining the ways allotments help us better connect to the food we eat. We return to RHS Chief Horticulturist Guy Barter’s allotment in Surrey, where he shares this season’s successes and failures. We stop by RHS Garden Wisley’s Student and Community allotments to have a look at the different approaches taken there. And finally, we get the history of how allotments became commonplace here in the UK from garden historian and writer Twigs Way. Links: Allotment: getting started Grow Your Own Advice Tomato blight Allotments by Twigs Way

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get your tickets for the greatest show in Earth at an RHS garden near you.
0:05.1	Where nature puts on an unforgettable performance of colour and fragrance.
0:09.3	The scenery changes many times in one season and our finest trees will happily play the part of...
0:14.7	The best hiding place ever.
0:17.4	Booth!
0:18.2	Put your day out of dreams in the hands of the experts.
0:21.6	It's the greatest show in Earth.
0:23.6	At an RHS garden near you.
0:25.6	Book tickets online for discounts plus under fives go free and under 16s at five pounds.
0:33.6	I had my first allotment when I was age 14.
0:36.6	That was a very long time ago.
0:39.3	In fact, it was in the 1970s.
0:41.3	I haven't had an allotment continuously since that time.
0:44.3	I've dipped in and out, but my most recent allotments I've had now for about, oh, 25 years.
0:51.3	And in that time it's gone from being a piece of grass leveled by the council's
0:56.0	digger had no idea what was on it before but something nasty into my now well-loved and cherished
1:01.5	plot that has reached an extraordinary level of fertility after years of effort and investment.
1:08.0	And I love it, there's something special about growing your own food, starting it from seeds, raising transplants, bringing it from plot to plate.
1:15.6	It grounds me, connects me to what I eat, and connects me to a long lineage of farmers from whom I'm descended, so I'm carrying on the family tradition in my own small way.
1:24.6	And I know I'm not the only one who feels so positively about allotments.
1:29.3	I think for me, one of the things that I would say,
1:33.3	one of the most important things I grow at my allotment really is myself.
	...

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