Jan 08 2009
Still digging for victory
A comment on another post reminded me of the happy hours I spent picking fruit and veg and doing little jobs on my grandad’s allotment.
As I thought about building this into a post, I realised that many younger people outside the UK might not know what an allotment is.
During WW2, when everyone needed to grow their own food to survive, local authorities made small areas of land they owned, such as alongside railways, available in small plots for families who didn’t have gardens or wanted extra growing space. The allotment owners formed themselves into clubs and associations to buy seed and equipment at wholesale prices which members could buy and borrow.
On some allotments, you were (and still are) allowed to keep chickens and even pigs too, With eggs and meat on ration, that was important. Posters appeared everywhere encouraging people to ‘Dig for Victory’.
I thought that these ideas were confined to the UK, till I found this site which shows that it also permeated to the USA where allotments were called ‘Victory Gardens’.
In the last few years, British celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have featured allotments in their TV programmes and have extolled the virtues of growing your own food. I don’t do a lot, herbs, chillies, peppers dwarf beans and tomatoes mostly - anything that will grow in a pot or container, but it does help my personal economy and is very satisfying. When me and my now-estranged husband John lived in London I even grew tomatoes in grow-bags on our tiny 3rd floor balcony.
My grandad’s allotment was next to Sheen station just outside Richmond which is a west London suburb. When I checked Google Maps, I thought that the site would have been built on, long ago, but I’m delighted to say the allotments are still there and very obviously still being well cared for and cultivated. Continue Reading »
