Turning Tarmac Green at Lakeside

• Having an allotment can help you live a healthier lifestyle. If you don’t like the idea of pesticides in your food, an allotment allows you to choose what goes into your soil. You can also grow varieties that you might not find in the shops.

• Meet new people and make new friends with fellow plot-holders. Sharing advice and experiences with other allotment owners while you work can be a real bonding activity.

• Save money on expensive supermarket fruit and vegetables.

• Getting outdoors within nature and plants is good for our mental health and wellbeing. Spending as little as 15 minutes a day out in the summer sunshine can build up our levels of vitamin D which is essential for healthy teeth and bones.

• The exercise that comes with gardening on an allotment can be great for your physical health. Get those joints moving and limbs stretching. Did you know that just 30 minutes of gardening on your allotment can burn around 150 calories, the same as doing low impact aerobics.

• Help your community to keep thriving as well as essential wildlife that may inhabit in and around allotments.

• Having your own plot of land to lay out however you like can really get your creative juices flowing, not only will you feel a sense of achievement when you’ve grown your first vegetable but also the sense of enjoyment is there too.

Here at Lakeside as part of our sustainability initiative, we have utilised a small piece of unused tarmac to turn into an allotment for our staff to nurture. We aim to recycle and reuse as much material as possible to get this project running smoothly. To find out why we're building an allotment, check out our Sustainability and CR page here. Or click below to find out about how we won our Green Apple award.