2021 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

CAFCGirl

This all makes me miss my allotment dreadfully 

Laura_Elsewhere

CAFCGirl said:

This all makes me miss my allotment dreadfully 

You're in THE right place for allotments now, though - Yorkshire and the NE are famed for their allotments! While you get on a waiting list, how about looking round for a neighbour who can't make best use of their garden and offer to do most of the work and share the results? A busy mum, an elderly soul with a poor back... and a nice way to make new friends!  

Cherryfudge

There are some great allotments round here but sadly a waiting list as I suppose there is in most places. Three or four at the back of where I live were taken back by the landowners or I'd have one myself!

I do like Laura's idea of offering to help with a garden and I know @CAFCGirl has already found the little communal garden hidden away in the centre of town.

PollyWollyDoodle

Beautiful knitting patterns above.  

@PipneyJane I still wash dressmaking fabric before using it.

My parents grew a lot of their own veg, including onions, but this has reminded me of the “onion man”. A Frenchman - I have a feeling he wore a striped Breton jumper but I could be imagining that – he used to turn up on his bicycle with long strings of big French onions on the handlebars. My mother always bought some, partly because she enjoyed cooking but also because she could speak French and loved having the chance to talk to him. 

It was many, many years later that I realised he must have had a lorry parked somewhere filled with onions, and that he didn’t cycle all the way from Calais with a few strings!  

Laura_Elsewhere

@PollyWollyDoodle - I didn't move to Edinburgh til 1979, aged ten, but friends my own age who were there in the 1970s clearly remember Onion Johnny who wore a stripey top and cycled round the streets stopping to sell his onions to the housewives who came out to their doorsteps! 
He had gone by 1979, sadly for me... but I do recall in the early 1980s often seeing the St Cuthbert's Co-op milk delivery, the same company Sean Connery was a milkman for in the 1950s (!), and the reason I remember it was that the milk-cart was horse-drawn...

I am only 52, honest!!! It makes me sound so old to recall milk-horses...   

Cherryfudge

I'm older than you, @Laura_Elsewhere, but I don't remember ever seeing horse-drawn vehicles. Lucky you!

I do remember the fishmonger, Mr Bolenberg (I'm guessing at the spelling, I think he may have been Dutch) coming round in his van. We had to spell 'F-I-S-H' as one of the cats knew the real word and would shoot out to investigate the van and anything we bought from it! One day he turned up with his right hand hanging limply, driving with his left, and explained to Mum that he had broken his wrist towing a narrow boat out of the canal (I may have misremembered this - why would it need to come out?). He was driving himself to hospital. I can still see him now, and remember being impressed about the wrist, but we never saw him again.

When I was very small, before we had a washing machine so in the last days of laundry vans, one used to stop every week to collect sheets and other items too large to wash easily by hand. Every house had a laundry mark so items could be identified.

Later on there was a Mr McCloud who came with a mobile butcher's shop. I was quite friendly with the assistant, a lad who was earning before going to Uni to study biology. In the summer of 1976 he presented me with six newts whose pond was drying up. I kept them for years in a tank, they are beautiful little things.

Later still there was a company who sold large boxes of top quality frozen fish with which Mum used to stock the freezer. She must have spent a fortune but it was excellent.

Looking back, there were so many people who came to the door and we were on first name terms with most of them. There was Jane from the shop on the corner who brought groceries round in a box as Mum had the baby to look after. (Later I worked at that shop in my teens: it was common practice to put things 'on the book' even then in the late 1970s, then settle up when you had cash). There was the Gipsy lady who had a basket with pegs, heather etc. Mum always used to try to buy from her. There was Basil the postman. I'm sure there were others. No horse drawn vehicles, though!

CAFCGirl

I thought I'd moved to allotment central, but alas the town here has a very small site (I was shocked!).

CherryFudge will know the scales but where I moved from, our site was bigger than the Tesco inc the car park here 

I have grand ideas for some epic container gardening which given the reason why I had to give up my allotment, is probably wisest and safest LOL Maybe next year will be a wild attempt at living a la 1942.... gives me 5 months to research and plan

MrsCD

When I was a young child, we had a rag and bone man with a horse and cart who would give you a ride along the street for the price of a jam jar.
I also remember the French onion man coming to Grandma's and there was a man in a van with fruit and vegetables every week who always chose which were put in the bag. Maughan's bakery came with a small van twice a week and I was allowed a cream cake if I had been good. The start of my lifetime battle with sweet foods I think!

Laura_Elsewhere

@CAFCGirl- I did hear something about that bit of waste-land along the side-road - you know, just as you leave Much Mending on the Borrow on the way to Little Mending, there's that turning off? Someone was saying next year they'd be encouraging us all to grow our own there, not quite official allotments, I believe, but a bit of space for containers, so we could grow our veg, fruit and salads there together   Easier with company!

Cherryfudge

CAFCGirl said:

I thought I'd moved to allotment central, but alas the town here has a very small site (I was shocked!).

CherryFudge will know the scales but where I moved from, our site was bigger than the Tesco inc the car park here 

I have grand ideas for some epic container gardening which given the reason why I had to give up my allotment, is probably wisest and safest LOL Maybe next year will be a wild attempt at living a la 1942.... gives me 5 months to research and plan

I looked up the local allotment site and there are 22 mentioned there - back of the pub by the churchyard. There are also a few tucked away right at the bottom right hand side of the town as seen on the map, and one in the village to the south, t'other side o' railway. I believe there are also some in the village to the north, but I don't know where. That leaves whole areas of the town with none.

I'm very impressed by you having had a site comparable to the footprint of Tesco plus car park!

The container gardening sounds very 'Dig for Victory', you might even get straight carrots in containers. All I manage is herbs and soft fruit unless you count the potatoes that planted themselves in the compost.

@Laura_Elsewhere, I know the one you mean. Are you going to try to organise something to utilise the oddments of land around the Mendings? There are so many little bits we might be able to put to good use... even down the side of the Village Hall, though it might be a bit shady.