Hooray for a sunshine-y day…

At last! July’s finally behaving like it’s supposed to! I arrive just after 9 and walk around the site with Ru, cup of coffee in hand, to work out what needs to be done. I make a list in the book but there really aren’t too many tasks to do today. At this time of year it seems that it’s more like maintenance than serious work. A little bit of planting – chives to go into the shadey bed by the bike park – and general weeding here and there, the paths and around some of the salad leaves in the main beds. We need to water in the greenhouse and prepare a concoction of garlic and water to treat the soil we pulled the cos lettuce up from last week. But other than that there’s really not too much to do. A quick assessment of the week’s growth and we arrive at a total of 11.5 kg of leaves to be harvested after lunch. Added to the 8.5 kg Ru’s estimated can be cropped from Springfield, this gives us a good total of 20kg – which will get packaged up into two hundred bags later in the day.

It just so glorious to be at the site in this weather. The sun warms the spirits and makes everyone feel happy and energised – the rain and damp already a distant memory. Our resident robin is out too. Really very tame and inquisitive – hanging around waiting for us to unearth some worms for him.

It also seems to be a day for other visitors - families wander through, Julie and Kerry from Growing Communites HQ come by and a journalist from the Metro arrives to look round the site, making loads of notes. It really is perfect weather for making a good impression! At lunch time, we are visted by a writer and photographer working on a book.

In the afternoon we get on with the harvest. Frank works on the bike park area, which we are cleaning up to make more welcoming. There might not be too much routine work today, but we can always find fun tasks for volunteers! We’ve cordoned off a section to plant some hardy grass and daisies - we’ll let it grow for a couple of weeks and then do the next bit…

Speaking of flowers, these looked particularly lovely today.

We put an edible flower in every bag of salad we pack. These are pansies. And these are calendula.

We mostly plant these to attract beneficial insects to the site, but the petals are also edible. It’s amazing what comments you get from such a small but pretty addition to your salad bowl.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 6 | Support workers: 1 | Visitors to the site: 3 families + a couple of others | Growing Community HQ Staff: 2 | Journalist: 1 | Writer: 1 | Photographer: 1 | Dog: 1 | Robin: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | 1 punnet mixed berries (including Japanese wine berries): 175g | Basil: 90g| Figs: 55 | Tomatoes: 2.5kg

Leaf of the Week: Cos

After yesterday’s sad business, I think it’s only right to give this pride of place to the poor cos lettuce. It gave us a number of boxes of leaves for the salad bags, all the healthy leaves harvest-able, despite having to pull up the entire bed to prevent the spread of the root aphid.

Cos is a rather regular leaf in salads. Crisp and bright green, it’s probably one of the most recognisable of the leaves in the salad bags we put together. Also known as romaine, this leaf is a great little producer. You pick the larger outer leaves and it keeps giving more and more new growth - have always been amazed at how much they grow back in one week between harvesting. It’s such a shame that we had to pull out an entire bed, but as we still have one more bed, this isn’t the last you’ll see of it…

Attack of the root aphid

More emotion today! The drooping leaves of a few of the cos lettuces gave away a whole heap of activity going on under the soil. The lettuce root aphids have been busily doing their damage out of our sight. We had to pull up a whole bed of perfectly healthy-looking cos to try to stop the spread. It’s an affliction that had already wreaked havoc on a bed of the same type of lettuce at the Springfield site – where, again, all the plants had to be ripped out a few weeks ago.

Here you can just about see the root aphid. See the white, ash-like substance just above the plant in Ru’s hand…

Apparently cos lettuce planted between April and late June is more likely to be vulnerable to infestation. But how does this uncharacteristic July weather affect this theory? We don’t know. And, aside from this, Ru says he needs to do more research as none of the books we have give suggestions on how to deal with the little rotters after the attack. Rather they wax lyrical about how you can avoid them by rotating crops and planting resistant varieties. The first method is, of course, something we already do as organic growers. The question is how do you deal with the land once you have pulled up all the plants? We are trying the practice of watering the affected area with the liquid that comes from soaking a mixture of rhubarb leaves and garlic cloves. And at Springfield we’ve planted little gem lettuce in the place of cos as this is supposed to be more resistant. Now it’s just a waiting game to see how these will fare.

Scene of devastation…

Disease and pests, as all gardeners and farmers will testify, add a rather unpalatable twist to the delight of growing food. Really tests your wits but we will not resort to chemicals. And the learning we will gain, especially if we manage to contain the blighters, should help to develop our resilience to such problems in the future. That is the fervent hope and of course we will share our findings with you!

I can’t bear to only bring you bad news this week. So just have to give you this lovely picture of our first tomato harvest…

These are from the greenhouse at Springfield, where the plants have been climbing right up towards the roof. Such a bright and cheery welcome sight to find the tomatoes hidden among the vines.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 7 | Support workers: 1 | Visitors to the site: 3 families | Friends: 3 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | 2 punnets blackberries: 600g | Basil: 90g | Chard: 7.5kg | Figs: 11 | Tomatoes: 1.5kg

Leaf of the Week: Lollo Rosso

Well, here’s a leaf you probably all know - the lovely lollo rosso. It’s such a popular leaf, I’m sure you’ve seen it in a salad bag somewhere along the line.

However, I think it gets more points for its decorative value than it does on the nutrition front. In all my research, I can’t find anything that speaks to its nutritional significance in your diet. But we’re not only after nutrition in a salad, are we? And as this leaf certainly does its job to make your food look attractive, we’ll keep on growing it. Plus, if you add it to the golden purslane (as well as all our other leaves!), you’ve got a perfect union in your salad bowl.

Ripping it up

Bit of an emotional day last Tuesday. Had to rip up the entire bed of oakleaf lettuce that I planted on my very first day as an apprentice. Pulled up, not because it had anything wrong with it – so I guess that’s good – it just came to the end of its cycle for us. That’s the way with growing, I’m learning. No point in getting sentimental about a bed of lettuce. But just look how beautiful it looked before Ann-Marie and I carefully harvested the whole crop…

We got a good three boxes of leaves from it and we’d been harvesting loads, generally a box or two each week since we started cropping it – so, all in all, it’s done us well. But the time had come to get a new lot of plants in there so that we can keep getting leaves from the bed in the next part of the growing cycle. All going well, the new lettuce, also a green oakleaf, will start delivering in two to four weeks, depending on the weather. Check out the new bed…

…all planted up and under a net to stop the foxes from digging up the clear ground. They seem to have made a habit of finding unprotected soil and digging holes, we have no idea why. A whole bed of cos was trampled last week, so it’s really important to give the beds proection.

The three boxes of oakleaf set the scene for a real bumper crop last week. 23 kgs of salad, which translates to 230 bags of salad for the box scheme and this year’s record harvest. We all felt rather proud.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 7 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 23kg | 2 punnets bright purple plums: 700g | Basil: 150g | Thai basil: 60g | Figs: 500g

(apologies for the short and rather late blog this week – I’ve been really busy in my job outside the site and have been mostly away from a computer since Tuesday)

What can it be?

You probably won’t believe it, but here, in all its glory…

…is a gooseberry! It’s the first of the crop on one of the five Cape Gooseberry bushes we’ve planted in the wild section at Allens Gardens.

You’d be forgiven for not recognising it as a gooseberry, as it doesn’t at all resemble the English variety - neither the plant nor the fruit itself look the same. I had to share this with you though, because I’m really excited by their arrival.  Growing up in Zimbabwe, it’s just the sort of gooseberry that I do know, having spent hours crawling under the bushes searching out the berries that had fallen to the ground. It might be obvious to you, but the reason they’re called Cape Gooseberries, is not because they hail from Cape Town (as I thought when I was a kid) but because the berries, which ripen to a wonderful orange, grow within a small cape. Protecting them from the birds but not from me and my sisters who just couldn’t get enough of them! The cape also protects them from insects and other creepy crawlies when they fall to the ground, which means they can lie there and ripen to sweet, delicious, perfection.

Growing them at the site is a bit of an experiment. We’ve planted them in a really warm spot which gets a lot of sun. They seem to be doing really well there, in fact better even than the ones we’ve planted in the greenhouses at Springfields. Though, having said that, I hope I don’t jinx them - will have to see how they are tomorrow when I go to the site. Crossing fingers that they are still ok!

Leaf of the Week: Perilla

I know every week I probably drive you mad with my ravings about the wonderful leaves that we grow, and I’m afraid I’m going to do it again! If you got the salad bag this week, did you chance upon this fantastic leaf?

If you did, I’m sure you would have had absolutely no idea what it was. I, for one, had never come across it before working at Growing Communities. You don’t need too much of it as it’s got a rather strong flavour but it’s so unusual and really gives a good bite to your salad. It’s actually a member of the mint family and if you looked (as I have just done) for some information about it, you’d find it listed as a spice, rather than a salad leaf. But I think Ru’s done a good job selecting it for the site as tastewise it really does work with the other leaves that we grow. And…as well as being an antioxidant, it rates pretty highly nutritionally as it’s got lots of vitamins and minerals. So, all rather deserving of its place in this feature then. Agreed?

Keeping the slugs at bay…

A true day of multi-tasking! The barrow loads of compost to be collected from the pile and sieved for the new bed of amaranth makes for a warm start to the day. The sieving helps to make the compost a good fine medium into which we plant the seedlings. I also help Ru to prune and then train the grape vines up the wall on the wild side of the site. There’s been a lot of growth from these vines and we need to make sure that we train them well so that next year they’ll be strong and hopefully we’ll get some fruit.

The new shoots are tied to the wire on the wall to help give the vine support.

After all the exercise involved in preparing the compost, I get some rest by sorting out the site’s cloches. Those of you who understand gardening speak will know what cloches are, the rest of you might have wondered what all the cut up plastic bottles are doing scattered round the site. They’re there to protect the new plants from the nasty slugs. And though it sometimes feels like a bit of a hassle, especially with so many new plants to protect each week, when you come back to the site and find a large proportion of last week’s planting chomped by the slimey little fellows, you realise just how vitally important those half bottles can be. We mostly use recycled 2 litre water bottles, cut in half for the job. In the cooler months it’s ok to leave the top of the bottle on, as they act as mini greenhouses for the new plants, however in the summer, when the sun’s shining and hot, you need to cut the tops and the bottoms off the bottle so it acts as a sleeve and prevents moisture from building up too much. We also tie a piece of copper wire around them which acts as a double deterrant – shocks the slug away from its mission to eat the tender leaves. It’s not a totally fail proof system but the number of plants that we save from the slugs makes it worth the effort.

Volunteer Ann-Marie helps make the cloches

Today, even with collecting all the cloches from the plants from round the site that have outgrown them and making up a batch of new ones, we run out. So we make do with another method of slug-protection. This is a mixture of sand and lime which we dribble in a circle around each plant. We add a little bit of seaweed powder which enriches the soil for the new growth at the same time. The only problem with this method is that if it rains, which no doubt it will, the circle gets washed away and you have to reapply it. Sometimes, maybe, you just have to pray to keep the slugs away…

Two methods of protecting the new plants

The harvest goes particularly well this week. Despite being rained on as I cycled to work, there is a good turnout of volunteers who plough through the day’s tasks…mowing the pathways, netting up some of the fruit trees, planting and harvesting. Ru’s promised Nat at Growing Communities HQ a bumper crop of 21kg and we easily hit our target plus we bag up some extra salad to be sold at the stall. With all the help we get away by 7. I’m worn out but it’s that wonderful tiredness that comes after a productive day.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 6 | Ex-volunteers volunteering: 2 | Friends & Visitors: 4 | Support workers: 2 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 21kg | Extra bags: 12 x 100g | 1 punnet summer fruits: 300g | 1 punnet red currants: 250g | Basil: 60g | Thai basil: 30g | Figs: 225g | Plums: 200g

Leaf of the Week: Aurora Orache

A little departure from the usual leaf of the week today, maybe cheating a little, as the leaf that I am featuring didn’t actually get harvested - if you get our salad bags, you’ll have to watch out for it next week! It’s Aurora Orache and with a name like that I couldn’t resist.

A variation on the red orache which I love so much.  It has the same taste but is greener, I think the ‘aurora’ title comes from the lovely hint of purple you can just about see along the veins in this picture. Sadly I couldn’t find out too much more about this little salad green, seems to be rather unknown. Let me know if you have some interesting facts to share!

Summer pruning…in the rain

All along the central wall at Allen’s Gardens the fruit trees have been sending up shoots. Apples and pears in training. The trees are small but they already have fruit. They’re a little extra sideline on a site that’s mostly about salad, doing their bit for the biodiversity so necessary in a well rounded organic site.

Ru is back today. And with him comes a flood of volunteers, despite the unpredictable weather. Perfect timing as it means that while they plant up the new beds, Ru teaches me about summer pruning. A bit ironic as it hardly feels like summer – certainly a common cry at the moment – but the time is right as we’ve gone past midsummer, so there’s unlikely to be too much growth (gulp! can’t believe my stint here is already half over…). Summer pruning means we tidy up the trees and make sure they are growing the way we want them to. They’ll take a bigger pruning during winter.

We pull back the netting that’s been protecting the trees from the squirrels and birds and Ru shows me how to cut the new upright shoots back ( = you sharpen your secateurs nice and sharp and make a diagonal cut just above a leaf. It’s got to be really clean and well sloped so that it doesn’t rot ) and train the horizontal branches by tying them to the wires attached to the wall.

Along the wall, the trees are being trained in what is known as an espalier shape. This means they grow up close to the wall and are trained along the wires. In the bed away from the wall, we have a couple of stepover trees, trained to be low enough to, you guessed it, step over. It seems strange to have the trees so low to the ground but it means that we can plant salad plants around them and they don’t make much shade.

The branches of the tree are weighted down with a brick to keep them low. On this bed we are growing Red Orache.

It’s a strange job because you cut back all the upright shoots, take a step back to inspect your work and then see all the ones you’ve missed, despite being sure you had gotten them all the first time. It takes me all morning. All that’s cut away gets put into the compost.

One of the trees seems to have a bit of disease. We consult a tree book but can’t find the cause. Anyone have any ideas?

We then have a belated birthday cake for Ann-Marie, served up with fresh lemon balm tea.

After lunch everyone cracks on with the harvesting, determined to get it all done earlier than we have been. It’s amazing that however much we decide to harvest, we always seem to get away at the same time. With a record 20kg of salad to pack this week, we surprisingly manage to finish by 7.15, just a little earlier than usual, with a little help from a friend of Annie’s, one of the support workers. It would have been even earlier but we were kept longer thanks to the wonderful glut of black currants at Springfield. I wonder how much more they’d be enjoyed by the lucky consumers if it was known that Nat and Bruce spent over an hour in the rain picking them all – truly deliciously local.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Helping friend: 1 | Dog: 1 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | Chard: 6.25kg | 10 punnets of black currants: 3.5kg + loads more which we didn’t package up as we ran out of punnets | 1 punnet summer fruits (red currants, black currants and logan berries): 300g | 1 punnet red currants: 350g | Mint: 30g | Basil: 30g | Thai basil: 30g