Giving up our allotment and going back to garden-sharing.
All I ever wanted was an allotment, it was one of the reasons why I started Lend and Tend when I was years away from getting one and didn’t have a garden; so it feels like such a miss step to be giving it up, and with a very heavy heart at that.
Me longingly gazing through the gates of the allotment before I had a plot.
Once upon a time when I was on…about the 14th house move, I was living in a small flat when I wished I could just borrow someone’s garden. I was fairly happy in the home I lived in even though I couldn’t change my circumstances and move, I just despaired at the unloved spaces around me. Some of these were clearly gardens that someone else couldn’t manage and I just wished I could get in one of these gardens and help.
Then after wishing hard enough and letting everyone know about my garden dreams, I ended up, not only sharing 1 garden but tending to 3 others, transforming a rooftop carpark into a garden space and then, finally, won the allotment lottery after a 3-year wait.
Having an allotment was a lot to manage and I wasn’t even doing it on my own, I had my partner’s support to do the heavy work. But the hardest thing I’ve learned about cultivating a garden of any size is that it doesn’t just take work, it takes patience. Taking each day at a time and having a pinch of optimism to sprinkle about in times of garden failures and despair, but despite that, I loved it. Which is why I’m so sad to be leaving it behind.
My dearest plot 72a, we toiled in the rain, sleet, snow and storms for you. You gave us bountiful harvests, you also killed what was going to be the most amazing tomato harvest of all time with a vicious blight in 2017 and in 2018, despite giving you water twice daily through drought. We protected your slow worms and fed your birds with excavated chafer grubs and you gave us wasp stings. Still, we bathed in your sunsets and made merriment with fermenting your fruits. You will be greatly missed.
In running Lend and Tend, alongside tending to my allotment, I ended up with a steady list of garden clients in London; designing small suburban gardens, maintaining garden spaces in city bars and restaurants and coworker spaces.
Tomatoes hanging from office balconies on Turnmill Street
However, Covid made very sudden changes to all of that. With restaurants and coworker spaces closed, and with everyone working from home, those with garden owners finally had time to spend loving them, so the possibilities for residential garden work very quickly fell away.
Instead, my partner and I turned our attention to riding out the pandemic on our beloved plot and thankful for its solace spent most of our time there, mainly preening our apple tree and later enjoying the fruits of our labour…cider. Watching the seasons change and patience being rewarded with cider from an apple tree you’ve climbed to prune each year- there’s nothing like it!
I couldn’t have gone on my journey with Lend and Tend without my partner, who has supported me from the day I came home from work one day fizzing with excitement and the nascent idea of a garden-sharing project almost 8 years ago and he has been there for me, through every panic, melt-down and has helped me practice every scary PowerPoint presentation that has been part of running the project. But the pandemic also made a big change to his working life too. After a bit of a nail-biting transition, there was an opportunity to change direction. So from working in Film and Tech, he became a soil consultant and is now a Farm Manager.
What changed our lives was going to the Groundswell festival. It’s a bit like Glastonbury for farmers and for anyone interested in #RegenAg (regenerative soil practices). This was us. In all of our gardening exploits, we’ve maintained sustainable practices and avoided the use of inorganic pesticides or fertilisers.
Groundswell was both a nice staycation where we glamped and an educational conference for gardeners, scientists, ecologists, activists, anyone terrified about the future scarcity of soil. Fast forward one year from immersing ourselves in the underground world of soil and we have left the outskirts of the city, our beloved allotment and we now we live in a little yard house on a farm.
What it also means is, that I’m going back to the principles of sharing someone else’s garden again.
Our house has a bit of outdoor space and although it’s not a garden I own, I hope it can become some form of garden that we can continue experimenting on.
I almost feel guilty for saying goodbye to our allotment after it was such a salve during the mental mind-field of Lockdown and will be ever grateful for what was a nurturing ground. A place where I tested my garden ideas, paced my thoughts between the rows of my strawberry patches and was perennially provoked by prickling weeds. But that is also how my partner came to take the wheel of our joint mission to spend more time outside.
Facing the wait of being on an allotment list, moving borough and having to join a new list and wait again, was one of the frustrations as to why I started Lend and Tend; my first baby is now almost eight years old. It was conceived out of deep frustration and a desire to create something that was more than a project that served me but helped others to have a positive impact.
I'm also now expecting a human baby and although my attention may be diverted over the next few months, I hope that you will stay with me on my garden-sharing mission to make sharing gardens a normal thing of the future. Just another way to support the culture of sharing for mutual benefit when we face a future of fewer resources in a landscape of information and social access overload.
The interconnected world is proving to be the way to thrive; but we need to find real connections with 3D people, not just via screens and we need to keep finding ways to get our hands dirty in nature. Lend and Tend might be able to keep us connected with both of those things and help us be and find good neighbours.
In the last 5 years of having an allotment, I have grown more food than me or my family and neighbours could have ever eaten, so we’ve spent summer nights jamming, pickling and bottling all excess to store or gift. (Christmas present spoiler alert friends, we still got plenty a jam in storage).
In the few months since we’ve moved, I’ve spent more money on fresh veg than I can ever remember, and when prices seem to be escalating in supermarkets quickly, there’s quite the incentive to get growing my own again. So whilst the current fuel and energy crisis looms, I’m foraging fruits and eating weeds like fat hen which is growing in abundance on our driveway. In the meantime, I’m collecting our food scraps for the compost bin and hoping I haven’t thrown away one of my biggest life dreams, which was having an allotment.
Gnocchi made with Roman spinach, aka Fat Hen weed. Yum!
I don’t know how long I’ll be here on the farm and that’s the beauty of garden-sharing, it’s the same as having an allotment really, as all you really can do is what you can and when and just simply plan ahead one season at a time.
I’ll miss my lovely allotment neighbours, the furry ones (I really loved that cat) and the ones who’d leave me courgette recipes hiding in the greenhouse, or bottles of wine for watering their plants whilst on holiday, and also there’s freedom in that an allotment is technically yours to visit as you please…
but here are 5 things I will not miss.
Finding glass, so much glass. Our allotment predecessor was partial to mini bottles of Jack Daniels and I think we must have unearthed at least a tonne of these tiny broken bottles.
Conscientiously ensuring my nearest water bowser was filled before going home, to arrive the next day to find it empty and someone using a (not allowed) hosepipe watering their plot or filling their water butts at peak times. Buttheads!
People nicking the fruit and produce you’ve grown.
Vandalism. After almost 5 years, we’d replaced almost all of the panes of glass of our greenhouse with perspex due to some, quite frankly, A-holes throwing rocks, batteries, and golf balls across the fields and into our allotments.
Fly tipping. People either dumping rubbish on your plot or on communal areas across your allotments, again think more broken glass panes, empty plastic compost bags, old boots even, all for it to blow over onto your plot.
Although there are also potentially frustrations to work around when you’re sharing a garden, as long as you continue an open conversation with the person you are sharing a garden with; ensuring you don’t let any issues build up, garden-sharing can be a really valuable and equally beneficial project for both Lender and Tender.
3 helpful tips:
Keep each other happy by sticking to the ground rules you initially set out. If you need to review these, keep communicating until you’re both happy with any new parameters.
If either Lender or Tender’s availability changes, keep communicating.
If there are any reasons at all for why something is not working, keep comm…. you get it.
For now, I wish the new custodian of plot 72a all the best of luck (the soil is now utterly amazing with almost no glass I hope) and to all of you new Lenders and Tenders all the very best of luck in your Patch-Matches, please do keep me in the loop of how it’s going. Tweet, or Instagram me pictures @LendandTend or email lendandtend@gmail.com if you have pictures or any questions.