Page 31 - ALG Issue 1 2025

COMMUNITY
today and it is so good to see it used by our longstanding tenants, allowing them to keep up with their enjoyment of gardening, maintaining their social contacts on site, and to continue to enjoy the fresh air and sense of fulfilment that growing your own produce brings.
Our main hurdle to achieving our aim was to be clear about our objectives and to put together a comprehensive business case to present to various funding streams.We made sure that we outlined the potential benefits to our community and the fact
that we were passionate about being
able to continue to offer our members
the opportunity to maintain an allotment garden for as long as possible. Most of our raised bed tenants have mobility issues and so having the beds just a short distance from our car park/pedestrian entrance is vital, as is having a flat hard surface on the plot for them to be able to walk on easily. The variety of beds from tall, raised beds to sit-down beds has also been really helpful.
We have recently converted another plot to raised beds, just normal height ones this time, so that members who don’t have mobility issues but who either just want
a really small plot (one or two beds), or are new to allotment gardening and wish to see if they take to it or not, can also have somewhere to grow things. Our five disabled raised beds are all rented out, at a very low rent and we even have a waiting list for them.
The project was very worthwhile and
enables us to keep our members for as long as possible! I hope that other sites can make this valuable addition to their offer, to benefit the whole community.
Carol Lincoln, Secretary, Groby Allotment Society
Allotment and Leisure Gardener | Issue 1 2025 | 31