The Meadoway Allotment Project is the development of a community allotment on two council allotment plots in Church, Accrington, East Lancashire. Our group has taken on two adjacent plots that total 460 square metres in size and have made them available and accessible for use by local residents, schools and community groups.
What we want to do is to encourage local people to start growing fresh food and to think about how this affects the environment and their health.
The main aims of our project are:
• To encourage greater use of allotments in Church.
• To engage local residents to take part in a community project.
• To educate people on the environmental benefits of growing food locally.
• To help reduce ‘food miles’.
• To enable people in a deprived area access to fresh, cheap and healthy food.
• To engage the 5 local primary & secondary schools, and
• To educate people in the principles of organic food growing and Permaculture.
As the above aims show this project is solely for the benefit of the local community. We are running the project with the aim of protecting the environment and promoting the use of Permaculture and Organic principles. We aim for the site to be a showpiece for running an environmentally sensitive food growing project in a deprived area.
We started the project back in June 2006 when we took over the lease of the allotment plots and since then we have made the site usable for new plotholders. We have set up ten smaller raised beds and will have disabled access raised beds on one of the two large plots in the future. The new raised beds are a more manageable size of 15 x 6 foot. We have installed all the drainage and created footpaths around the plots
We have tried to make the project as low cost as possible to show that community projects do not necessarily need thousands of pounds to achieve positive results. The way we’ve done this is to approach local businesses for support and to date we have received over £700 worth of free material towards the project. This has included free stone, drainage and printing.
We have also carried out all the preparation work with dedicated volunteers and so far we calculate this ‘in-kind’ support at over £2,000
As we anticipated, all the beds were allocated by the end of May 2007 and as the level of interest is extremely high, our group are now looking into the posibility of further extending the project.