Allotments: Food You Can Trust .. And More

Allotments provide a safe and attractive environment for plotholders to grow plants, fruit and flowers. They also provide havens for a range of wildlife.

Allotment somewhere in West London

The value of allotments is considerable - they provide the opportunity for eating healthy, locally-produced food, for healthy exercise and for youngsters to learn that food actually comes from the soil, not a supermarket shelf!

Food produced on an allotment is food you can trust. You know what, if anything, it has been sprayed with. You know if it is genetically modified (GM). You know what varieties you have grown, so hopefully you know it will be tasty and nutritious. Most certainly you know that it has been produced locally, so it has not been driven, or worse, flown for hundreds or thousands of miles, producing air pollution and greenhouse gases. What better reasons for growing food on an allotment!

But you don't even have to rent or work an allotment in order to eat the food. Many allotment sites now have shops where you can buy the excess food produced by plotholders. How much better to spend a bit of your money helping out the plotholders of your local allotment rather than the directors and shareholders of Tesco!

For more information on allotments, visit the superb web pages that form part of the Ealing LA21 web site. There you will find:

• Brief history of allotments
• Why allotments are important now
• Allotments and the environment
• Further links

Allotments also are an important resource for wildlife. See our allotments and biodiversity page.

The development of allotment land for non open spaces uses is a potential threat. As long as there is demand for housing or commercial use, councils and developers tend to eye allotment sites with a view to 'development'. This is particularly the case if allotments are not fully used and the demand for plots is low.

However, national government, councils and local people all recognise the value of allotments and the desirability of retaining these green oases. There is often some of protection afforded in the borough land use plan - the Unitary Development Plan or UDP. However, the level of protection depends on how much the council and local people care and how much effort they are prepared to put in if individual sites are threatened.

Links

LA21 allotments web site
Introduction to food
Wildlife and habitat