Ingenuity helps keep costs down
The Scots Gard’ner by John Reid published in 1683 claims to be the first Scottish gardening book. His dedication “To all the Ingenious Planters in Scotland” is one of my favourites and so apt when looking at what allotmenteers do on their plots.
Reid himself was not lacking in ingenuity.
On occasions when he had to lay out a garden with undulating land where the end point was obscured, he recommended doing this on a calm night using lanterns on poles to light the way forward. String, candles and poles were the tools of the trade.
Examples of ingenuity are still much in evidence on Scottish allotments.
Not all allotment sites have sufficient depth of soil. Comrie Allotments in Perthshire are situated on the flood plain of the River Earn and underneath a deceptively lovely sward of grass lies nothing but big river cobbles.
Allotments at Lochaline and Ullapool, meanwhile, have a poor covering of soil over bedrock. Raised beds are the solution in these circumstances.
Damaged scaffolding planks have to be discarded and can often be sourced cheaply or even free from builders’ merchants.
Pallet collars also make useful raised beds and have the advantage of being stackable according to how deep a bed is required.
Raised beds need filling with some kind of growing medium which can become expensive. Recycled green waste is probably the least expensive
material but even the cost of buying that soon adds up.
The community allotments at Fairlie, Ayrshire on the banks of the Clyde were built on a derelict, polluted brownfield site with no soil at all.
To fill all their large raised beds they embarked on an ambitious programme of composting and vermiculture to provide enough material in which to start growing.
Water is another necessity for successful growing.
My allotment site has a piped mains water supply but other sites, particularly new ones, do not have this luxury and have
turned to some innovative ways of gathering enough water for their needs.
I recently visited the allotments at Kelso and particularly admired one of the plotholders’ efforts to collect water from a sloping roof over his compost and storage area with an attached gutter feeding into a barrel.
Most plotholders keep an eye out for people having replacement windows. The discarded windows can have a useful second life as lids of coldframes, enabling us to cheat the late frosts from taking their toll on young plants.