Allotment envy!

Went to the Beamish museum up here in the North East at the weekend - a great day at a brilliant place in beautiful weather!

Part of the museum is a recreation of an old pit village, complete with a line of pitman's cottages. What amazed me most was that the gardens were taken over by allotments, which I guess in 1913 was more common than a decorative garden, and every allotment was crammed with huge amounts of vegetables.

There were lines of pea plants with hundreds and hundreds of pea pods on, the plants almost bent double with the weight of peas. One had cabbages the size of beach balls, and another had a row of enormous turnips that an old man and his entire family and pets would struggle to pull up! There were rows of beetroot and onions the size of grapefruit, and leeks that were a good 6" wide! Don't even get me started on the Kohl rabi!

On another plot at the Pocklington Manor part of the museum, there was a line of leaf beat in which each plant had the curcumference of a tree and a row of perfect, enormous, red lettuce with not a sign of any pest damage whatsoever!

How??!?! 

OK, I guess the museum staff can spend a lot of time tending the plants and preparing the ground, but whenever I visit Beamish, I always go through the same envious emotions!

One side of my family are in Ashington, a large pit village, and the houses that the pitmen lived in were and still are back to back terraced with no rear garden to speak of. Certainly not anything that could in any form be called "allotment" That really is an exageration.

Since I have known the place the rear gardens on the terraced houses were all simply concrete, where things could be stored. Never saw a garden at the rear of any.

I would suspect that what is presented is a very much idealised view of life and not actually representative of the reality of it.

They grow leeks for show, and, if like one of my uncles, the secret of growing the largest will be taken to the grave with them.

I spoke to one of the gardeners at Beamish once when he was tending the veggies at Pocklington Manor. They've got a set of full time gardeners and access to industrial quantities of horse manure.

The veg at the Eden Project, Heligan and the local National Trust properties is always annoyingly perfect!

They all pretty much promote no-chemicals so they must spend a fortune on nematodes!
Thats my guess anyway!

lots of hoss muck and soot for slugs in them days
R