So long…for now…

So. My last week as an apprentice. My last ‘leaf of the week’ just written, even though there are loads more leaves to feed the feature for weeks to come (how I love the diversity of our salad bags!). But it’s time up. My six months of being an Apprentice Grower are over. A good growing season in which, as I hope my posts on this will testify, I’ve learnt a huge amount. I hope they’ve taught you something too.

And, what next? Well, first up, I’m taking a bit of a break for October. A trip or two away, while I ruminate on the next step on this growing path I’ve decided to go down. I should warn you that there are some exciting developments brewing…

So, maybe take a break too, but don’t go away entirely. Check this every now and again. This blog will continue to tell its growing tales…I’ll be back soon.

Leaf of the Week: Lattughino

Well, here’s another winter lettuce for you, this one with a more unpronounceable name than any of the other leaves I have brought to you this growing season – it’s called Lattughino, and believe me I have had to ask Ru to tell me its name loads of time before it stuck. Here’s a rather sweet little one…we take about 2-3 leaves off one this size.

It, like last week’s Rouge d’Hiver, has a reddish tinge to its leaves. It’s proving to be really productive, which is great as we head into the cold months.

Testing, one, two three…

Today is soil testing time. A strange thing to be doing on the last day of my apprenticeship, with the soil such an integral part of our growing days. But this is an activity that only needs to be done once every twelve months or so, and Ru leaves it to a time of year when there’s not so much to do and the weather is fairly good. The clear skies mean that we can set up a table outside to make an outdoor lab. First though, we have to collect the soil.

We take samples from two different places on the site. First you check the structure of the soil. You can use a spade to do this, digging one length down into the soil and cutting it out. We have the advantage of a damaged raised bed which needs fixing. We pull away the slab of concrete and look at the how much the soil has been compacted, what life there is down beneath the surface. Our soil looks pretty good. It has a good amount of activity going on – earthworms doing their groovy thing and a millipede rushes through. And being a raised bed which doesn’t get trodden on, it is fairly airy. The addition of lots of yummy compost has helped with that.

The next thing you test for is the texture of the soil. You do this by taking a handful and kneading it into a ribbon or sausage shape. You’re checking to see how well it holds together. Ours has some malleability but is sandy as well. Ru says this means it is a sandy clay loam. ‘Sandy’ and ‘clay’ are pretty self-explanatory, I think. ‘Loam’ means it has a high content of organic matter. There are lots of different types of soil ranging from sandy, loam to clay, with lots of variations in between including loamy sand, silty loam, clay loam etc etc. What this helps to determine is how well your soil retains water, sand will be poor, while clay keeps water well, too well in some cases. This can help you decide what plants to grow but also what you should add to balance it.

Once these two physical tests are done, it is time for the science. Here we have a special soil testing kit to check out how the soil is doing as far as its nutrient content is concerned. We also test the pH or acidity levels of the soil. On the nutrient front we are testing for nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K). NPK are what are known as the macronutrients. The nitrogen helps with the leaves, phosphorus for the fruit and flowers and potassium for the roots.

All laid out and ready for testing!

For each of the tests, you have to make sure your soil sample is dry. Then you get rid of any sticks and stones and crumble it up a little. Into your test tube you put about 1ml of soil. You add different solutions to test for each nutrient, wait various times (all instructions will come with your testing kit – don’t want to bore you with too much detail) …and then you check colouring for the N and P and the cloudiness of the K solution. Felt just like being back in science class.

And our results – from Bed 1 we got a pH of 6.8, which means it is slightly acid, and from Bed 2 a pH of 7 – bang on neutral. Bed 1 was low on both nitrogen and phosphorus and high to medium on potassium. Bed 2 had low to medium N, a medium/high P and high K. Ru thinks this is pretty good and reckons that this is typical of a site that has been reclaimed for growing food in London. It can only get better with all the compost we are adding!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 90g | Tomatoes: 3.5kg | Cape Gooseberries: 300g

Correction! Confusing hoverflies with lacewings??

So I was wrong! A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making hoverfly hotels. Well, the clientele we are hoping to attract to our lovely hotels actually happen to be lacewings and not hoverflies. Oops. It’s a pity because ‘Lacewing Hotel’ just doesn’t have the same ring!

But…lacewings are every bit as important to an organic garden as hoverflies. According to Garden Organic, the female lacewing lays about 300 eggs in her lifetime. Each of these develop into a larva which eats anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 aphids. That’s a whole lot of aphid! Don’t have to worry about room service, then?

Leaf of the Week: Rouge d’Hiver

Now here’s a good looking leaf with its blushing sides. This is the lettuce that we used to replace all the cos with a while back. It’s growing OK but not brilliantly, just taking its time to establish.

Sometimes called winter lettuce it tolerates the cold well, hardly a surprising fact as the name translates to winter red. What might be more interesting is that the colder it is, the redder it gets, so if you want a colourful salad, it’s good to plant it as the cold descends!

Caped treasures…

Only one more week to go before my growing season at Growing Communities is done. So I know I should be frantically sharing new knowledge with you but please indulge me here, for today I harvested the first of the Cape Gooseberries !!

Remember them? I introduced this fruit to you a while back and wondered how they would grow here in the UK. Well, it’s been mixed. At Allens Gardens there is a bit of a race against time as the warm weather comes to an end (though September’s being surprisingly summery!), while at Springfield, where the ample greenhouse gives them the shelter and warmth they need, the plants have grown in leaps and bounds.

So today, in an act reminiscent of my childhood, I crawled under these bushes to hunt out the ripened fruit. And there I learnt that the pure pleasure of my memory hasn’t dissipated with age: finding a perfectly ripened gooseberry, safe within its protective cape, is as much like finding a treasure as it was when I was a kid. Of course my adult size makes it harder to crawl quite all the way under! And it was also a very different and, I can tell you, a quite dissappointing experience having to collect the fruits and not stuff them immediately into my mouth.

You can tell they are ready by the colour of the cape, which turns from green to an orangey-purpley colour, then dries. The drier the cape, the more delicious the fruit. Here they are collected, the delightful fruits of my labour.

As my time as an apprentice at Growing Communities draws to an end, you might have noted the quantity of salad that we are harvesting is diminishing. We’re getting around 10kg of salad a week from the sites compared to over double that a few months ago. That’s partly because we are turning the beds over to winter crops – mustard leaves, cabbages, perpetual spinach etc – though the colder months will also bring less growth…hence the end of this year’s ‘growing season’…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 120g | Tomatoes: 7kg | Cape Gooseberries: 400g

Leaf of the Week: Kale

After my bits and bobs blog a couple of weeks ago I realised I had shot myself in the foot. Each one of those ‘random’ leaves was a potential subject for this feature and I had used them all up! Even with only 3 more weeks, including this one, left to go, I thought I might have done myself a disservice. But no! The range of leaves we grow for the salad bags at Growing Communities goes way beyond my expectation. Here, growing in perfect time to take the title of leaf of the week, is kale.

This has actually made a bit of a comeback because I recognise it from my first few weeks at Growing Communities back in April. It’s a member of the brassica family and has that wonderful soft gray look. Unsurprisingly it has the same texture as cabbage and taste but this kale, grown for salad, is not as tough as the one you might boil up to get your vitamins…

Cool plants to have around!

Last week I promised to show you some beneficial plants. Here are two. Both have featured strongly in my time at Growing Communities. The first is the mallow tree. This furry-leafed tree gives a certain softness to the site, though that’s not the reason it is beneficial…

This plant grows pretty rampantly at Allens Gardens. We have to decide where we will let it grow otherwise I think it might just take over! It’s good because it attracts aphids and because it attracts aphids, it also attracts ladybirds – always a good insect to have around. Here you can see the ladybird larvae munching on dem aphids…

This particular tree got heavily attacked earlier this year….but though it didn’t look so good, it did mean that all the plants around were blissfully healthy…

If you are worried about how the mallow survived, don’t be concerned, I can tell you it fairly quickly returned to good health.

The next plant I am going to show you is the teasel. It’s beneficial in many ways, mostly because it attracts birds who love its seeds. It’s actually a bit of a carnivorous plant – no, it doesn’t eat the birds! – water collects in its crevises, flies fall in and the plant takes their nutrients as they drown.

The teasel at Allens Gardens has taken up a good portion of one of our long bed – here it is in June this year.

And here it is now…

As well as being beneficial by attracting birds and the bugs that would otherwise ravage our sweet salad leaves, growing these plants at Allens Gardens and our other sites means that we ensure the biodiversity so necessary in organic gardening. And that’s pretty cool, me thinks…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 7 | Support workers: 1 | Vistors: one mother and child | Potential volunteers: 1 | Friend: 1, who came for lunch | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 120g | Tomatoes: 6kg

Leaf of the Week: Leaf Celery

Well, here’s a true leaf of the week, for like none of the others so far featured, it has leaf in it’s name.

This is a cut and come again version of the celery that you might be used to. But here, instead of eating the long crunchy stalks, we eat the leaves. It looks a bit like flat leaf parsley so you might be forgiven for mistaking it for the herb. Although we won’t forgive you, for its distinct celery taste should have given it away. Also, the leaves are just a bit tougher. I really like harvesting this leaf, you gather up all the pieces into a bunch and chop them off. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, it kind of feels like you are giving the plant a hair cut!

Welcome to hover-fly hotel!

CORRECTION CORRECTION CORRECTION

So, I’ve touched on natural pest control a few times in the writing of this blog. A necessary practice on an organic market garden and one that has varying degrees of success. Most of what I’ve written has been about preventative measures – the cloches and the trails of sand around young plants to ward off slugs and other pests that have a taste for tender young seedlings; garlic sprays to get rid of the aphids on the leaves; and garlic brew watered onto the roots to rid ourselves of the root aphids. To a lesser degree I have spoken about growing plants that attract beneficial bugs, those that prey on destructive aphids and other nasties. But there has been so many other things to write about each week that I haven’t had a chance to go into too much detail about this.

Well, today, we learnt about another natural pest control technique…how to make a hotel for hover flies. This gives them shelter on our site and makes them really cosy. We like hover flies because their larvae eat aphids, thrips and other plant-sucking insects.

Here’s how you build a hotel. First of all, you take a 1 litre plastic water bottle and cut off the bottom. Then you cut some thick corrugated cardboard to the length of the bottle and roll up it up fairly tight.

You jam this into the bottle. Then, to stop the card falling out the bottom, make two little holes on opposite sides and fasten a piece of wire across. This gives the hover flies plenty of access.

Now you’ve got a hotel, where to put it? We tie these up along the fruit cages in the site, inviting the hover flies to stay close to the food we’re hoping they’ll enjoy.

Next week, I’ll show you some of the fantastic looking plants we grow to attract other beneficial insects…

Though first, and I know this is incredibly gratuitous (you’re going to hate me!), take a look at these! Ru found them while draining the liquid feed barrels. Beautiful!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 6 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 9kg | 2.5 kg chard | Tomatoes: 19.5kg

CORRECTION CORRECTION CORRECTION