With a little help from my friends

Taking on an allotment can be a daunting thing. All that space, often overgrown and neglected to start with, can seem impossibly huge once you’re responsible for taming it. Many people working full time or who have young families struggle to visit often enough and for long enough for them to be able to see results quickly. It’s easy to lose heart.

A really good way of making a visible difference quickly is to enlist the help of a group of friends. A large posse will get more done in one afternoon than you could manage on your own over the entire growing season. Needless to say, they need to be very good friends and you should be prepared to bribe reward them for their efforts.

Having very recently inflicted just this kind of activity on my own pals, I’d like to pass on the following tips for an enjoyable and productive day:

- Book a date well in advance so that your friends have lots of notice and space in their diaries and you will end up with more personnel. Long term planning does mean that you will be gambling with the weather, so choose a relatively summery time of year, cross your fingers and suggest people bring waterproofs just in case.

- Keep your workers happy - take plenty of supplies of food and drink. think carefully about whether alcohol is worth having during or after the event. Only you know which will better motivate your crew.

- If possible, plan the day around a particular project such as erecting a shed or greenhouse, building raised beds or rotovating the plot. People will enjoy the day much more if they can see that this is a big job that you would have struggled with on your own, and there will be a real sense of achievement when the job is done.

- That said, try to have a range of smaller tasks and activities available that people can do if they start to get bored. Your team is more likely to stay around for longer if they are kept interested.

- Finally, don’t take it too seriously. Have a laugh, take photos, tell jokes, get covered in mud. It’s not just about getting work done, it’s also about having fun.

Written by Pumpkinsouper on May 29th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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