Page 56 - ALG Issue 4 2014 Digital Edition

Making the Most of Our Shield Total Insurance Grant
Towards the end of April, Liz at Corby kindly informed us that we had been awarded £250 from the Shield Total Insurance Allotment Fund to help to sort our site drainage problem. During August, 20 or more plot holders helped to put the grant to good use.
Hale Road Allotments are in Swavesey, between Cambridge
and Huntingdon. The 60-plot site was set up in October 2012 and in the first two years we have had exceptionally good crops of vegetables, fruit and flowers. With the amount of deep digging and large applications of bulky organic manures over two years, things can only get better – provided weeds are controlled and a rigid crop rotation is followed.
The only site defect is that the moderately heavy soil is significantly waterlogged in periods of prolonged wet weather. This is hardly surprising since the land is at only 5 metres above mean sea level and in the flood plain of the river Great Ouse, less than a mile away, as it winds its way round the southern edge of the East Anglian Fens.
We had come through only two winters but that was enough
for the surface ponding to convince us that we had to something about surface wetness. It is no use having good crops of parsnips, Brussels sprouts and leeks if the grass tracks on site are flooded
and your wellies sink in when you walk on your plot. So we decided to install a piped drainage system along our grid of internal tracks, leading to the external ditch in the south and with crushed brick rubble filling the trench from the pipe to the surface. Finance was required for i) a mini-digger and operator to dig 285 metres of trench, ii) 300 metres of 100 mm diameter perforated plastic drainage pipe and iii) 50 tonnes of crushed brick rubble. The total estimated cost was just over £1,200 and whereas we knew where we could obtain £800 we had little further cash in our account for bridging the gap. Then one of our more tenacious plot holders remembered seeing on The National Allotment Society website that in early 2014 Shield Total Insurance still held a monthly competition with a grant of £250 to the
winning project put forward by an allotment association or school. We prepared an application that made the technical case for our project which we submitted in March. We included photographs of
the wetness problem from two previous years in our bid. Our method statement stressed that the 50 tonnes of crushed brick rubble
would be hauled in wheelbarrows from our car park and placed
in the trenches by our plot holders – perhaps the assessors were impressed or took pity on us at this stage. Within six weeks Liz gave us the very welcome news that we had won.
We decided to do the work in summer when dry soil conditions would allow us to complete the task in a concentrated bout of hard physical labour. The trench digging, drainage pipe delivery and most of the brick rubble delivery was all done on one day towards the end of July. The only clever part was to carefully lay the drainage pipe
in the trench with joins at the intersections and this was done by a group of older, more mature and sober plot holders.
In the last days of July, several enthusiastic plot holders occasionally carted brick rubble to cover the pipe. Then, on Saturday 2nd August a big co-ordinated group turned up with massed wheelbarrows, spades and forks and within two hours the large heap of rubble was gone. We actually ran out of rubble so more was delivered and on 16 August it was topped up to the original ground surface along all 285 metres of trench. Some of the excavated soil was then spread onto adjacent plots and some was levelled either side of the trench and grass seed sown. By the end of August the job was done.
The only visible sign left of this strenuous activity is the rubble that remains exposed at the surface along the length of the trench. It also reminds us that the generous and timely Shield Total Insurance grant was the icing on the cake that spurred us on to do the job.
Selwyn Richardson Chairman, Hale Road A&GA
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