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Welcome to the Bath Student Community Allotments Blog!

This is a very new project started up because I got offered various places to grow vegetables in, and I don't quite have the kind of time to be maintaining big gardens by myself. I think that as a student there isn't quite enough time to maintain a whole allotment space, as different university projects always seem to take over.

Thereby, this group is for all those students who would love to be out doing gardening work when there is time to, but do not always have the time to look after everything.

This is also a group for people who want to be students in gardening. There are aspirations, which will be stated a little later on, that it is dreamed that this group will lead to.

Finally, it is faintly political. Whilst B&NES do have a fine number of allotments compared to some other cities, there was still a 400+ waiting list for allotments in August 2010. This waiting time makes it impossible for a student, who would often only stay in the city for three years, to have an allotment of their own. This scheme, however, is grassroots, and it is perceived that new allotment spaces will be very easy to find; these two factors combine to give the freedom of choice back to the student. Whether as normally you would have to wait months, or even years, to be able to grow your own vegetables unless you have your own back garden, with BSCA the time can be literally seconds. The plan is to have a communal area whereby anyone can grow anything, as well as individual allotments. If an allotment isn't available at the exact moment that you want to grow something, then there will always be space in the communal area and you will always be able to express your green-fingered-ness.

So far there is one confirmed Student Community Allotment site in Oldfield Park, behind a pub. Watch this space, and there may be more (pending how successful the first project is). It has been remarkably easy to get allotment sites, so there will easily be more if this one is successful.
The idea is that there is an over-400 long allotment waiting list in Bath (far too long for students to take into consideration the idea of actually getting to use one during their course of being a student) and yet there is much space on residents' land to be used by whoever would like to grow their own. However, with it being land that is to be used by students, it also means students of gardening. Thus, exciting projects, in the name of partaking in gainer greater understanding of how things grow, will be conducted such as: Mound gardening, Biodynamics , Hydroponics, Permaculture and all projects that people voice wanting to try out! Like a course at university level, we will aspire to learn all about vegetable gardening, and will aspire to get in specialists to do workshops too.
All of the output from the gardening will be shared, whenever someone would want some veg they can either take from their own plot, or from the community plot if they've helped make it happen!

That is the dream, anyway.

Let's make it happen!