market gardens

[gazzaroo]

hi all ...i have an allotment ..many of the gardens around me on the site ant getting used because of fluding and and that ,and with all the cut back the counsel have stopped are backing and we only have a 5 year lease on are garden so not looking good   ,,do you no if you can chance from allotment to some sort of market gardens where the community can come and walk around and by are froot and veg and eggs just like a farmers market lowing us to develop are garden site and are gardens,,marking it a place were visitors would like to come,,,,some think like anwick  gardens   

[gazzaroo]

[Unwashed]

Hi Garry, welcome to A4A.  Yes, several options are possible.

If the Council want to allow you to sell your produce they can do that.  The prohibition is on selling produce from allotment gardens, not allotments which are more general.  It just depends on how the Council let the plots.

The Council are also able to let allotments on whatever terms they like if they aren't able to let them as allotments, and if your site suffers from flooding then that would appear to apply.

The Parish Council is able to sell an allotment site to the Boorough Council for them to let as a smallholding, but smallholdings come with conditions you might not be happy with so I don't know how suitable this option would be.

It is possible for the Council to dispose of the allotment site but how easy that is would depend on how the Council came to own the site in the first place.  But even if it has statutory protection if it's susceptable to flooding the sale might get approval.

If I understand your plans right the best option might be for the Council to let the site to your association for you to manage as allotments.

If the site floods it might be possible to protect it but I have a funny feeling the Environment Agency wouldn't let you do that.  If you haven't already you might want to talk to them about your plans and see what they think.

What do you mean when you say you have a 5 year lease on your garden.  You mean your personal plot, or are you talking about the lease your site association has on the site?

Can you say any more about your arrangement and what you plan?

[gazzaroo]

the allotment site is not a council owned site , its owned by a land lord of some kind.. the allotments have been there over 30 years and used to be funded by the council ei they payed for water and rent on the land buy that has all been cut back,,,many years ago the council damaged the drains and have said they are at fault,,so over harv the land is not used becouse its floods we has 17 waiting for a garden ,,,and loads of land.. we cant sell what we grow and we have a   association wich are getting on a bit now,,as for are 5 year lease it for the site ,, the thing is now what do we do to race the founds to keep are gardens and inpove them. we could be kicked of in 5 years, some are now saying whats the point of putting up greenhouses and polytunnels just to get kicked of..,,, so now am looking in to helping out ,,,iv been to farmers markets and see small holder selling what there grow ,,and how buzzy they are. i now have 2 plots with my dad and we have spend loads on green houses and duck huts and hen huts and more and must of are fello gardeners would love to sell what there can grow to help race the cash need to put proper paths in water pipes ..do you think it will work,,have some sort of garden market were people can walk around nice looking garden and buy foot and veg , eggs all that ..

[Unwashed]

Interesting.  There are several bits to this really.  There's the lease, the funding, the flooding, and the market garden.

Market Garden:  As a fund-raiser the market-garden won't work.  If market gardening was at all profitable the countryside would be covered with little market gardens.  It isn't.  Even big market gardens with all the ecconomy of scale and mechanisation hardly turn a profit in the UK.  Your time would be spent much more profitably working at your day-jobs and just stumping up the cash yourselves.

Funding:  You need money to fix the drains, pay the lease, and pay for the water, right?  It's reasonable to expect to pay around £5 per pole for your plots, so if you pay much less at the moment your rents probably need to go up, but that shouldn't create any hardship.  Water is usually around £1 per pole so you'll pay that yourselves without difficulty.  Funding site improvements and the lease are more involved but you might not actually need to find much yourselves.

Lease:  How much is the site lease, and how big is the site?  If you're paying over the odds for the site lease then you may be able to negotiate with the parish council to pay the excess.  £200 per acre would be absolute top whack for agricultural land and that should only add around £1.50 per pole to your rents.  I agree that you need a longer lease to be able to plan ahead so if the landlord isn't willing to renew the lease then I would be talking to the parish council about the powers of the allotments acts to compulsorily rent the land t a fair agricultural rate. 

Flooding:  This obviously needs fixing because it's killing the site.  It may not take much money if the work can be done by hand.  You have some options.  You my be able to do it yourselves, or you might be able to find some voluntary labour - Vodafone in Newbury do some of this kind of thing, and there may be companies around you with an agenda of social responsibility that would want to help.  You may also be able to find some grant money to pay for some of it - several members here have successfully found money for site impovements like this.  If the council are responsible for the damage they might also be persuaded to cough up some cash.  The most challenging aspect is organising it all.

I'm certainly happy to come along and meet you all and see what I can contribute but I think getting a good working relationship with the parish council may also help as there may be a councillor or two who want to get involved in the planning and organising side and they can sometimes be very good at this kind of thing.

[chriscross1966]

I can see a couple of issues, to add to the list, one major, one minor.

1: The biggie. HSE will be all over you like a cheap suit if you let people, especially children, have unfettered access to a working market garden. You'll need serious machinery to work it (A rotavator the size of a Camon C8 or better still a Howard Gem at least for starters), , and the average local HSE will have a collective aneurysm if you suggested it. This also applies to your third-party liability insurance which will be horrible.

2: You have a serious problem with spelling. I'm not usually a spelling/grammar nazi unless I'm drunk, but your post isn't the easiest thing to read. If your correspondence with the council is as badly spelled they might well ignore it.  One prblem you face with your spelling is that you are using a lot of homophones, words which sound the same but mean different things and are spelt differently, a spell checker won't pick them up, they're perfectly acceptable words, they just don't mean what you want to say.

The second one is easily fixed, get someone else to sort out the paperwork, the first one is the nasty one

[gazzaroo]

thanks for that.

[pigeonseed]

The selling produce idea is an interesting one - market gardens in the countryside can't make a profit, but I suppose it depends what kind of area you're in, how much disposable income people have, and whether they'd like to spend it on community-grown veg.

But yes - I hadn't even thought of health and safety. You'd need to be able to separate the selling from the gardening, wouldn't you? And making it all conform to health and safety rules would cost a lot of money.