Kitchen Garden Forum

Since early January, our allotment association has received every Saturday groups of Community Service offenders. They have cleared vast areas of bramble-ridden plot, laid a path in scalpings all around our site and collected massive amounts of rubbish. Having been previously about 65% full, every plot is now taken.
The cost to us has been zero. We know of a similar site which got £20,000 of Lottery money to do the same work.
So, if your allotment site needs cleaning up, I suggest you approach your local Probation Service office and arrange a meeting with the manager of the Community Service division. On their visit, they undertake a safety assessment and judge whether the work is community-based or not. Crucially, if the work were to be done, would it be taking work away from somebody who would otherwise be paid to do it? In our case, being a self-managed site, we either did the clear up ourselves or it didn't get done and such was the state of some of the site that nobody in their right mind would have tackled it!!
The group of offenders comes with a minder, who liaises with the association on each visit. We tell him what we want doing and he gets the group of offenders to do the work. Our appointed minder, who manages three groups on different days around NW Kent, now has his own key and a schedule of work to be done. That means that we don't always have to be on site when they are doing work.
While the offenders will clear brambles, lay scalpings, barrow woodchip around, set fire to rubbish, dig up tree stumps, dig abandoned plots, lay carpet and even throw manure back to create more compact heaps, they won't help ordinary plot holders look after their own plots.
On the down side, most of the (mainly) kids we get are completely unaware of what vegetables are and can sometimes walk across cultivated plots without being aware of the damage they are causing. They muck about chucking aerosols into fires. Their productivity is awful and quality of work mainly poor. Some of them are absolutely horrible. But, after having said all that, by concentrating lots of hands on one job, you can achieve miracles. Furthermore, for every five people on the scheme that are horrible, you get at least one person who accepts their punishment in good grace and gets on with the work alloted to them.
For us, the experience has been fantastic. In my 10 years on the site, we have never had full membership before and, had the additional plots not been cleared, nor would we have had.
Go on, if you need labour intensive work doing, free help is out there and the Probation Service is desperate for schemes like allotments.
Please feel free to ask questions and I will do my best to help.

Good morning Barry, a few years ago we had a group of community service offenders in to decorate our church. I don't think this was probably the ideal job for them, but we got there in the end.
But clearing allotments and the like sounds just the sort of work that would be ideal.
I know what you mean about getting one out of five that really gets stuck into the work, that probably goes for life in general.
One more thing is to sing the praises of the minders they must have the patience of a saint.

Kind regards Old Herbaceous.

Theres no fool like an old fool.

Sounds like a good idea Barry. It gets the job done and maybe, just maybe, the whole experience will ignite a desire in a young person to find out more about growing and horticulture in general.

I'm not a liberal bleeding heart by anyones standards, but if a young person only knows chaos, confusion and violence in their life then learning
there's another way to live can often be a turning point for them. It gives them the option to change their life. Plus, the physical work gets rid of some of their steam and teaches team work.

Where my son rides they had some young offenders in doing some work and some of them got a real buzz being around the horses and ponies. Some went on to qualify as stable hands and work for thier living.

Hopefully, other sites can now access this source of workers and get their sites sorted.

We had the same input from a group of offenders over the winter, with very much the same results as Barry.

The groups did a lot of good work, and shifted skiploads of rubbish, that we would never have got round to doing. As a result all our plots are let this year, the first time for several years.

The downside was that they did very little gardening, and even though the plots were dug over it was all superficial, and the perennial weeds are popping up on the plots that they cleared.

However it would be churlish to complain given the positive benefits,, and Barry is right to suggest that it is an avenue well worth persuing.