Salt of the Earth (Part 1)

During National Allotment Week, a Guardian Online article claimed that allotment waiting lists in Greater London were up to a staggering 40 years. This is partly due to an increase in demand from the swelling Grow Your Own movement, and partly due to the dire shortage of plots nationwide. The waiting list here in Brighton is a cautiously optimistic 2 years, but for the 85 allotments in the city; 2,000 people are standing in line.

Allotments are a terribly British thing, with a rich history of the working man versus the landed gentry,riots, uprisings and angry letters to The Times. Over 400+ years there’s been enough blood and bone meal shed to raise a healthy crop of vegetables in the pursuit of “free land for all”. Allotments lay somewhere between guerrilla gardening and community gardens.

Recently I appeared in an online article about community gardening, a phenomenon that seems intrinsically US-based. Throughout the piece, there’s talk of rents and rights, and more of a sense of citizens maintaining a plot that’s rightfully theirs. On the other hand, in the UK, there is an air of slightly smug Christian charity as unwashed subjects receive their allotments. It wasn’t always this way.

During the ironically named Dark Ages, the Feudal System was in full swing, and the Open Field System reigned. Villagers received around half an acre of free land from the fields surrounding the village, allocated at random during annual public meetings. This was in lieu of wages, and the farmers practiced crop rotation, bartering and seed swapping.

By the Middle Ages, the growth in population and the extra manure from increased animal husbandry led to larger crops, less available land and greedy landowners. After successfully lobbying Parliament in a sustained campaign of wealth and power versus general fairness, the landed gentry managed to close off 5 million+ acres of common land and field between 1700 and 1860.

Statistically, less than 12% of the population owned any of the land that they worked on, and the population rise of 77% resulted in emergency Poor Laws, workhouses and increased starvation. Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers tried, and failed to wrestle common land back from the aristocracy and despite altruistic murmurs from some clergymen and landowners, poverty and crime was on the rise.

It wasn’t until the Swing Riots of 1830 and 1831 in the South of England that the aristocracy started to take proper notice of the Great Unwashed. A series of bad harvests in the two previous years, returning Napoleonic war soldiers and the newly invented threshing machine meant that starvation was at crisis point – hence the pitchfork waving, general shouting and head kicking.

Enter the General Inclosure Act of 1845 – an about-face of vast proportions, which allowed the landless poor access to at least ¼ of an acre of soil. The Victorians rather liked this in their po-faced, charitable way, and saw it as a means to curb degenerate behaviour through fresh air and God’s double digging. By 1873, there were an estimated 243,000 allotments, meaning one in every three labourers had their own vegetable plot.

The Golden Age of cake sales, flower shows and marrow measuring began…

Comments

[Art]

I think it's cool what you are doing and everything (I mean that), but I'm curious why this blog took a turn in the gardening direction?

I subscribe to it for the music and pop culture rarities, it's always been a treasure trove of that kind of stuff. It's sometimes a drag for me (a non-gardener) because it's hard enough to find these kinds of gems from a reliable source on the internet- but then to have to sift through the gardening posts on WFMU's blog to get to this stuff here- it just sort of bums me out.

I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'd just like to hear the "admin" (or whoever) explain their thinking on including so much gardening stuff with the WFMU blog.

Meanwhile, good luck with what you are up to, GeorgyGirl- I don't mean it personally I hope you understand.

Can we get an explanation, though?
Am I the only one who feels this way?

[davin]

no, you're not

[GeorgyGirl]

None taken.

It *is* only one weekly post out of scores of other posts, so I'm not entirely sure why you feel that you're somehow bombarded with gardening? And, to be fair, you get the introductory paragraph on the front page with a link to click if you want to read more... so essentially you're getting a gardening paragraph a week. Why do you feel then that you "have to sift through the gardening posts"?

I'm genuinely curious.

[Richard]

I'd agree with GeorgyGirl guys - its one paragraph a week, hardly a mire of gardening information. The rest of the blog seems to still be pretty much music. I have to say, I really like this branching out, and this is one of the blogs I enjoy most.
As to where it fits in with WFMU.. well I've not been a longtime reader but it seems to me the guys that run the site are pretty hippyish, with interests in hippyish music. Gardening strikes me as something profoundly hippyish, especially when performed in an urban environment. Then it becomes more of a statement or even art piece. And loads of classic rockers love or loved to garden, not least George Harrison.
My main point though would be that if you dont want to read about gardening... then don't. Seems pretty obvious.

[FMU BOT]

Hi Art,

Yes, the WFMU Blog is almost completely audio and visual but sometimes we offer other directions, from gardening to views on daily life, and so on.

While the majority of the blog is dedicated to sound and vision we do have a gardening post once a week from one author. There's really no exact explanation except that we thought it was a nice direction to take every Saturday afternoon and from the initial posts we reviewed it had an audience in the comments.

Note: The blog does not make a habit of jumping in non-audio/video areas very often. It's actually pretty rare that we have authors jump on to discuss other topics.

[Art]

i sense animosity or just a general "negative vibe" from your end, and i sincerely didn't mean any toward you. i would have emailed an admin or someone "in-charge" directly to ask about this, but couldn't find an email address to do so. i apologize for using your post as a place to pose this question if that feels inappropriate to you.

i don't understand why you feel the need to make fun of my being less coordinated than you think i ought to be with reading blogs/ getting to the stuff i read it for.

i'd hope we can agree that regardless of how easy it is or isn't to "sift," my question remains the same and is valid, and I hope someone at WFMU can give us readers some insight:
Why the decision to incorporate gardening with an otherwise mostly music blog?

i just would like to hear your all's overall thoughts behind this decision.

for me, it feels a bit like throwing in an article about antiquing in the middle of a cat fancy magazine.

[FMU BOT]

"Why the decision to incorporate gardening with an otherwise mostly music blog?"

WFMU = Freeform

Maybe in time we will offer a weekly post on "improving your skill at Scrabble"

I would just skip the posts weekly Art.

[GeorgyGirl]

Hi Art - Please let me reassure you that I wasn't making fun of you in any way, shape or form and I genuinely apologise if it came across that way.

I think if you click on "FMU BOT" (under their comment) it takes you through to the TypePad profile where there should be an email address or comment box or something similar, if that helps.

I hope I haven't put you off WFMU!! :(

[Kevin]

WFMU is in New Jersey .. the Garden State.

I know people in New Jersey who garden and listen to WFMU .. and that's in Elizebeth NJ.

Popular Science has named Elizabeth NJ as one of the greenest cities in the US .. and the only one selected from NJ.

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-02/americas-50-greenest-cities?page=1

Personally .. I would never eat anything grown by the side of a Petroleum refinery.

[Matt]

GeorgyGirl, I mean no disrespect to Art. But don't waste your time.

He's at WFMU of all places asking to "speak to the manager." It'd be funny if it weren't such a sad statement of big box store Americans who are constantly looking for a master and a 3-ring binder of rules to dictate our lives.

Art? This is a freeform blog. If you don't care about gardening, you can move on to the next article. Or go to another blog that's 100% music. You hold the power. You.

And GeorgyGirl? Why did you decide to about gardening? I'm guessing because you felt like it.

And that's okay. You can't please everyone. So you may as well please yourself.

I look forward to your next piece about gardening or Richard Stark novels or Paul Pope art or whatever you want.

Diversity thrives.

And hopefully WFMU won't waste any more time bowing to those who would search in vain for foolish consistencies...

[D.]

The post before this was about car bras.

[jeff]

i read it as national altamont week...

[GeorgyGirl]

Funnily enough, me and the Other Half were debating whether the 40th anniversary of Altamont would get as much rose-tinted coverage as Woodstock, the Moon Landings et al... I somehow doubt it - can't think why! ;)

[Rebecca Lewis]

I'm really enjoying these posts on gardening and I think today's topic about allotment spaces is really interesting.

[K.]

Thanks for the posting, GG. I knew nothing about the history of "allotments", we have no equivalent here in the States ( this still being a feudal warlord based society ). What happens here is that the urban working class occasionally get fed up, squat on a piece of abandoned land, and develop a garden that way. Often these things last for years until the city is pressured into evicting everyone and paving it over to make another parking lot. That happens less now that the consumer culture has permeated every inch of the country and our citizens have been reduced to mewling and puking babies, unable to even cook a meal for themselves, much less grow the food to do it. I'm really impressed that those waiting lists are so long.

[Dale]

I have read posts on the FMU blog about Archie comics, the democratizing effects of the invention of drywall, Steve Allen's toupee, making beer, FMU personnels mode of travel, on and on.....if you don't have an interest in something, don't read it and don't comment about it. Posts with zero comments probably don't get repeated or become serialized.

[Jrld]

I frequent the WFMU blog BECAUSE is isn't just music.

[barryeugene]

georgy has actually inspired me to start a garden.. She is right!.. You don't need that much space to do it!

[GeorgyGirl]

barryeugene - You have completely made my day. :) Some of the negative comments on here really get me down, and then I hear something like "georgy has actually inspired me to start a garden" and that makes me feel infinitely better. Hugs to ya - and send me some photos of your garden!