In 1986, the municipality of Rotterdam created their first “integration garden”. Patchworked allotments, offered in equal numbers to native Dutch people and immigrants, were supposed to encourage collaboration and community building. In the same year, the Centrumpartij, a far-right anti-immigration party, pledged allegiance to the “allotment garden philosophy” in Dutch society in its election program. All around the country, immigrants and their children were planting foods in allotments that they could not buy in the Netherlands. Broccoli bloomed in old bus tires; memories of hazelnut groves in Turkey mixed with the soggy Dutch soil. This paper explores the experiences of immigrants - primarily from Turkey, Suriname, and Italy - in allotment gardens in the Netherlands from 1960 to 1990. It argues that allotment gardens were potent political spaces for immigrants and for native Dutch people. Allotments were imbued with ideas about thriftiness, productivity, community, family, and environmental awareness — and therefore were unruly representations of national values. Municipalities, journalists, and native Dutch gardeners had specific visions of what an allotment should look like. Immigrant gardeners did too. The imposition of the former on the latter was rarely entirely successful, and was frequently contested.