Topic: How much do you pay

[Weed-Digga]

23pounds and 25 pence for 5 poles in Slough. This includes water, toilets, an onsite shop,(although there is a small membership fee yearly for this) regular waste removal and sometimes a lorry load of manure. Rent is the same as last year.

[Alex133]

It's amazing how many different types of measurement we use - rods/poles/metres/yards&feet/farmer's feet.....

This is a great survey but without any indication of location bit difficult to compare your own with others.

[lincsyokel2]

It's amazing how many different types of measurement we use - rods/poles/metres/yards&feet/farmer's feet.....

This is a great survey but without any indication of location bit difficult to compare your own with others.

if you are going to talk land, and you hate the EU, then you have to talk in Poles, Hectares and Acres. I would even use Bovates, Ploughs and Hundreds if i could, except i only know three other people who would understand what i was talking about.

1 sq mi    259.0 hectare
1 Hectare 2.47105 acres and also 395 poles
1 acre    0.4047 hectare and also 160 poles.
1 pole  = 16.5 ft   and also  272.25 sq/ft


yes, it needs county adding to it, to see if theres a pattern - i suspect the more south you go the more expensive it gets.

[lincsyokel2]

Farm-derived units of measurement:

   1. The rod is a historical unit of length equal to 5½ yards. It may have originated from the typical length of a mediaeval ox-goad. Also known as a Pole, or a Perch.
   2. The furlong (meaning furrow length) was the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting. This was standardised to be exactly 40 rods.
   3. An acre was the amount of land tillable by one man behind one ox in one day (4840 sq/yds). Traditional acres were long and narrow (many are 40 poles (70 yds) long, and therefore 4 poles (7 yds) wide!) due to the difficulty in turning the plough.
   4. An oxgang, or plough was the amount of land tillable by one ox in a ploughing season. This could vary from village to village, but was typically around 15 acres. This was also reckoned to be the amount of land one family needed to live off.
   5. A virgate was the amount of land tillable by two oxen in a ploughing season.
   6. A carucate was the amount of land tillable by a team of eight oxen in a ploughing season. This was equal to 8 oxgangs or 4 virgates. Also known as a Hide, or Bovate
   7. A Hundred was enough the land to provide 100 men-at-arms to the manor
   8. A Wapentake was the same as a hundred in Danelaw.

For comparision, Lincolnshire comprised 27 Hundreds and is approx 2300 sq miles (141,000 acres), giving 5200 acres in a hundred average

[tonybloke]

you missed out the interesting measurements!
16 sq poles = 1 sq chain
10 sq chain = 1 acre
80 acres = 1 yd of land
100 acres = 1 hide of land
40 hides = 1 barony.

;)

[lincsyokel2]

you missed out the interesting measurements!
16 sq poles = 1 sq chain
10 sq chain = 1 acre
80 acres = 1 yd of land
100 acres = 1 hide of land
40 hides = 1 barony.

;)

And just to confuse it even more, there was two ways to count acres, depending if you used the Danelaw or the 'english' method. In the Domesday Book, land was measured in Danelaw. The essential difference was that 'english; acres were about 20% larger. This is demonstrated above where you sate 1 hide  = 100 acres, whereas we know 1 plough = 15 acres. 8 x 15 = 120. So your acre is a danelaw acre, and my plough is an english plough.

we'll have no truck with the foriegn measure here *waves pitchfork*

[tonybloke]

you must have been ploughing light land if you can do 15 acres in a season, on heavy land about 10 acres was normal fort a seasons ploughing.

( I still use all imperial measurements, btw)

[Gadget]

I pay £13.50 a year for a 5-pole site, but have been told it's going up to £16.00 from January.

[Jeannine]

Interesting topic.

Just as a comparison, here in BC we pay $17  a year for each plot plus we have to be a member of the garden association to get a plot. So for us now 2 plots plus membership is a little short of $50 dollars, that is for an area of 20 feet x25 feet, that is about 35 sterling.

 We can buy wheelbarrow loads of manure   for about 2  sterling.

Supplied are all gardening tools, rotatillers and hand tools if we want to use theirs, so we actually don`t need to buy them if we don`t want to.

Hose pipes to every fourth lot, with very long hoses on them.

I also have a long disabled waist high bed which I don`t pay anything for, and I have the   large greenhouse which is in a compound where food is grown for the foodbank., well about 8 x 16 ish which I have taken on as a project, it costs me nothing but I do grow transplants which are given out as freebies at work parties, and I shall be growing toms for the oiod bank in it this year too.

We have to do 10 hours of community work on the gardens or pay an extra $50 a year. The greenhouse is my commitment. Others cut the grass, build or repair sheds etc, repair the plunbing put up picnic tables,or usual maintenmance stuff, work on the exec, newsletter etc, We are completely self managed and self financed. The land belongs to Vancouver Parks and is a heritage site, but we are not subsidised at all.

It works very well, I just wish the plots were bigger. We can have up to 6 but only one at a time,so on the waiting list we go and if we make it to the top in one year we get another one..usual thing with waiting lists. We have just got our second.

Very different here.

XX Jeannine

[Alex133]

Got it wrong on original posting - 2011 £5.20 rod, 2012 will be £5.75 rod.

[Unwashed]

League Table £/pole

flitwickone      £0.25
goodlife         £0.30
cobnut           £0.45
lottiman         £0.57
Fork             £1.00
BoardStupid      £1.70
Good Gourd 2     £1.75
sazhig           £1.94
Flighty          £2.00
tonybloke        £2.30
lincsyokel2      £2.35
squash64         £2.35
shirlton         £2.35
saddad           £2.40
pumpkinlover     £2.50
Gadget           £2.70
BAK              £2.80
nodig            £2.85
macmac           £3.33
steve76          £3.35
jimtheworzel     £3.53
Trevor_D         £3.60
Stripeybea       £3.88
picman           £4.51
Chloe            £4.57
Weed-Digga       £4.65
herring8         £4.68
Alex133          £5.20
manicscousers    £5.50
newtona2         £6.00
Digeroo          £6.75
Unwashed         £6.94
cornykey         £7.35
vicki.m          £8.99
PJW_Letchworth  £11.20

I'm 90% confident that the average rent is in the range £2.94 - £4.30, and most likely it's £3.62.

I'm afraid it would take an enormous sample to be able to make any kind of regional comparison - with 35 respondents it's only possible to say with any confidence that the national average is somewhere in a £1.40 range.  And even if you could collect enough samples, it doesn't tell you anything about any underlying cause for a rate disparity because it doesn't isolate the effect of a regional variation in self-management aganist council management or the level of subsidy.

[Unwashed]

I think it's worth mentioning the distribution of rents.  Statistics is a funny old game and if you want to know how the rent you pay compares with everyone else you'll probably ask if your rent is above average or not.  Oftentimes that's the best way of saying, but when the distribution of rents is skewed a better question is whether you pay more or less than the typical allotmenteer.

Here's the distribution of rents, and it turns out in our sample that a quarter of allotmenteers pay less than £2.00/pole, half pay less than £3.00/pole, two thirds pay less than £4.00/pole, and if you pay more than £7.00/pole you're in the top 10%.

[Unwashed]

If you really want to know how your rent compares with sites in your neighbourhood your best bet is simply to phone round or visit the web sites.  This is what I did last year to see how Newbury's rent compared with its neighbours.  My findings were pretty much the same as this current sample - half the sites pay less than £3.50/pole, a quarter pay less than £2.20/pole, two thirds pay less than £4.10/pole, and the top 10% pay more than £6.80.

[Alex133]

That's very interesting Unwashed - thanks for all the work you've put into it.
I guess amount charged is also affected by amenities offered like water/loos/security.....

[camo_lady]

We're on £7.50 per full plot and have been for 3 years. 
 Rent day was last night. Yay!!  :D

It's a 'traditional sized allotment' I was told, and it's 100 years old, no change in boundaries as the previous owner cut terraces to mark the boundaries. Hazarding a guess, it's 23foot wide (ish) by 68 foot long (Does that sound right??)

There's NO water, or any other facilities. (Though we're putting in a compost toilet as we have 4 plots between our extended family.)

Camo

[lincsyokel2]

We're on £7.50 per full plot and have been for 3 years.  
 Rent day was last night. Yay!!  :D

It's a 'traditional sized allotment' I was told, and it's 100 years old, no change in boundaries as the previous owner cut terraces to mark the boundaries. Hazarding a guess, it's 23foot wide (ish) by 68 foot long (Does that sound right??)

There's NO water, or any other facilities. (Though we're putting in a compost toilet as we have 4 plots between our extended family.)

Camo

so its  1.3 poles by 4.1 poles = 5.3 poles, a standard allotment is usually 17 poles (at least in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire), being the amount of land need to feed a family of 4 people, so round here that would a third of a plot.


5.3 poles at £7.50 = £1.41 a pole.

[Unwashed]

so its  1.3 poles by 4.1 poles = 5.3 poles, a standard allotment is usually 17 poles (at least in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire), being the amount of land need to feed a family of 4 people, so round here that would a third of a plot.


5.3 poles at £7.50 = £1.41 a pole.

23' is 1.4 poles long (23/16.5==1.4) so 23' x 68' == 5.7 poles in area, so I'm going to call that £1.32.

[Unwashed]

I guess amount charged is also affected by amenities offered like water/loos/security.....

Self-managed sites appear to charge whatever it takes to break even plus a little in reserve for capital investment.  in these cases you could probably put together something of a formula where the pole rate was approximately equal to combined costs of maintenance, administration, water, insurance, ground rent and capital levy all divided by the anticipated number of poles let.  On any given site those various costs can vary quite a bit depending on circumstances, but the basic formula holds.  The self-managed site is not run for profit so there is no incentive to maximise the rental revenue, and in any case the rent is often voted for by the members and that positively limits the rent to do no more than cover expenses.  So for the self-managed site the rent has very little to do with the level of site facilities other than whether water is available or not, though rents on sites that are saving for a future capital investment will be expected to be higher.  In the case of a well run site shop the rent may even be cheaper despite the added value of the facility because its profits can subsidise capital projects.

The situation on council-managed sites is different.  The rent is essentially arbitrary and at the vagaries of political whim rather than based on any sound financial analysis.  Invariably the councillors deciding the rent will have no idea what the going rate for an allotment is, and infrequently have no idea what it costs to run their own service or even how the money is spent.  Some councils are happy to subsidise the service and charge little more than a peppercorn, whilst other, especially tax-capped primary councils, are under pressure to reduce the subsidy on a minority passtime.  Some councils rate their sites in bands according to the facilities and this gives the impression of a systematic approach to setting the rent, but there is virtually no free market in allotments as you invariably take an allotment at your nearest site, so there is nothing to be gained by complicating the adminsitration which in all likelihood would see a nett saving if the allotments were let for free.  So nationally you'd expect a degree of correlation between rents and facilities on council sites, but I suspect the effect is swamped by the essentially random level of subsidy.

And then of course there is a spectrum of devolved responsibility between these extremes, so the best a national survey of rents is likely to tell you is how rents vary, it can't tell you why.

[tonybloke]

a standard allotment is usually 17 poles (at least in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire), being the amount of land need to feed a family of 4 people, so round here that would a third of a plot.

as secretary of the Norfolk branch of NSALG, I actually do get to know a little bit about allotments in Norfolk. the normal for Norfolk ( to coin a phrase) allotment is 10 rods. ;)

[lincsyokel2]

the normal for Norfolk

is that not an oxymoron?     :o  8)  ;D