Wednesday 19 May 2010

Japanese visit

I had an interesting day helping to show some Japanese visitors round my site, and a second site nearby. Apparently they've only had allotments there since about 1920, and they're still developing. A city plot is about 25 square metres, but in the mountains they have larger plots with huts on them. Unfortunately I forgot the camera (I'm always doing this) so I don't have any pics.

The second site we visited is quite secluded, like mine, but has a completely different atmosphere as there are no hedges. Plots are 2-300 square metres, rather than our 300 or 600. It's more of a standard size, and obviously a lot easier to manage. They've got wide grass verges and communal spaces, with lots of trees. I assumed at first that this originated as plots which were abandoned when allotments were unfashionable, but as far as I could gather, it was actually laid out like that from the beginning. There's a nice communal building with kitchen facilities and toilets; we could do with something similar on my site!

3 comments:

  1. Allotment sites are very different aren't they? As ours is a small field owned by the local church the plots are smaller than standard and there are still only 11. It's bounded by hedges though, which gives a real air of seclusion and being 'away from it all'.

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  2. When I was in Japan, I noticed lots of front and back gardens with vegetables planted in them, as well as plots between buildings, even near large roads. It was strange in such a technologically advanced country to wander a few miles out of the cities and find tiny rice paddies being tended by elderly couples using hand tools.

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  3. It's the same in many parts of the world. My wife's from Sierra Leone, and there people have little swamps, or rice paddies, in the middle of the capital. I think people manage to cultivate land in most cities, if not all.

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