Allotment gardening
“We must cultivate our garden”
The oldest allotments were laid out in the early 18th century around the city of Birmingham in the UK (1732, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening))
Allotment gardening in Denmark started for the first time back in the late 18th century, of all places in the town where I spent all my school years, Fredericia in Jutland, across from the island of Funen. This was and is a garrison town, back then situated behind its fortifications and with a ban on building roofs higher than the battlements. Space was scarce, so in 1778 the town decided to make land available for allotment gardens outside the fortifications.
The first Danish allotment associations (‘garden colonies’) was founded in 1884 in Aalborg in the north of the country — our allotment garden is on the other side of the fjord but still under the general association governance of the municipality of Aalborg. Today there are over twenty thousand allotment gardens in the country.
Allotment gardens are called many different things — in France they are called jardins familiaux or jardins ouvriers (family or workers’ gardens), in Germany Kleingarten (small gardens), in the USA community gardens, in The Netherlands Volkstuin (people’s gardens), and as mentioned, in Danish kolonihaver (colony gardens) — but the aims are the same, i.e., providing ordinary people with the opportunity to have a garden, produce their own fruit and vegetables and enjoy being outdoors with space to grow what they want and relax.
Some allotment gardens consist of a plot of land where one can grow the vegetables needed, in many ways the type of garden known as ‘victory gardens’ during WW II when parks were dug up to make room for much needed food production. The allotment gardens I know here in Denmark are plots with a little house and lots of space to grow whatever one wants. Most have a greenhouse, a shed, and a lawn, as does our garden. There are all types of building ‘styles’ among allotment houses, but there are rules as to the size and height of houses, so they are all single story houses, and most are built from wood.
The biggest difference between the various allotment associations is whether they have sewage installed or not — most associations in and around the capital Copenhagen have sewage, but not our association or the others in the municipality. This means that we need to have at least one septic tank per garden (we have two), and water is cut off every autumn until next spring — from end of October until the end of March — to avoid that all the water pipes burst during periods of frost. This year the water will be turned on now in early April and not in March as there is still night frost forecast this coming week.
You need to be a member of an association to be able to acquire a garden and pay their annual fee of about 450 USD per year. You can only become a member if you live in the municipality where the association is situated. And then you can buy the garden, more precisely, the house. We paid about 25,000 USD for our garden, but I can see that prices are going up as more and more people try to grow their own, both due to inflation and to climate change. There is a general assembly once a year where common activities are discussed, such as repair of the roads, planning a jubilee party, or cleaning up the common areas.
The excellent thing about an association like that is that you can always find a gardener who will know about pruning or how to best lay tiles, or contact someone who owns a trimmer or a tall ladder. And you can use the greenhouse to germinate plants to go into the garden later, once the right temperatures are there — we have sunflower seeds in pots in there now, and corn. Later on we grow tomatoes and cucumbers in there as they are impossible to have in the garden due to the climate up here in the north. I have been forbidden to grow melons in the greenhouse as they take up too much space — according to my daughter. I am allowed, though, to make the melon seeds germinate in there and then find a spot where they can spread out in the garden afterwards. I have chosen a couple of huge pots for that, so the vegetable beds are not overpowered, either.
The house has a front room, a sitting room, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a bedroom. We are not allowed to have a wood burner due to the fire risk from sparks, but we have two kerosene burners to keep us warm when we are there in winter, and the kitchen stove runs on gas. Over the autumn and winter, I have a couple of containers to collect water to fill up the big milk churns of which we have three. We now also have a large barrel attached to the guttering to collect even more rain water. We do need water during the autumn and winter period for the toilet and for my tea. The birds will normally manage through that period with water in the bowls we have in different places, or they drink what is on the top of the barrel.
And as you have seen above, my grandson has his own space in a small Hobbit house under the witch hazel — for the time being, he is more interested in climbing up onto the roof than being inside, but in summer he likes to be inside in the shade. The big cushions for the Hobbit house are in the other house over winter to protect against rot.
The fruit trees, to the left, have been pruned as well as the big apple tree at the end of this space (you can see it in the next photo). The difference between the bare, white area of winter and the green space of summer is amazing.
In summer, my space is mainly in this area where I can sit peacefully on the stone bench, read a book, drink my tea, and keep an eye on the vegetables, the birds, and the apple trees.
I lived for thirty years in a big flat with its own fairly large garden, and I missed the garden when I moved. The allotment garden has given me back the pleasure in gardening and the peace in ‘pottering’. And my grandson loves the peas and the sunflowers, the carrots and the beetroots, and he is fed on the potatoes from the garden throughout winter.
With spring on its way, let us hope that all those seeds in the greenhouse will germinate and provide us with lots of sunflowers and corn over the summer.
« Il faut cultiver notre jardin »
‘We must cultivate our garden’ — last sentence in Voltaire’s Candide (1759)
