My Big Old Annual Moan About the Council

Rabbit! rabbit! rabbit! But this time I have an excuse. There's been a massacre. The victims were butchered in their beds. The main suspect - let's call him Peter, Brer or Bugs - has just wiped out three plantings of juvenile cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower plants, about ninety in all. Yes I'm blaming a rabbit. Or a whole rabbitude of them. Proof? (a) Little roundy pellets in the vicinity (b) Buck toothed incisor patterns left in the deceased and critically wounded brassicas (c) I nearly caught one of the fat little gets a few weeks ago. He was so full he seemed to be having trouble hoppiting off and if the grab I’d made had been a successful one, he’d have ended up in a stew - one way at least of getting those filched nutrients back into my account.

No use hiding behind that stick!

Meantime, down the hill, raiding sheep long ago caused one harassed grower to turn his beloved plot into a chicken wire origami of Fort Appache. Think "Troubles" era RUC station. My rabbited plants might have recovered somewhat in this fantastic growing weather had I actually been able to water them. But on my last visit - perhaps the hottest of the year so far, the water was turned off - yet again and always in the heat.

Despite the recent rains, our windswept hillside site was bone dry and the bunny stripped plants would have fluffed up with a bit of water.The lack of water for me is the for-all-for-the-want-of-a horse-shoe-nail difference between thirty cabbages and none, thirty heads of broccoli and none, thirty heads of cauliflower and none. And I’m looking at bare blackcurrant bushes whose failure is also directly linked to the taps being dry during the hot period just before easter when these bushes went thirsty and raggedy because the water was also turned off. Meantime my competitive relations are boasting about blackcurrants the size of their heads.

Then there’s the bull with a face like Jordan's ex. I'd caught him hoovering my raspberry plant stems backwards through the fence on which they were supported, extricating the berries from the thorny branches with the oral finesse of a Jim Rose Circus veteran. However its attitude was more pre deregulation Dublin taximan. As it slewed off the last of my ripening raspberries and spat the bare stems right back through the fence, it looked at me as if to ask: "Alright bud?" Unlike the rabbit, I didn't attempt a wrestle.The infernal thing continued to hoover my raspberries even despite me ranting my tonsils raw and throwing half a pebble path at it whilst simulaneously holding back as many raspberry stems from the supporting fence as my tally of remaining fingers would permit.

Bad moos around an allotment. And it's no use hiding behind that stick!

I didn't have a bigger-than-the- bull, bull-barred jeep with the huge wheels and a great big blaring bull-horn which the farmer blares as he reverses and thrusts about in a motorised bull fight every evening in order to get Butthead and his accompanying herd of bovine raspberry blowers back to base - after they’ve chowed on our permimeter crops.

So the thing is this: Myself and a goodly number of my comrades in farms at our complex have now had quite enough of the bull. And the rabbits, and the sheep and the feral accountants. Because we pay the council handsomely (they increased our rents from E44 to E120 this year - 172% up that is) to keep the water on the land and to keep the local farm fauna from treating our complex like the salad snack counter at Fresh.

Because rabbit and livestock proof perimeter fencing is part of the deal on an allotment complex.Neglectful mother council has also banned us from having sheds to shelter in when it rains (we have dark shipping containers in the car park), and it seems to cut off our water when the rain stops. For more than a hundred people we have been provided with the single toilet bowl from Trainspotting located in the outhouse from the Texas Chainswaw Massacre. Previously used by thirty years of Dublin binmen (ours is a former tip head site) and without a window or electric light last time I was there - we have had to find the seatless and stained bowl in the dark with outstretched hands.

A gang of short shrifts yesterday.

The same council gives our representative - the one appointed to speak for hundreds of paid up allotment holders, short shrift each time we raise views on these issues. Their attitude: “we've a massive waiting list of people just dying to take over your plots. And did you know private plots cost E350?” Already some of us are murmuring about clubbing together to buy our own land.Based on figures they provide on their web site, it seems that our council earns roughly E17,000 per annum from our five acre site.

According to a recent survey by the Farmer’s journal, the average price of agricultural land in Ireland has fallen by 57% in four years. In Dublin the average is now E13,000 per acre.Thus our council earns E3,400 per acre per annum in rents - enough for them to reap the entire value of their land within four years. This is not providing an “amenity” - this a business.On the other hand it would take 32 of us paying E416 each to buy an acre of our own land which would allow us an average allotment each (120 square metres) and common land for parking and other facilities. Of course we’d have to pay for fencing, wc facilities, insurance and the sinking of a few wells. But a one of payment of E1,000 each would likely take care of the lot.

The alternative is that increasing council allotment fees combined with an increase in the cost of the hobby as compost and seed prices increase, are now turning allotment keeping into a paid-for fashion hobby akin to golf.In the same week as my robbing rabbit, a hardy old grower who disappeared from our complex some time back was finally replaced with one one who blocked off vehicle access to perhaps 20 allotments with a brand new sixty grand car. Wearing brand new designer wellies of the sort normally found at the backstage area in Glastonbury, he unloaded expensive trays of garden centre grown lettuces.

Soon it’ll be hired help to do the digging fchrissakes!!

Ain't Gonna Work on Daddy's Urban Farm No More

Last weekend, my three year old daughter walked up to me wearing her beloved set of fairy wings and wielding her star tipped fairy wand. She glared into my eyes and delivered the following withering line: “Sweetie, I make forces of nature,  YOU make pots and kettles! I work up in the sky and YOU work down in a ditch!"

The effect was to leave her dad sincerely alarmed on two fronts: first wondering where in hell she got that vocabulary range and second, to try and work out exactly what she was saying about my career. And she’d only just turned three last month!

Observing my state of shock, Her Outdoors pointed out that our fairy mad munchkin was merely quoting a line from Tinkerbell - one of her favourite Disney films. She’d just delivered word for word the dialogue from a segment in which one of the cattier fairies jibes Tinkerbell over her lowly status as a “tinkering fairy” rather than a higher ranking “garden fairy.”

"Sweetie, I make forces of nature!!"

And this wasn’t the first time either that uncle Walt had delivered some pint sized invective by proxy. Almost as soon as she began to talk Plot 34’s Waterer of Everything began blurting out: “Go Away and Leave me Alone!” ...for no apparent reason.  It took us a few weeks of embarrassment in shops and such before we worked out that she was quoting, tone perfect, an indignant Mowgli as he gave some lip to Baghera in the Jungle Book - or the “Jumble Bump” as she called it back then.

For his part her eight year old brother, Plot 34’s erstwhile Head of Secret Tunnels, has recently started speaking with a particular type of American affectation that sees him raising the last word of every sentence and leaving it hanging there. Those who remember American Pie and the “This one time....at band camp...” monologue will know exactly what I mean.  We think he gets it from a particularly irritating television noisefest called iCarly.

What all this shows is just how much our little spongebabes absorb from popular culture – in particular from television and film. And while our three year old continues to follow me around as her brother once did, watering and tinkering in the garden,  HST himself  seems to have decided somewhere along the way that food growing is “uncool” or “cool....not.”

Keeping them interested in food growing is a losing battle

The thing is that there’s bucketloads of food growing activities featured on children’s television and in children’s media every day, but unfortunately most of it appears to be featured on those worthy sorts of ultra pc programmes that kids like HST deem to be “definitely uncool.”

His pre primary school helped for a time with their efforts to win a Green Flag by setting up a vegetable garden. Back then our HST was proud that he know more than the other kids. But the nearest thing his new school – a sports oriented outfit – encourages to juvenile horticulture, is the planting of full backs.  Indeed they recently had a large greenhouse removed.

In any case, these days the big battle is to get his nose out of the Nintendo DS handheld game system and to move him outdoors. Recently he missed the irony when I suggested that it might be a good idea to get a metal fitting and attach his Nintendo wing mirror style to his head so he wouldn’t have to stop playing while he walked down the street. “Cool!” he enthused. 


When he recently asked if he could have his own "farm" because all his friends had one, my surging hopes were as rapidly shot down when it emerged that he wanted to join Facebook so he could play "Farmville," the game where users run a virtual farm. The irony is, that while he's on his Nintendo he's also quite often "farming" in a version of one of his favourite games, "The Sims," in which he can grow "virtual food."

Plot 34's eight year old former Head of Secret Tunnels - "Take me to your Nintendo."

Last year the international computer gaming consultant Andrew Mayer told a major industry conference that farming games would be the biggest growth segment in the business: "In the future there will be only farming games," he predicted. In September it was estimated that "Farmville," Facebook's virtual farming game, had sixty two million active users - or one in ten Facebook users overall. Sixty two million virtual farmers?!! That's a lot of kids "growing" virtual good who could themselves do far more growing outdoors.

I’m not against computer games for children per se, because I believe they help develop problem solving skills and quick thinking but I can’t help but see the irony that I’m losing our plot’s Head of Secret tunnels to a pixelated farm.

In truth my initial idea of a family run allotment has all but evaporated by now. I persisted for a time in bringing HST along with me, partly on the traditional of the “character building” ethos. But the long faces, moans and slouchy dramatics that accompanied any tasks he was assigned, finally saw me give in, especially when Her Outdoors opined that the few weekly hours of allotment training was akin to modern day child abuse for a lad who was missing out on playing with his friends at weekends.

Down on the virtual farm

Instead I’ve had to restrict his food growing education to short sharp bursts in the back garden where he at least maintains an interest in some aspects of our endeavours notably edible fruit –  blueberries, grapes, strawberries, raspberries and apples. But at least that’s something.


But by now it's hard to get away from the fact that allotmenteering is still largely a pastime for men or childless couples over thirty five and is likely to remain so - unless Spongebob starts packing a secateurs in his square pants any day soon.

But at least our three year old Waterer of Everything is still on the job. Almost.

Since watching Tinkerbell over and over, she’s decided she doesn’t want to be a garden fairy any more. She whacks me in the head with her star  pronged magic wand and declares: “Look Daddy, I’m a tinker!”

The wonderful world of Disney for you.