PART III
The Allotment and Vegetable Plot
Encouragement of productive vegetable and fruit growing for the support of working-class families was one of the main thrusts of the cooperative movements overseen by Edward Owen Greening, and this interest is strongly reflected in the ‘One & All’ garden books. Having lured in his readers with promises of Sweet Peas and Annuals flowers, Greening produced a booklet on simple salad vegetables before moving swiftly on to the more serious side of vegetable production, with ‘Vegetables’ (Booklet No. 4), ‘Manuring’ (No. 6), ‘Potatoes’ (No. 7) and ‘Allotments’ (No. 8). Pausing for light relief with ‘Rose’s and ‘Weather’ (No. 9 and No. 12), books 13, 15, 16 and 17 again returned to the productive side of gardening, covering onions, peas, tomatoes and beans. Pausing to cover in more detail the ‘Roots’ and ‘Cabbages’ first seen in the more general work on vegetables, Greening then returned to allotments (and the allotment ‘movement’ more generally), in Nos. 27 and 28 (the latter a double edition). This concern, predating the productivity campaigns of the First World War, reflected nineteenth-century changes both in the countryside (where enclosures had resulted in loss of land available to the rural labourer), and in the towns (where a vastly increased working-and middle-class population had been left with no means of producing their own food). Greening (through his chosen writer T. W. Sanders) had covered the more recent history of the allotment movement in the first of his booklets on the subject – but his campaigning zeal for the provision and efficient use of allotments and vegetable plots for all shines through each of the ‘allotment’ booklets. His suggestion of allotment gardens for soldiers in barracks pre-dates by decades a similar scheme put in place by the government in the Second World War. Booklet 28 on cropping allotments, dealing with the layout of the plot and the use of techniques such as inter-cropping and crop rotation, can be used as an exact model by present-day allotment holders, although the outline of suitable rules and regulations for allotments, including the exhortation that ‘No work shall be done on Sundays after 10 am’ is perhaps less likely to meet with enthusiasm, as religious observance has fallen dramatically. It is however satisfying to find that the basics of sowing, tending and cropping were much the same then as they are now; and if Salsify, Scorzonera and Seakale (No. 4) play a less prominent role in our vegetable diet than was the case for the Edwardians perhaps it is time for their revival!
Twigs Way