Spanish Versus British Allotments Part 1
Some differences between Spanish and British allotments
By Clodagh and Dick Handscombe, members of the Allotment website who have grown vegetables for a combined 120 years since the age of five including own mini plots, school vegetable gardens, allotment size vegetable gardens and eventually a 800 square metre allotment in Spain where they have lived for twenty years.
Do allotments exist in Spain?
Unfortunately the English style allotment rented from an allotment association or town hall is not a well established tradition in Spain although a few farsighted villages and towns are starting to set them up.
However there is an ancient tradition of growing vegetables on small plots ‘huertos’ outside villages and towns that :
- Were laid out and worked by Moors during their 800 years residency in Spain.
- As Spain was re-conquered much land was reallocated to monasteries who lent it in parcels to Moorish Muslim and Christian families to work on a crop saving basis. This practice continued until the monasteries were dissolved in 1836.
- After the dissolution of the monasteries the land was sold off with some rented out for the growing of crops for sale as well as family use. However after almost two centuries of large families, marriages and inheritances today’s land holdings can be just half, one or a few henegadas (833 square metres).
- Incidentally in a Spanish family a wife does not inherit the house or land these going immediately to the children who are often told at a young age which piece/pieces of land are allotted to them in wills so that they can work them from an early age.
- However many Spaniards have decided during the last ten years that growing vegetables is no longer economically viable or is too hard work and instead have planted the areas up with fruit trees - often citrus trees which in time have also become uneconomic so many are now being abandoned or sold for the building of houses where arable land has or is likely to be reclassified as urbanisable land.
- It has, therefore, become possible to buy, rent or just borrow for the provision of a few vegetables the equivalent of the English allotment.
- Luckily the two of the four huertos/allotments adjacent to us are still used by Spaniards who see the sense of growing vegetables to have fresh harvests 365 days a year. One by a mixed age group on borrowed land as we do and by a 91year old working his own land - as he has done every week of his life for 85 years! Of the other two one is abandoned and a source of wind blown weeds and the other still a an active orange grove.
How large is the typical Spanish allotment or huerto?
Typically a little over 400 or 800 metres, as land was originally parcelled off in henegadas (833.3 square metres) with some being split into two. This is therefore very similar to those in the UK.
How are they irrigated?
Many allotment/smallholding areas are still irrigated by the two millennium old method of flooding – the water coming though channels, tubes and siphons under roads and streams for up to a couple of kilometres on order – for instance 15 minutes –from a spring or pump house. We use the former during dry winter spells and the latter during summer months.
To facilitate flooding our 28 metre wide plot has a 40 cm high wall with nine circular holes for irrigation purposes along it’s breadth and is therefore split into 10 strips. The first of three metres is for a line of compost heaps and barrels of steeping comfrey and nettle. The rest we split into nine strips with raised mounds of earth between.
We will typically ask the pump man for ten minutes of water every two weeks during late winter/early spring if it has been dry and fifteen every seven to ten days during the summer…unless of course it has rained. Life would be much easier if we had piped water and a drip irrigation system but after ten years of using the system it’s no hardship.
Are the growing seasons different?
We live on the Mediterranean Coast – 400 metres up and 14 kilometres from the coast.
Since we are on a south facing slope frost is normally not a problem so we can have sixty percent of the soil fully planted throughout the year taking advantage of the two springs – spring and autumn –to grow two or more crops of things like carrots, potatoes, broccoli, onions, lettuces etc.
By the way broad beans and peas are planted in the autumn for February to early May harvests.
The other forty percent is fully used in the summer when we grow expansive squash and melons. Were we on the north facing slope of our valley, the reduced hours of sun and sometimes heavy frosts would reduce significantly what we can grow during the winter. Likewise if we were on the high inland plain or in the north of Spain.
In the far south regular temperatures of 40 to even 50 degrees can make it difficult to keep some traditional summer crops growing beyond early July. If we were at sea level we would sow or plant about a month earlier in the Spring.
What else is different between Spain and the UK for allotment growers?
- Many agricultural areas have red or light grey clay soils. The former can bake rock hard during sunny spells all the year round unless irrigated and worked. The grey soils remain more open and have a greater water holding capacity. This enables crops such as squash and melons to be grown without watering after sowing even under the Spanish sun.
- If one takes over a new allotment the soil will normally require a major initial improvement because the traditional annual manuring to lighten and enrich the soil stopped 10 to 20 years ago when the keeping of working mules and donkeys and oxen ceased and the flocks of sheep and goats declined exponentially. Chemical fertilizers became the norm as villagers became wealthier but are now becoming overly expensive in relation to the prices they can get if crops are sold.
- There are fewer types and varieties of seeds available and very few sparsely available seed catalogues for amateur gardeners exist. Traditionally Spaniards grew few types and only the family/village varieties handed down over the generations. We aim to use organic seeds where we can so save our own seeds where practical, tap into a local government seed bank, use anything offered to us by locals and fill gaps with imported seeds.
- Sheep and goat manures were the norm but there are now more horse stables now opening wanting to get rid of manure.
- Pelleted chicken manure is not generally available but in our area there are many commercial chicken houses where it is possible to buy a few sacks full when they are cleaned out. However we only use the droppings from our own ecologically/naturally reared chickens (and then only after composting for a year) as we are concerned about the possibility of residual growth hormones and antibiotics in the litter from the commercial sheds …..commercial broilers are now reared to kill in 42 days versus 70 or a 100 only a few years ago!
- Fortunately there is now a wide range of eco fertilizers/growth promoters, pesticides and fungicides available to the amateur gardener – possibly wider than in the UK - having been developed/commercialised for the export oriented organic vegetable growers. For interest look up <www.trabe.net>.
- Composting needs more care to prevent heaps from drying out. As explained in long chapters in each of our books* the layering of dampened material is essential.
- The generally benign climate can lead to long growing and harvesting seasons. For instance leaf crops can be planted out in the autumn and will over winter without going to seed until the hotter weather of spring. Raspberries we harvest on the same canes from May until November and if we are lucky into January.
However one has to watch out for widely yo-yoing daily temperatures and between successive days especially during the winter and early spring. Winter does not change to spring as gradually as in the UK. Indeed it is possible to experience several winter/spring/winter sandwiches between December and April. We have experienced minus five to plus thirty in that period and summer temperatures up to 47 degrees centigrade although above the mid thirties is unusual except in Almeria and Andalucia where 50 degrees is possible! - We may get less rain but when it comes it can be for days at a time in the spring and autumn and of monsoon proportions. The heaviest days rainfall we have experienced is 67 centimetres in a day with 28 centimetres in an hour! Inland tennis ball sized hail stones can be a problem but the last fell in our village 24 years ago when the cars of the day ended up with badly dented roofs which were still around when we moved to Spain.
- If one asks a Spaniard when he is going to sow or plant out X or Y he will often reply with a saints day or in relation to the current cycle of the moon. The elderly men still keeping up allotments – our neighbour is 91 in a few weeks time and has worked his land every day since the age of ten - were well versed in the rudiments of the lunar calendar. But as with most, he has no one interested in keeping his allotment going or even helping him out at weekends. So his accumulated historic agricultural knowledge will die with him and his land laid to waste until swallowed up in a future building boom.
The long term vision of our mountain village is that all the current agricultural/allotment land will eventually be reclassified as urbanisable land with the already abandoned olive, almond and grape terraces on the mountainsides being given a ‘preservation’ status allowing them to go back to the primeval state when the first inhabitants moved into caves in the valley 29.000 years ago and started tilling the land on early allotments long before AD.
- The need for more allotments becomes more urgent as more and more small scale and large scale agriculturalists cut back or even stop production. What were self sufficient villages now rely almost entirely on vegetables from other areas of Spain and imports. The reasons are the recent increases in the price of seeds, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and tractor/lorry fuels as a result of the oil crisis, the low prices paid to growers which do not go up even though supermarket prices do and the allocation of more and more land for more profitable bio-fuel crops to meet the governments objective for more oil self sufficiency – apparently seen to be more important than food self sufficiency.
- In our area Spaniards find it odd that Clodagh works our allotment for as many hours as Dick however along the Galician coast it is the tradition that women work the huertos/allotments while the men are away fishing or in the navy.
- Even without allotments more and more people are starting to grow at least a few vegetables in their gardens or on apartment terraces. To show what can be done and to have photographs for the book we grew eighteen vegetables in a one square metre mini allotment –a collection of plastic tubs and pots – on one of our terraces two summers ago. Where there’s a will there’s a way!
We have now written six books re gardening in Spain including the best seller Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain
© Clodagh and Dick Handscombe May 2008.
