Gardening on wheels

Green fingered wheelchair users in Fife have an exciting new way to garden open to them, thanks to Fife Council.

Up to now, if a wheelchair user wanted an allotment, they would have had to wait while the Council found a vacant standard allotment, which was accessible to the user’s vehicle, and then adapted it by adding raised beds, slab paths, a wider shed and other adjustments to suit the user. However, if the user then moved or their interest in gardening failed to blossom, the cost of this conversion, typically £3,000 - £4,000, had to be written off, unless another nearby wheelchair user was immediately interested in taking it on.

A new prototype solves that problem – a Disability Discrimination Act compliant covered allotment that is completely mobile and is built on a skip. Accessed by a ramp, it is designed from the outset to meet the needs of wheelchair users and improve availability to them. “If the user moves on, so does the allotment,” says Peter Duncan, allotments officer, Fife Council.

Having launched it at Gardening Scotland, which took place in Edinburgh at the end of May 2015, Fife Council is currently using the mobile allotment along with a second non-covered one to publicise its fostering services, linking the idea of growing plants and growing children. It will become available to wheelchair users in September 2015.

The mobile allotment costs £15,000 to develop and requires only a hard surface to park on. There are sufficient suitable sites within Fife, including most of the council’s newer allotment sites, for the mobile allotment to be available to a much wider user base. Duncan anticipates that it will have a lifespan of around 25 years. It took three months to develop, from inception, but Duncan expects further versions to be faster to build.

The allotment is effectively a glasshouse on wheels, says Duncan, meaning that the user and their plants will be sheltered from the weather and can garden all year round. It is polycarbonate rather than glass for health and safety reasons and to comply with road haulage regulations. “Polycarbonate allows for a degree of movement. If you’ve got panes of glass it won’t work because there is a degree of flexion going on,” says Duncan.

Including its access ramp, it is 10 meters long and 3 meters wide, and fits into a standard half size plot of 100 meters squared, with room for the user’s vehicle too. It weighs 3-4 tons.

It is built around the basic design of a roll-off skip. While the open mobile allotment prototype uses a recycled skip, the covered one does not. “That was built from new,” says Duncan. “It’s not a case of taking an old skip. When you’re working with fine tolerances with polycarbonate, with doors closing, you can’t afford to have things buckled.” It has a solar panel in the roof to charge a battery that provides power for a timer that works the pump for the irrigation system and temperature control fans at either end of the unit. There is also a 12v-240v converter for soil heating cables.

It recycles water from its roof into tanks, meaning that plants won’t die if the user cannot visit frequently.

In fact Duncan says that the unit requires very little maintenance, an additional benefit for the user. Because it harvests rainwater, filters do need to be cleaned periodically but the solar panel has a 15 year guarantee and the battery only needs to be replaced every three or four years. The polycarbonate is an advanced type that will remain clear.

Fife based suppliers RB Grant, John Young Signs and a local blacksmith were involved in the construction.

Mobile allotments are not a new concept. Edinburgh has already seen mobile allotments in the Fountainbridge area of the city. Here they were intended as ways of making temporary use of land that would be later required by developers. Country Classrooms offers mobile allotments to schools as teaching aids. In London, Borough Market has featured ‘nomadic allotments’ developed by Cardiff University students. Artist Lisa Cheung also developed a mobile allotment that was used in various locations in London before being decommissioned.

The concept is also popular in the Netherlands where trailers and the rooftop of a bus have been used to grow plants.

However these are not designed around the needs of wheelchair users. In fact Duncan is confident that Fife’s version is sufficiently novel to allow patents to be registered and the council legal team is working on that at present. Other local authorities have already shown interest in the design.

This first version was fully funded from Duncan’s budget but he is seeking funding for further ones, either from other council departments or matched funding from external sources.

Gardening Scotland gave the Council the opportunity to test potential user reactions to the allotment and the resulting feedback has produced a couple of further adaptations, for example adding hand grips to make access easier for the wheelchair user.

The allotment has not yet been allocated to a service user but by mid-September Duncan expects to have established a Fife-wide waiting list for the unit and any further it builds. Fife Council currently has three people wanting this service. Interested readers can apply online via the allotment waiting list form on Fife Council’s website.

The image shows the allotment arriving at Gardening Scotland and was sourced from Twitter.

Gardening on wheels

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