Blundell’s Plot Home-Start Saturday 12th December Cambridge Wind Band Christmas Concert St Paul’s Church, Hills Road, Cambridge at 3.30pm Tickets: £8 for adults / £6 for concessions / £4 for children. Bookings can be made by emailing cambridgewindband@gmail.com Home-Start will benefit from the retiring collection at this concert. Snowflake Tea Parties – could you help raise funds for Home-Start by hosting a tea party with your family and friends from your office, playgroup, school, book club etc.? We will supply you with a ‘tea bag’ fundraising pack with ideas for all you need to host an event - the pack includes invites for your use, a snowflake cutter and recipes for any cakes or biscuits you may want to make for your event. If you would like to host a tea party, please call our office on 01763 262262 or email admin@hsrsc.org.uk “Please join me raising money for The Snowflake Appeal so Home-Start can keep supporting unique and fragile children. Home-Start is in there, making a difference each and every day. It is changing all our communities for the future. It prevents parents’ difficulties from becoming their children’s problems”. Kirstie Allsopp, TV presenter, mum, stepmum, Home-Start ambassador
Exactly a century ago, the country was up against it on the Somme and in the Dardanelles, Zeppelins were bombing Great Yarmouth and the Kaiser was about to launch a blockade of our islands. England faced the very real threat of starvation. Family legend has it that that January, up in a terraced house in the Wirral, my great-grandparents were discovered to be subsisting on a diet of potatoes, parsnips and cabbage. It was an experience of everyday hardship repeated across the land that bleak midwinter – even here in Melbourn among our fields and orchards – and it left a scar on the national psyche that is there to this day. Twenty-five years later, we were up against it again. We were digging up our gardens, parks, lawns and sports fields and turning them into allotments to grow food. Then, along came an extraordinary character – C.H. Middleton, or ‘Mr Middleton’, as he became known to a generation of gardeners. Long before, Alan, Bunny, Monty and Carol, he was the first celebrity gardener. Each month more than 3.5 million listeners tuned in to the BBC Home Service to hear his endearing reflections from the vegetable patch. It was the launch of Dig for Victory, and it began with his promise that “these are critical times, but we shall get through them, and the harder we dig for victory the sooner will the roses be with us”. He trusted, he said, that his friends across the nation would tune in to hear his pearls of wisdom “when I hold forth on Leeks, Lettuces and Leather jackets, instead of Lilac, Lilies and Lavender”. For me, and I believe for thousands of vegetable gardeners, these folk memories still encourage us to grow our own food – not, thank heaven, for fear of an empty larder, but for the sheer pleasure of tasting your own produce and the satisfaction of watching a seed germinate and grown into something healthy and nutritious to grace the Sunday roast. In Melbourn, we’re fortunate to have a good crop of allotments owned and managed by the parish council. They are on each side of The Moor, 88 plots on the main site and seven on the other. Application for one can be made through the council. I haven’t yet managed to discover how long the village has owned its own allotments (maybe someone can enlighten me), but it is known that at the end of the 19th century the council was given the task of actively identifying suitable land. At the moment all the plots in the village are taken, with a waiting list of five. Annual rents vary, mostly between £20 and £25, though they can be as little as £13. Traditionally, allotment plots are measured in rods – a unit derived from Anglo-Saxon farming practices. A rod was used to control a team of oxen and measures 5.5 yards (5.03 metres). Originally, plots were 10 square rods but now they are often much less and – as is the case here in Melbourn – half allotments are sometimes offered. You do not need to have an allotment to join the St George’s Allotment and Leisure Gardeners Association (yes, it was founded on St George’s Day!). The benefits include heavily discounted seeds, advice, quarterly newsletter and membership of the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners. Subscription is £5 per year. For more information, there is a link on the village website, or contact the secretary: Bruce Huett on 01763 232855 or e-mail allotments@melbourn.org.uk Midwinter jobs on the patch: Lift the last of your leeks and parsnips before the soil becomes frozen. Lift and divide established clumps of rhubarb. Remove yellowing leaves from your winter brassicas. Dig over empty borders and pile manure on top. Start a trench where you will be growing your beans next year – fill it with compost and fill in. Net your brassicas against the pesky pigeons. David Blundell melbournmagazine
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