You don't have to be Tom and Barbara in the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life to boost your supply of vegetables, fruit and flowers. JON BRUNTON reports from the city's allotments.

BUSY mum-of-two Mary Kenning is an allotment addict, whose enjoyment of them, and whose job, happily combine. She runs the Hungerhill Gardens site in St Ann's – at 200, the oldest allotments in the world – and has a large plot there herself.

If you aim at greater self-sufficiency, especially if you have little or no garden at home, this is the way to do it.

It's not some mild eccentricity, as displayed by the Good Life characters played by Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, escaping the rat race to fend for themselves.

You can still earn a living. But at nights and weekends you get out – and get growing.

Mary's commitment to the allotments, tended by 450 other people, too, and her dedication to seeing them managed and, in some necessary cases, renovated, is undoubted.

Says Mary: "It's that connection between food, health and the environment.

"It's also that bit of escape from the city, as the site is something special and in places it's really just like being out in the countryside.

"My food is fresh, without chemicals, and I know I'm being kind to the environment.

"There's nothing like picking an apple from the tree and biting into it, or digging potatoes and cooking them within the hour.

"At home, my garden is very small. Very hard clay soil and lots of slugs limit what I can do."

Hungerhill's is a remarkable story of survival, underpinned by the fact that quite a few plots, which would otherwise have been hopelessly overgrown, are being renovated by volunteers, with 130 hopeful allotment holders on the waiting list for one.

The land costs 11p per square yard to rent.

"Our plots are very varied in size, some around 30 square yards, some as big as 1,000 square yards," says Mary.

"Every garden is individual, with a hedgerow around it, which makes our site unique as an allotment site."

The allotments, which have English Heritage grade two listing, sprang from a time when Nottingham was still a garden city, before the Industrial Revolution, Enclosure Acts and the slums that were to follow, had, within less than 50 years, altered and scarred the cityscape, and actually made allotments even more necessary.

Allotment gardening is an activity anyone keen enough can undertake.

And it's younger gardeners all the time who are picking up their rakes and trowels and getting on with it.

"We probably have an equal mix of male and female and the average age of tenants is rapidly dropping," says Mary, who runs the site for the management body, STAA.

"We have many twenty- somethings who are actively gardening.

"A huge diversity of plants and foodstuffs grows at Hungerhill.

"The ethnic diversity of our tenants is wide and many like to grow their traditional vegetables, for example the calaloo (a leaf vegetable) which is a delicacy for African Caribbeans."

Read more about Nottingham allotments in the current Bygones, on sale now.