State and conditions of the amateur garden territories: land usage and management tendencies in Lithuania

ISSN 1822-3230 (ankstesnių spausdintų leidinių)The article presents the analysis of the Associations of Gardeners of Lithuania, the undergoing changes in their territories. Since the establishment of the amateur gardening comprising 56 associations, there has been a tendency of privatizing a great number of agricultural land parcels owned by the amateur gardeners; the traditional gardening tends to be substituted for a single family housing. The objective of the article is to discuss the current situation in the territories allocated for the amateur gardens, to point out the tendencies of their future development taking into consideration different regions of the country and to assess the problems concerning land usage and management. The associations of gardeners comprise 216932 individual gardeners; they manage 228673 land parcels owned by them, which totally occupy 20714 ha. The major part of the land allocated for the associations of gardeners is the privatized land by the members of the associations, i.e. the territory makes 70.4 %. The survey of the experts of the municipalities on the current state of the territories of the amateur gardens and the assessment of the particular locations of gardens, presented the results, which confirm that the majority of the associations of gardeners failed their main purpose and new development tendencies appeared depending on their geographical location. The associations of gardeners has come across with a great number of problems on territorial planning, engineering communication services, and services maintaining the needs of the associations, the expansion as well as development of these areasVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŽemės ūkio akademij