With thousands on North East allotment waiting lists and few spaces coming up, Rosie McGlade pulls on her wellies to find out what’s going on
Of all the honeys in the world, the North Tyneside allotment variety surely has to be up there. Forget your Manuka, this is the one for you if you’ve got hay fever, sore knees, or are in general need of a boost, and it tastes beautiful. It’s sweet and delicately fragrant without that cloying heaviness you often get.
Here in Forest Hall, the bees, active until just a week or two ago, are in hibernation. Most of each hive’s 60,000 to 80,000-strong workforce will die off soon, leaving the two queens, who have a life-span of three or four years, and a couple of dozen sleeping companions in their wooden boxes, which are surrounded by shiny fallen conkers and within yards of the greenhouses and neatly turned rows.
Lee Kirkbride is the Clousden Drive allotment secretary and Steve Brodie its chair. Steve’s wife accuses him of living here. They and their fellow committee members have overseen a project this year which has brought all but three of the site’s 41 allotment holders a half pound of shared honey.
Having secured the council’s best allotment award once again this year, the committee is responsible for its running, collecting fees (between £19 to £53 a year depending on garden size), and ploughing funds back into projects like a new fence and a wildlife garden. A resident family of foxes is revered for its capacity to keep rats at bay. A sale of seedlings in the spring and produce in summer helps bring in additional monies.
Nobody, so far, has been stung.
The honey idea came from a tenant who approached a professional beekeeper on the win-win theory of bringing additional pollinators in. Dahlias and other flowers seem to have been better this year than ever.
“When I first sat on the committee nine years ago, the right half of allotment holders didn’t speak to the left half, but that’s all in the past now,” Steve says.
“Now it’s all very friendly. Someone will have an excess of cucumber plants for example, and invariably there’ll be somebody else with plants he can swap them for, and there are various communal projects. That’s how it works.”
This being the first year, the beekeeper has kept his hives here for free, while the tenants have enjoyed the honey. “There are shops in Newcastle which would charge up to £14 for one of our jars,” Lee says.
Next year they hope to expand with hives of their own, and while they can cost up to £1,000 each, you can buy polystyrene versions for much less. They’re planning a step-by-step policy so that the number of bees won’t outstrip the available pollen supply.
Clousden Drive has an intriguing history, starting out in 1902 as a communist cooperative five times the size producing food for the Co-op under the auspices of a Russian entrepreneur who lived in the adjoining big house, known for its Viking grave in the garden.
Today it’s all beautifully kept, with graveled pathways, neat rows of Brussels sprouts and piles of manure dotted between beds of fat red and golden chrysanthemums, now just starting to finish. Birds are singing even in the cold drizzle.
While almost magical in terms of their produce, honey bees are a drab-looking version of the lovely wild bumble; small and dark and altogether lacking the bumble’s jolly yellow and black woolly strip, but once established, hives are quite easy to maintain. The beekeeper just comes occasionally over the summer to make sure all’s going well.
“If we can produce more honey, we’ll sell more,” says Steve. “It’s like gold dust. One of our tenants bought 10 jars from another local producer and massaged it into her knee. Other people use it to help with their hay fever. If you think about it, it’s all coming from the same local pollen source. It’s a natural antihistamine.”
Allotments became popular in Britain in the 1920s, when soldiers returning from the Great War took up gardening to feed their families. The old commune at Clousden Drive was divided up into small gardens.
Today it has a waiting list of around 100 people, and only a plot or two comes vacant each year. Much to the concern of some of some longer-standing tenants, the committee is looking to halve some of the gardens so they can welcome more people in.
Lee, an intensive care nurse at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, was recently awarded best plot for the second year running. “This year I’ve grown lots of brassicas: broccoli, cauliflowers, cabbages, sprouts, as well as potatoes, peas, beans, beetroot chilies and tomatoes, plus a lot of strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, as well as apples and figs. I just live round the corner with my wife and I’m here probably every day in the summer.”
The gardens produce more than the allotment holders can eat. Food is shared with neighbours and friends, and then this year tenants voted to give a lot away to the food bank.
“Grow your own has become very popular again,” Steve says, “and allotments are the most sociable way of doing it. I think there are 2,500 people on waiting lists in North Tyneside alone. Ours is statutory land so it can never be built on, but some other allotments in the region are less fortunate with disputes going on as the tenants try to fight off developers.”
It certainly shows that far from dying off in popularity, allotments are a flourishing and very fulfilling part of modern life which no wonder so many people want to be part of. Councils, we want more of them, not less.
