Good new for allotmenteers in Manchester. Thousands of pounds that has been collected from criminals has been donated by the police’s payback scheme is being given to an allotment project in Wigan.

The Norley Hall allotments will get about £5,000 to spend on a project to help youngsters who have been involved in anti social behaviour to give a little something back. They will grow produce and flowers which will be given to local victims of crime.

The scheme has been running for a while now and the area has seen a notable decrease in petty crime and anti social behaviour as a direct result.

As people are increasingly interested in growing fruit and vegetables, the allotment waiting lists in the UK are ever growing. Landshare is an initiative, established across the UK to help make British land accessible to the potential growers and hence increase land productivity and
availability of crops.

How it all works:

Landowners and growers alike register online, posting details of what you can offer or what you need. The mail system helps match the requirements, aiding dialogue hopefully to result in well utilised land.

This is a fantastic opportunity for those who would like to get growing but are stuck on the dreaded allotment waiting list. Have a browse online, it might be the solution for you.

A small town in Hampshire is taking the lead in finding new ways to increase the available outside space for residents who want to grow their own vegetables. The waiting list for an allotment in Alresford is about six years, but many people have large overgrown gardens that they do not, or can not tend themselves.

The town is launching a share your garden scheme, where greenfingered residents who have a small or no garden can use space on other peoples’ gardens to grow crops. The scheme will primarily be aimed at the elderly who have gardens and need help to keep them in order. This will help both groups of people, and will keep elderly residents feeling a part of the community and keep them in contact with people from different age groups.

This is a great idea and similar schemes have already been started around the country. Hopefully allotment waiting lists will be reduced and community spirit will increase.

Manchester City Council has announced plans to introduce fruit trees and bushes across the city in response to the fact that children from the city did not know where different types of fruit came from. The fruit will be free for the community to use as it wishes, whether just to pick and eat or for community projects.

The £200,000 scheme will see about 20,000 plants introduced to the city’s parks with signs and labels on them to tell the locals the right time of year to pick and eat the fruit. As well as fruit bushes and trees the council will also plant herbs and introduce more beehive sites, with park employees being trained on how to look after the plants and bees.

The plan will also see a number of vegetable plots created; with waiting lists for plots of land at a premium in the Mancherster area this will be a welcome relief for people who want to grow their own produce.

A statement from Manchester parks and leisure stated.

“Historically there have been very few fruit trees in our parks and we were amazed by the number of young people who told us they didn’t know where fruit and veg came from. These are public areas and there is no reason why people shouldn’t be able to help themselves to the produce grown.”

A wind turbine has been installed by a group of allotments holders in Leicester to provide power to the plots. Rowley Fields decided that a wind turbine may be appropriate due to its raised and open location. The funding for this project came primarily from the council. The 20ft (6.1m) turbine cost approximately £7,000.

The power can now be used for lights and to power tools. There had been concerns raised by nearby residents, which lead to relocation of the turbine from its original intended site, but it appears that the current site is now ideal.

Mr Howgill, Rowley Fields allotments’ society secretary said:

“The wind turbine has some maintenance issues and the battery needs replacing in about nine years, but when we flick the switch, it is not going to cost us anything. It will give us lighting so we can do more work in late summer and autumn but also for laptops, which we increasingly use for record keeping and educational sessions.”

As every allotment holder knows, it would be nice to have a connection to some sort of electricity source, to power tools such as a lawnmower or strimmer or for some sort of lighting during the long winter months. However many of these tools can be bought that rely solely on battery power so you can charge them at home and then bring them to the site whenever needed. There are many battery suppliers that specialise in rechargeable batteries that are perfect for this type of use. They can be recharged hundreds of times so you save money and save the planet.

A planning application has been submitted by The Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society to create 60 allotments on a site near St Lawrence.

Car parking, fences and sheds will all be required at the site, and hence make up part of the proposal. The chair of the society has indicated that there have been a large number of enquiries from people who are interested in growing their own vegetables but have limited space in which to do this.

The planned allotments, which are to be situated at the top of Mont Cochon, should be available to all those in the society.

Most people tend their allotment to get the benefit of having fresh vegetables or fruit whenever they want them. Imagine the surprise when Andy Jarrett from Wallington found a fossil that is believed to be 80 million years old whilst digging his patch. The fossil is of an Inoceramus which lived at the bottom of the ocean in the Cretaceous period around 80 million years ago. The find has been certified by the Natural History Museum who stated:

“Inoceramids are an important group of bivalves. The actual specimen appears to be Inoceramus balticus which dates to about 80 million years ago. It lived at the bottom of a deep sea that covered much of Northern Europe”.

Andy loves working on his plot and will be looking out for any other fantastic things that might just turn up when he is tending his vegetables.

Native Americans used to practice companion planting called the “three sisters”. The Iroquois women used this technique to grow their 3 most important crops: Beans, squash and maize.

They produced mounds of soil a stride apart. On the top of each mound several maize seeds were planted, and then 2 weeks later a bean seed was added. After the maize and beans had germinated a squash seed was planted at the base of the mound.

As the maize grew, the bean would use it for support (whilst adding nitrogen into the soil for the maize and squash), and to provide shade for the squash to spread across the ground (suppressing the weeds).

All 3 crops grew together benefiting from their friendly relationship and producing good crops of excellent quality.

With more and more people interested in growing their own vegetables and fruit, the demand for allotments has never been so high. With the advent of trendy green television programmes that extol the virtues of “growing your own” more people have contacted their local authority about the availability and ownership of an allotment.

One such place where this can be seen is Cardiff, where 800 people are currently on the waiting list for an allotment on one of the city’s 27 sites. The Vale of Glamorgan has also seen such problems with 290 residents on a three year waiting list before they may get the chance to rent a plot.

Councils are supposed to provide enough land for people to want to start an allotment but this current trend of wanting to ‘eat green’ shows that they are evidently not doing enough for their tax payers.

Terry Walton, BBC Radio 2’s allotment expert has stated that more young people now have, or want an allotment because they are fed up with increasing supermarket prices and want to eat healthy organic produce.

The world’s largest green wall was unveiled at the Expo 2005, featuring the Bio-Long in Japan, the wall is 200 metres, 15 metres high and has 200 different species of plants growing on it totalling a 200,000 plant population altogether.

Green roofs in the UK are (pardon the pun) growing in popularity and becoming more and more common according to Dave Auster at Greenfix Sky Gardens who are UK Green Roof specialists.

Nightclub owner Billy Reilly is opening a roof terrace venue called Pacha, let’s hope that more nightclubs follow suit and cover their clubs in foliage.

In cities across Germany it is becoming law that flat-roofed buildings must have a green roof, and the overall roof coverage is said to be growing by more than 13 million square metres a year. In the UK it is expected that future UK planning regulations for roofs are starting to move in the same direction as the Germans with new buildings being required to have a portion of their roof surface area be dedicated for green walls and roofs.