What do we encourage?
We promote following ideas for the allotment garden, which we consider as good:
- Persons entitled to establish an allotment are: farmers, an organization of farmers, an organization related to agriculture, city (town, village) authorities or an NPO organization.
- Even, if a person establishing allotment gardens is an incorporated company etc., we consider that their establishment is good, if they do not make high profits while managing the allotment gardens.
- We think that the management of an allotment garden is good if it has one or the other of the following items:
- The allotment garden has a users' (gardeners') organisation and a good partnership exists between its representative and the allotment garden owner.
- Although if there is no user organisation on site, an owner can get and establish a users' cooperation.
- A gardener uses his allotment satisfactorily and cooperates in the management of the whole allotment garden site.
- There is a rule concerning the management and the use of the allotment garden.
- The users alternate and they help each other if needed.
- The following uses of an allotment garden are desirable:
- The gardener can use the same allotment for a long period.
- A user cultivates his allotment and grows the crops he desires.
- A user strives to improve the soil where crops grow up.
- A user understands the problem of repeated planting, and so performs a crop rotation.
- A user fully performs weeding-out management in order not to cause problems to the surrounding users.
- We are aware of the potential strong growth of weeds and think that 30-50 m2 per allotment plot is a good size for an allotment.
Special expertise of the federation :
Since the "Japanese Kleingarten research association", the predecessor of the Japanese allotment garden union, was launched in 1985, the spreading of the right knowledge has been an important issue.
In order to spread the result of a study group all over the country and to attain a networking of the allotment garden movement, local associations were needed. Yoshiharu Meguriya formed the local association to Chiba Prefecture in 1992.
Furthermore, in order to guide the establishment and the management of allotment gardens, an allotment garden coordinator was brought up since 2005. Yoshiharu Meguriya performs the qualification authentication.
The association performed 63 people's qualification authentication until now. As a specialist, who supports these allotment garden coordinators technically, Yoshiharu Meguriya has prepared the formation of allotment garden masters.
There are 15 allotment garden masters.
Interesting Information:
In the rural areas surrounding metropolises, such as Tokyo, strong job offer power, such as companies, absorbs rural young men and the backbone's labor force to an urban office. For this reason, fallow farmland spreads and old farmhouse residences become a vacant room.
When all the related problems are solved, it is possible to establish an allotment garden in fallow farmland and to use the vacant farmhouse residence as a clubhouse for a leisure-time activity.
Now, we are tackling this subject.
The metropolis in Japan has few park green-tract-of-land spaces, and is inferior in naturalistic environment. For these reasons, the trial is made to create a small allotment garden between the buildings of collective housing.
We are asked for various advice as far as this question is concerned.
In various places in Japan there have been in the recent past, frequent earthquakes and people are worried about the damages caused.
Some city offices specify specific farmland for disaster prevention in order to secure an evacuation area and an emergency-supplies place, when damage occurs.
As Association for Japan Allotment Garden has so far accumulated information on natural disasters, and experience of support it is due to utilise this experience and to hold a study meeting about "the preventive measures in case of a natural disaster, the correspondence at the time of generating, the disaster-site support after generating, and restoration from a disaster" (February 2).
