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.He had two plots, one in the middle of the area and one directly next to the railway embankment. On the second, there were tall rows of runner beans, where I could imagine that I was in an enchanted forest. There were also raspberry, blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes - those ingredients went into the wonderful and simple Summer Pudding that has always been a family favourite, and also into jams and other desserts. There are plenty for recipes for this available, so I’ve given a link to a Delia Smith version. You can make this dessert with frozen fruit in the winter.
The other plot grew all kinds of root crops, salads and also strawberries. There was a small shed for his tools and stores always immaculately neat and swept. There were also a couple of folding chairs in there, so visitors could sit in the sun and watch him work, but mostly we had to help!
This is over 50 years in my memory, Grandad died when I was 8 or 9 and Nana kept the allotments going for a few more years with the help of my Mum and Dad, my 3 aunts and their families.
Allotment owners and associations now often have a hard fight against councils who want to sell off the land for housing development, yet there are long waiting lists for allotments all round the country. Maybe in the current economy, even more people will want space to grow food and the Government will step into help threatened plots.
This is a link to the National Association that represents allotment owners in the UK - if this post has made you think about trying to get land on which to grow food, this link is for YOU. Dig for Victory, not at war this time, but victory over the difficulties of feeding yourself and your family in hard economic times, and victory over expensive and pesticide-ridden supermarket fruit and veg.
Even if it is a bowl of tiny cherry tomatoes, one chilli or a bunch of herbs, anything you have grown yourself tastes so very much better.
