THE recession has led to long waiting lists for public allotments as rising food prices prompted increasing numbers to grow their own fruit and veg.

Fingal council has a waiting list of 500 for the 448 allotments it will open in Powerstown and Donabate next year.

The tenants at Fingal’s 100 existing allotments will get first call, so would-be tenants face a waiting list of up to two years. South Dublin county council opened four new sites last year and now has 245 allotments in Clondalkin, Palmerstown, Bohernabreena and Tallaght. The authority has 211 people on its waiting list.

“It’s doubled in the past year,” said Deirdre Loftus, from SDCC’s property management division. “There is provision in the three-year capital programme to increase the number, subject to funding.” Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county council has 102 allotments at Mount Anville. Tenants at the temporary site, earmarked for the Eastern bypass roads scheme, pay rent of €50 for a 40 square metre plot under an 11-month lease.

“These allotments are very highly sought-after,” said Eileen Fox, from the council’s economic-development department. “We have a waiting list of approximately 60 names and are not in a position to take on any more applicants. Just 15 got an allotment in 2008.”

In the early 1980s, almost 40% of people with gardens grew vegetables. The figure is now estimated at 10%. But food growing is enjoying a resurgence, partly due to higher supermarket prices and environmental awareness.

“With the current financial troubles and food prices going up, there has been a real boost in people growing their own fruit and vegetables,” said Bruce Darrell, who last January helped set up Dublin Food Growing, a food security initiative campaigning for more public allotments in Dublin city.

“Irish people stopped growing food for their own consumption about 25 years ago and it became a sign of poverty to grow vegetables in the back garden. Now it’s becoming not only socially acceptable but cool to grow your own food.”

Sales of fruit and vegetable plants are outstripping flowers in Ireland for the first time in decades. Herbs, fruit and vegetable plant sales have risen 66% to €15m from €9m in 2002, according to Bord Bia.

The lack of allotments in Dublin city centre has prompted one group to set up a garden on an unused site beside a canal in Dolphin’s Barn. When they were moved on, ST Salvage Company loaned them a site they converted into the South Circular Road Community Food Garden in April 2007. Some 40 people now work on the garden and share the harvest, according to Seoidin O’Sullivan, 32, an artist who set up the project.

Grow-it-yourself groups have also emerged in Naas, Athy, Ferrybank, Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford to put pressure on local authorities to provide plots for urban dwellers.

In June, a Labour councillor in Mayo called on Westport town council to buy agricultural land to provide space to grow food. Michael Kelly, author of Trading Places: From Rat Race to Hen Run, established a Waterford network of people eager to grow their own food.

Kelly, a former IT salesman who downsized to a cottage in Dunmore East, complete with hens, pigs and a vegetable patch, said the group aims to encourage and facilitate back-garden, allotment and community-based food production.

About 100 people attended the network’s first meeting in the city library last month.

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