Vegetables grown outside service hours may not count

Line 4 — Planned platform maintenance (gate access, metered standpipes, cultivation telemetry), 14 overnight windows, per plot: £18.40. The item would appear on next spring's rent statement for plot holders on any site whose council has moved allotment administration onto one of the larger land-management platforms. Under the scheme, a maintenance window would not be a period in which the allotment stops working, only a period in which it stops being recorded.

Demand for allotments in many cities far exceeds supply, and waiting lists on urban sites are commonly measured in years. Councils and site associations typically require tenants to keep a large share of their plot under cultivation, and they issue warning notices and eventually terminate tenancies when plots are neglected. Allotment administration is increasingly moving onto online systems for waiting lists, rent collection, plot inspections and communication with tenants. Some sites have introduced metered or restricted water supplies and electronic gate access, and dry summers have brought hosepipe restrictions that shape when people can water. Scheduled maintenance windows, status pages and uptime figures are standard features of the software platforms that now run everyday services.

The platform would control three things: the gate, which opens to a phone; the standpipes, which meter water to the plot; and the cultivation score, which is calculated from a monthly overhead scan and a stream of plot photographs uploaded by the tenant. All three would require updates. Under the published maintenance calendar, the second and fourth Tuesday of each month, from 23:00 to 05:00, would be designated 'non-operational', during which the gate would default to locked, the taps to closed, and the cultivation feed to 'not observed'. Plants would be permitted to continue. They would simply do so without a record.

The consequence would fall on the cultivation score. Councils already require plots to be at least three-quarters worked and issue notices to those who fall short. Under the scheme, growth that occurred during a window would be logged as 'unverified' until the next scan, and unverified growth would not count toward the threshold. Ruth Ashby, 61, who holds a half plot in the north of the borough, would receive a non-cultivation notice for a bed of runner beans that came up over a bank holiday weekend coinciding with an extended window. 'The beans were there,' she would say. 'They just weren't there officially.'

Water would be the harder problem. Hosepipe restrictions already push watering into the small hours, which is where the windows would sit. Colin Firbank, 44, would describe standing at a locked standpipe at ten past four on a July morning with two empty cans, watching the platform's status page change from 'investigating' to 'resolving'. The tap would open at 05:07. 'The incident was resolved,' he would say. 'The tomatoes were not.'

The waiting list would absorb the rest. Most urban sites already hold applicants for several years, and the platform would use the windows to create a new tier of tenancy. Applicants willing to accept 'flexible cultivation terms' — additional windows, at the operator's discretion, with no fixed calendar — would be offered plots ahead of the queue. A couple in their thirties, four years on the list, would sign for a plot described in the tenancy agreement as 'available outside published maintenance periods'. 'It exists most of the time,' the wife would say. 'We've been offered less.'

The £18.40 would be described on the statement as a service continuity contribution. It would cover the windows themselves: the engineers, the status page, the automated messages telling tenants the site was unavailable, and the rescans required to bring unverified growth back into the record. The site association's treasurer, a retired surveyor named Angela Dunmore, would point out that the same site had for thirty years been secured by a padlock whose combination was known to every tenant, the neighbouring pub, and at least one fox. 'The padlock never went down,' she would say. 'It also never sent me a report.'

The platform's head of grower experience would defend the calendar as a form of honesty. 'A maintenance window is a commitment,' she would say. 'It tells the tenant exactly when the site cannot be relied upon, which is more than the weather has ever done.' The council's parks committee would adopt the same phrasing in its annual report, which would list the site's uptime at 98.6 per cent, a figure that would not include the fortnight in August when the scan mistook a tarpaulin for an abandoned plot.

Ruth Ashby would keep a notebook in the shed. In it she would record what came up during the windows: the beans, a second flush of lettuce, a marrow she had not planted and could not explain. Each entry would be dated and, where possible, photographed with the plot number visible, as the platform requested. The notebook would not be admissible. The platform would accept uploads only during operational hours, and the marrow, by then, would have been recorded as bare soil. She would keep the notebook anyway. It would be the only document on the site that had never been down.