Peep over the fence or boundary wall of your nearest allotments and superficially everything may seem much the same as it has been for years.

But dig a little deeper and you will find a quiet revolution has taken place in the gardening world.

Allotments used to be populated almost entirely by gnarled old men who had been there for years and who were highly resistant to change. They planted much the same crops every year and often hid away in sheds made primarily from old advertising panels.

There they drank unfeasibly strong mugs of stewed tea, which had been transported there in stained vacuum flasks, and smoked untipped cigarettes or roll ups. Many of them were there to get away from their wives, hardly surprising when you saw either party.

Some were really market gardeners who should not have been there. One man grew bucket loads of dahlias and another had four plots full of nothing but potatoes.

There were other oddities such as a fellow who seemed to spend his entire time splintering wood into smaller and smaller pieces; I think he must have been a retired lumberjack.

Now the typical allotment gardener is as likely to be a young woman as an old man. Many plots the time-honoured size of ten rods have been divided into two or even four to give people a start.

Some are run by co-operatives and others by charities. The produce grown is no longer just traditional potatoes, parsnips or peas.

Exotic fruit and vegetables abound. One chap near me grows melons and peppers in a greenhouse. Others have successfully cultivated peaches and even lemons.

Most of the allotments are organic. The old practice of using fertiliser in industrial quantities has almost entirely disappeared. Nowadays great faith, usually amply rewarded, is shown in compost.

All around the allotments are conical plastic containers, looking rather like Daleks, where the compost is matured until it reaches a satisfactory dark brown colour and is full of pink worms.

Many of the bigger sites in Sussex have shops, run by volunteers and open at the weekends. These have also seen great changes.

Once the main shop in Hove was in a dank and depressing corner, not easily discovered and hardly worth the effort of going there. It was in a wooden shed steadily rotting away.

Now it sells scores of different varieties of fruit and flower seeds, all attractively displayed. It is in a renovated room at the Weald Avenue allotments and it looks splendid.

Peter Ferris and his team of colleagues not only give a service to people from near and far prepared to pay a modest membership fee.

They also provide free advice and operate a vigilante service to ensure the allotments are being properly guarded.

I can remember when hundreds of plots lay empty in Sussex with many of them in Brighton and Hove.

There were so many vacancies that Hove Council sold its biggest site, the smallholding off Elm Drive, to health authorities for enough money to have provided all plot holders elsewhere with gold plated taps.

Like other councils, Hove sold further pockets of land only to find there were fluctuations in demand.

In 1973, after the first world oil crisis, many people all over Britain were jolted out of the notion that fresh food would be forever freely available.

They started to grow their own and took every available plot for the next three years until the drought summer of 1976 convinced most of them that allotment gardening was a back-breaking, unrewarding business.

Now we are going green again and there is an even bigger demand for plots. The waiting list on many sites is five years or more.

What a shame that so many plots were needlessly sold in the past. It is a mistake that should never be repeated.

Even today, in land-locked towns, there are sites that could be made available for cultivation. They are in patches near road junctions, on housing estates and by the urban fringe.

Much better use could be made of the sites already available by operating a more stringent policy against those who let their plots rot. While people wait patiently for land, there are gardeners near me who have let their few square yards grow into jungles of weeds.

This time, I think the demand may be here to stay. As pressure grows for housing, so gardens are being built on in all towns and villages. Allotments are then the only answer for people wanting to grow their own produce.

Every February, an event called Seedy Sunday in Hove is attended by hundreds of gardeners who swap or buy seeds which are often rare and original.

Only last month, 500 people came to an open day by the organic gardeners who have a beautifully tended area on the Weald Avenue allotments.

In Holland, allotments have for many years been turned into leisure gardens. People can admire the produce being grown which is also available for sale. There are cafes, loos, and gardens given over to flowers, wild or formal.

You can spend several hours or even a day in these pleasing gardens which are welcome public places rather than the rather secretive sites that tend to house most allotments in this country.

Keeping an allotment is hard work. At a minimum it requires at least half an hour in work each day of the year – which in practice means an hour in the growing months and little or nothing in the winter.

You have to be prepared to put up with disappointments such as I have had this month when my carefully grown tomatoes succumbed to blight.

There are irritations such as invasions by birds, which ate many brassicas, and slugs which are busy chomping away at lettuces.

Human nuisances also abound including the boys from a local school who forced nearly every lock on allotment sheds a couple of years ago.

But there is nothing like the taste of freshly grown raspberries that can be served with cream within an hour of picking them.

No sweetcorn from a shop tastes quite the same as the ones you have grown yourself. New potatoes straight from the ground are exquisite.

You can grow crops that are rarely seen in supermarkets such as tayberries or vegetable spaghetti. And you can save hundreds of pounds a year on your allotments.

Most allotment gardeners are more adventurous and ambitious than they ever were before. They are also enjoying themselves which is why the waiting lists are so long.

In my own small way, despite manifold failures and eccentricities, I am proud to be part of this welcome green revival.