Hendon Regenerative Culture Garden

Hendon Regenerative Culture Garden is based at a council run allotment site at Hendon in Sunderland. It has been developed by permaculture practitioner and activist Allan Rowell as a traditional allotment with a permaculture spin. 

Established in 2017 as part of a Transition Town initiative, the allotment was intended to be a place to teach the community how to grow food and to develop greater resilience. 

The allotment sprawls over two plots, the first filled with raised beds, composters and chickens, while the second is a more traditional veg growing plot with a small forest garden.

Hendon Regenerative Culture Garden is our newest LAND (permaculture demonstration) Centre.

The first thing you see when you enter the plot is the giant soil food web sculpture. Allan loves this as an interactive tool to help visitors and volunteers begin to understand how the design process works and how to apply non linear thinking to creating their own designs. 

Behind the web is a state of the art chicken coop, that home of the Hendon adopt- a- chicken scheme. For £30 a year local residents can adopt a hen, which they can come and visit when they like and have access to their delicious eggs. The chicken coop is a great example of stacked functions, as not only do the chickens provide eggs and local engagement with the garden, but also manure for Allan's many compost heap and rainwater which is harvested from the roof into big IBC containers. 

In the centre of this plot is a small pond, which was created to alleviate the flooding on the site. Water from all of the other plots runs into the pond, so it has been densely planted with reeds to aid filtraration. To the edges Allan has planted cordon apple trees, interspersed with bug hotels that have been created with recycled materials. All of the beds on this plot are raised for accessibility and no dig. They are mainly used for growing salad crops. 

Allan is a passionate composter. Both of his allotment plots have several composters where he experimenting with different techniques inspired by his learning with Dr Elaine Ingam's Soil Food Web. In order to generate enough material for composting he has set up two small community initiatives. He noticed that his allotment neighbours were all burning their garden waste. In the spirit of the principle 'catch and store energy' he set up several builders bags at the entrance to the site and invited his neighbours to donate their green waste for composting. The result was overwhelming and Allan now has an abundance of green matter for his composters. 

The second initiative involved collecting leaves from a local private street, where the council had ceased to collect garden waste. In exchange for a donation to a local homeless charity, Allan offered to collect all of the leaves, which he would put in his leaf mould bins on plot two. He then collected over two hundred bin liners full of leaves, which after a year of rotting down as leaf mould were added to his hot compost. 

Allan employs a hot composting system at Hendon. He collects green and brown waste, plus nitrogen rich material, which are all layered together in a big heap. As the materials break down, they heat up quickly, killing weed seeds, pathogens and deterring rats. After three days, the heap is turned, then a few days later turned again, making sure that all of the waste ends up in the hottest part of the heap. What is left is lovely seed free compost, made really quickly, which is essential for building the soil in the no dig beds. 

Plot two is a much more traditional allotment where seasonal vegetables are grown in large no-dig beds, including Allan's unfeasibly large cabbages. There is a polytunnel, where seedlings are tended, heat loving plants are grown and other crops are dried. A row of cordon apple trees divides the main veg beds from the small forest garden which houses apples, pears and plums with an understorey of currants and strawberries. The forest garden is heavily mulched with cardboard and woodchip to deter the invading blackberries. 

Next to the forest garden is the new composting toilet, affectionately known as "the turdis". You can't have volunteers without a loo, so it has been an essential addition to the garden and another valuable addition to Allan's composting empire. 

One of Hendon's most impressive features is it's commitment to the ethic of Fair Shares. Allan was keen to demonstrate that a different kind of economy was possible and was determined that the project could be viable without relying on grant funding. The 'Feed the Need' project was set up to provide fresh veg to the local food bank. In order to support this, half of the garden's produce is sold to the local wholefood cooperative, which pays for all of the resources that the garden needs to thrive, enabling Allan to donate the rest to those in need. He has also just started hosting community days, where local people are invited to come and see the garden, learn about growing and to help harvest the produce.