Well, you’ve had all kinds of people trying to force their way into the house, after all…Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Vikings, Normans, Nazis…I can see a need for wariness…
Pumpkins are marrows, too, aren’t they-- winter squash. If the pumpkin were big enough you could hide the body inside.
As I recall, Hercule Poirot planned to raise vegetable marrows during his retirement years.
I have an allotment- like most (but not all) in my city, it’s owned by the local council, and the rent is not exactly peppercorn, it’s about £80 a year- some places charge several hundred.
In England, there’s actually quite a lot of legislation around them, including restrictions on rent increases (basically the council can only increase the rent a similar percentage to the increase for any other leisure activities they provide), and a requirement for local councils to make allotments available if the land is available, and a certain number of tax paying residents request them. This can cause a little friction with councils, as they don’t make much (if any) money from the deal, especially as they provide water and fences on site (mine even has a little shop and toilet facilities- it’s dead posh).
Allotments aren’t generally rented for one season, but the council often takes a dim view of them being passed between people, especially areas with waiting lists; my tenancy agreement specifically states that I can’t give or leave it to anyone else. Unless thrown off site, for breaking site rules (normally neglecting the plot), people can have them for decades though, and sometimes do pass them on to kids by sneaking them in as joint tenants. I have neighbours on my site who’ve been there well over 30 years, with one 90 something year old who holds 12 plots and has been there about 60 years. Having held mine a mere 5, I’m still the new kid.
I grow vegetables, flowers and have fruit bushes and trees on mine, and have just started keeping bees there too. Trees are banned on some sites, but just limited to 6 on mine. Some people have chickens (“no cockerels”; apparently, we have a lot of crowing hens), ducks and geese, and there’s a tumbledown old pig pen, though pigs are no longer permitted. The site is a bit over 100 years old, which is older than most in Bristol, and also the largest, with over 300 individual plots.
I’ve not found any corpses yet, but I did dig up a human molar a few months back, so we’ll see when I dig out the rest of the new bit.
Feel free to ask me any further question about 'em, or I have a blog about mine if you’re really interested 
It used to be a common joke that, if you wanted to be sure to get your garden or allotment properly dug over, you only needed to make an anonymous report to the police that there was a body buried there.
(I think most people are aware that “wasting police time” is a genuine, and sometimes prosecuted, offence here…)
PS: “Peppercorn” rents go back to the days when spices were extremely valuable, so one peppercorn was genuinely of value. But over time, any old leases on those terms became of no great value to the landlord, and the term came to be adopted as a nominal acknowledgement of the owner-tenant relationship.
AIUI there can be all sorts of variations in how allotments are run, often with an association of the plotholders doing a lot of day-to-day supervision and support so that whoever owns the land doesn’t have to be very pro-active. And the balance between supervision and support varies as well. There are tales of some association committees being very strict about people neglecting their plot or growing too many flowers or whatever, and others being much more supportive and community-minded.
In Germany they have similar “Schrebergarten”, but I think they tend to be aimed more at maintaining the plots as something more like a domestic garden, with summerhouses you may sleep in.
Good man, I was going to add this myself and refer to the Dutch bulbs financial market in the 18C as an example of things which we consider common were once enormously valuable.
[quote=“Claverhouse, post:3, topic:725452”]
It’s basically a field with parallel strips of ground ( somehow I think each strip is meant to be 165 feet long ideally )…QUOTE]
Good post. 
OK: historically an allotment measures 10 square poles (perch). So a 10 poles (perch) allotment would be 5.5 yards wide by 55 yards long, or 10 square perch. 253 sq metres.
The traditional allotment size is 1/4 of a rood (or goad for our American friends).
Or 1/16th of an acre.
That is actually a lot of dirt to plant and yet is human sized for the effort of one person.
Good post. 
OK: historically an allotment measures 10 square poles (perch). So a 10 poles (perch) allotment would be 5.5 yards wide by 55 yards long, or 10 square perch. 253 sq metres.
The traditional allotment size is 1/4 of a rood (or goad for our American friends).
Or 1/16th of an acre.
That is actually a lot of dirt to plant and yet is human sized for the effort of one person.
They’re pretty common here in Stockholm too. Some are large enough that a small building, larger than a shed but much smaller than a bungalow, sometimes comes attached. This is mainly as so many people in the cities lives in flats that it gives them a bit of a garden they can have as well, just a distance from your home. Anyway, there are rules about not treating the place as your primary residence, but every so often someone gets in trouble for trying to live in one.
So…an Acre was the original measurement of the amount of land which could be ploughed by a man and oxen in a day. The measurements of furlong and chain come from that base.
Purely for historical interest these arcane measurements date from the 11thC England but in 1960s New Zealand they were still the standard calculations my father (and I as a child) measured paddocks and calculated how much to sow.
A quarter acre was originally the amount of land (English) which a peasant needed to provide enough food for his family.
Which explains why 1/4 acre lots were created throughout the British colonialist expansion,
Wonderfully informative post! Thank you. Do give your blog address.
Congratulations on the transgendered hens. They’re quite au courant.
I can see where the councils wouldn’t want people to just pass the plots song, as that deprives them of the opportunity to raise the rent.
If you find skeletal remains to go with that tooth, you heard it here first.
I’m now going to start working the fabulous expression “dead posh” into my conversations.
I recall hearing a long joke with that as the punch line. Something about a son who was helping his dad get the garden ready and phoned the police anonymously about a buried body… Or maybe it was worked into the plot of a mystery story.
Allotments in Edinburgh are 10 metres x 20 metres and cost £100 per year, although half-size ones at half the price may also be available.
Here are a couple of pictures of ones near where I live - the waiting list to get one is, apparently, 9 years.
They’re quite desirable; in other areas in the city, the wait is usually less.
Wow-- that is a huge area!
What is seen as the clear, overt benefit to the community of maintaining the allotment phenomenon? I mean, it’s common sense and all, and intuitively one can infer the benefits, but when councils, politicians, and citizens actually have to make a case for continuing the practice, what specific economic benefits can they cite with proof? Or does it never come to that?
I can imagine that if the gummint wanted to sell that whole Edinburgh group of allotments to a shopping mall developer, hundreds of citizens with pitchforks and cans of bug poison would storm the mayor’s office!
These particular allotments would be awkward to develop although there’s currently a bitter fight in progress to stop a neighbouring, now unused, field being built on. It’s beside quite a posh area and it’s also on a slope and next to a much-used park/nature reserve which are part of the Edinburgh Green Belt.
(In the UK various cities have a ‘green belt’ around them to try to prevent urban sprawl. Some development is allowed and obviously there’s farms and villages, etc. already in them but in theory it’s all very controlled. Edinburgh is growing rapidly and all sorts of plans for housing, etc. are pending but these allotments are probably fairly safe.)
Google Earth view centered on them.
There was a somewhat less revolutionary campaign over some allotments that were moved to make room for the London Olympics and were supposed to be moved back to the park, but - guess what - there are property developers involved:
http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/2136
What happens at the beginning of the growing season? Is each allotment owner responsible for tilling his/her own plot? Or does the town council bring in commercial equipment and turn over all the plots at the same time? Because the second seems so much more efficient, although, presumably, there will be some people who don’t want their plots turned over.
There’s one of these within walking distance of my house. I think you sign up for one through the local community association. All of the sections always seem to be in use. I’ve never done it, though. A couple of flower pots in front of my house are the most I can manage.
Hardly. They’re all growing different things on different systems, so would need to dig over at different times. Besides, part of the point is to get the exercise. There’s a difference between “efficient” and “effective”…
This is done here in the states sometimes, but there’s no formal nationwide system like it sounds like the UK has. Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, the local state mental hospital has a large amount of land (I think at one time the facility grew its own food), and has set aside some of it for local residents on a first come first served basis. Currently you can sign up via a Facebook group, I’m not sure how it was done before and I’m sure that there must still be some other way.
It’s divided into a bunch of very small plots. You can grow maybe a few tomato plants and some other things that don’t take up much space. Around here, unless you’re a renter, you probably have a back yard with more room available than they give you. I think it’s intended for people who have no land at all available to them, or maybe people in developments where the HOA doesn’t allow vegetable gardens (don’t get me started on HOAs).
Some allotments will clear the ground between tenants, but that’s not common. Other than that, it’s entirely the responsibility of the tenants. Mine looked like this when I took it on. As I mentioned, I grow fruit trees, so I’d be pretty livid if the council decided to dig it all over without my permission. Besides, we don’t really have one growing season, I have crops in the ground all year, even if they do slow right down over winter.
There isn’t really a formal national system, so much as every council has its own network, and there are some privately owned sites as well. There is a national association, but I don’t know anyone who’s a member.
As for general benefits; well, it does tick a few society benefit boxes. A lot of the plot holders are elderly, and it’s good exercise as well as social. Also, a lot of sites (including mine) are extremely diverse, with tenants of many different nationalities. Though my site, due to size, isn’t as social as some, it’s still one of the very few places in the city where everyone genuinely mixes regardless of age and background- no one cares who you are or when you’re from, or if your English isn’t great, they just care how your pumpkins are doing, and ooh, what’s that you’re growing?
Mostly though, they’re there because they have been for years, and so many people have memories of helping out on Grandad’s plot that the idea of selling them would provoke outrage. There were protestors living up trees for 6 weeks here when one of the other sites in the city was partly dug up in building a new, not particularly popular, bus route. Support wasn’t exactly universal for the allotments, but it was pretty widespread, and protestors were interviewed on national news.