Partner news · 09 February 2026
A second plot at Bestwood: the parish pantry takes on a growing patch.
From the trustees of Arnold Relief in Need · · 7 min read
At the quarterly meeting of January 2026, the trustees of Arnold Relief in Need agreed a one-off grant of £1,200 to the Bestwood Village Allotment Society to take on a second plot for the parish food larder. The plot, a fifteen-perch patch on the north-eastern edge of the site, has been let by the parish council to the society on a peppercorn rent for five years. The society will sow it, weed it, harvest it, and deliver the produce, weekly, to the parish larder at St Paul's, Daybrook.
It is, by some distance, the largest single grant the trust has made in the last two years. It is also among our quieter ones. The plot was applied for, granted, and turned over in the week before Christmas, with very little fuss; the trustees have only now got around to writing it up.
Why a second plot.
The parish larder at St Paul's runs on the back of two food sources. The first is the supermarket short-life donation route — pallets of bread, fruit, and tinned goods that come in twice a week from a regional distribution centre. The second is the rota of allotment growers around the parish who drop off whatever they have a surplus of. The first source is, by volume, the larger; the second is, by quality, often the more valuable. There is no substitute for a fresh head of curly kale, a punnet of strawberries, or a bag of new potatoes still warm from the ground.
The parish has a long allotment tradition — the Bestwood Village site dates from the 1920s and has eighty plots across two acres — but the share of plots being actively worked has dropped, over the last decade, as the original generation of plot-holders has aged out and the waiting list of younger families has stalled. The society has had a vacant plot of one kind or another on its hands every quarter for the last five years.
The proposal that came to us in late November was simple: would the trust pay for the basic set-up of a dedicated larder plot — fencing the back two yards against rabbits, two raised beds, a small tool shed, twenty bags of compost, and the first cohort of seed potatoes and onion sets — so that the society could begin to deliver into the larder on a weekly schedule?
'It is a plot we would not otherwise have been able to take on — and now it is committed, in advance, to the parish.'
— A volunteer plot-holder, Bestwood Village Allotment Society.
What the £1,200 covers.
- £280 · second-hand timber and chicken wire for the rabbit fencing on the back two yards.
- £320 · two raised beds, eight feet by four, in pressure-treated softwood.
- £260 · a small reclaimed tool shed and a padlock cylinder cut to the society's standing key.
- £120 · the first year's compost, peat-free, twenty bags.
- £140 · seed potatoes, onion sets, broad bean seed, leek seed, and the late-summer brassicas.
- £80 · a reserve for the unanticipated.
The society's plot stewards will keep a short ledger of what is grown, harvested, and delivered into the larder each week. They have agreed, on a handshake, to write us a half-page report at the end of the first growing year. There is no requirement on the society to repeat the arrangement in year two, but our impression is that the plot will continue under the society's standing rotation regardless.
Where this fits in the trust's work.
This grant sits within the trust's standing Parish Pantry programme, which makes a small quarterly grant of £600 to the larder at St Paul's, Daybrook, and a smaller £200 monthly grant to the Arnot Hill community fridge. The Bestwood plot is, in effect, a slightly larger one-off addition to that standing relationship — a piece of investment rather than recurring revenue.
It is also, we hope, an example of a kind of grant the trust would like to make more of in the next five years. Most of what we do is small, recurring, direct-to-household. There is, however, a small space — a few thousand pounds a year at most — for larger one-off grants that build a small piece of infrastructure for one of our partners. We will look, in coming quarters, at one or two further opportunities of that shape.
A small thank-you.
Our thanks to the Bestwood Village Allotment Society for the proposal, the work it implies, and the patience to walk a trustee around the site on a wet afternoon in December. Our thanks, too, to the volunteers at the parish larder at St Paul's, Daybrook, who will be the first recipients of the plot's produce in the early summer.
The first delivery from the new plot is expected in mid-June, with the early broad beans and salad leaves. The full annual yield, on a conservative estimate from the society's plot stewards, should be in the order of three hundred kilograms of fresh produce by the end of the growing season — enough to supply the larder with a meaningful share of its fresh-produce shelf through the late summer and autumn.
— The trustees of Arnold Relief in Need, signed at the quarterly meeting of 27 January 2026.