Grow Your Own – a lot of data to work with and yet again more challenges than I expected

My wife grows some vegetables in our back garden, she used to have an allotment but she gave it up and we dug up part of our grass. I got to wondering about allotments and whether they were a British phenomena or they were widely spread? Which countries have the most allotments, growing space per capita and the largest size of allotments? I started out checking out OpenStreetMap to see how allotments were tagged (landuse=allotments) and then thought I would give Overpass Turbo (the web version) a try to download a sample. It seems that Overpass gets easily overloaded and I could only manage to download London allotments after 3 or 4 tries. Claude suggested using the QuickOSM plugin to download the allotments data but that still hit the same limits and it looked like I would have to download the UK in regions, a European or world map was not going to be easy. Scratching my head I reached out to my friends in the OSM community via mastodon saying “OpenStreetMap friends. Not being very…