Taking shape…

Had a wonderful day down at our Clissold site today. It was the first time this year that we’ve had a proper volunteer session there. Up until now, it’s kind of been out of bounds to volunteers as it was a bit of a building site really. But now that the new gate has been installed and the fencing around the boundary is almost in place, the time has come for work to begin in earnest to get the site up and running again.

It’s not that we’ve not been busy at the site up until now. As I blogged way back in February, the move to the other side of the butterfly tunnel resulted in our taking ownership of the tunnel to turn it over to a more agricultural endeavor. In these last couple of months we have managed to cover it in plastic in preparation for some serious undercover growing. This was achieved with a brilliant little work team to get the hoops covered. A task made more complicated by the un-sympathetic weather that day. You need to have a really clear warm day to get a polytunnel covered. The plastic does better when the weather’s warm so you can stretch it really tight and you need the hoops to be dry so you can stick the anti-hotspot tape to them. This is essential if you want your plastic to last when it gets hot – those metal poles absorb all the sun’s rays and the plastic touching them can melt on a hot summer’s day. So it was touch and go that drizzly day in March. But did it we did, and we’ve now got a great tunnel in which to grow more salad and hopefully extend the season in which we can grow it!

Now the digging of the beds has begun and the site is starting to look good again. Thursdays are now another opportunity to volunteer and the turn out today was truly heartening. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some crops in the ground by June.

Virgin voyage!

One thing that I have inherited as grower at Growing Communities is the delightful task of riding the brox. It’s a bit of a dinasaur of the recumbent bike world – an all-in-one trailer bike with the capacity to carry a serious number of salad bags. We also use it to cart things between the multiple sites that make up our urban market gardens – tools, compost, seeds and the like.

I’ve not had the need to ride it much since I took over from Ru in November. Mainly because the Christiana trailer that we also use has enough capacity for the amounts of salad we have been harvesting over the winter months and to be honest, it’s rather more zippy. But now that spring is here, the need has returned, to pull the brox out of its winter storage and get it back on the streets.

A job helped along by Two Wheels Good who came out to Springfield to service it for us, getting it road-worthy for the year ahead. The brox is renowned for being a bit troublesome, so big thanks go to Alex for a job well done.

Today was the first time, then, that I did the complete round-trip…picking the brox up at Allens Gardens, where it lives under a lean-to, cycling it up the hill (I knew if I could get to the top I would be ok) and over to Springfield where we spent the day. Then back to Allens with the Springfield harvest and finally after a couple of hours harvesting and packing there, I cycled it down to the Old Fire Station to drop the salad bags into the cold store, ready for pick up tomorrow. From there it was back to Allens to lock it up.

This is me back at Allens, relieved to be alive!

And how was it? A bit hairy if I am honest. My legs aren’t made of quite the same metal as Ru’s, who built the riding of this rather heavy machine into his cycling training programme, so I wasn’t always able to get it across some of the busy roads between Allens and Springfield as quickly as the waiting cars might have liked. It needs some better rear view mirrors too. And man, it is incredibly noisy – made of metal, every bump or hole you hit on London’s potholed roads results in an all-mighty clattering. Sometimes feels like it’s going to fall apart!

But I did have some great conversations with people along my route who heard me coming from afar – an easy, friendly interaction being on an interesting-‘what-the-jiggers-is that!’-looking bike. And taking a little time to get between the sites is a nice little time for reflection and meditation on the way the day’s passing. And, of course, there’s something rather glorious about knowing that my slow progress adds to the zero-food mile status of our Hackney-grown salad.

We’ll see how my relationship with it progresses over the growing season, time will tell…

Apprentices make an April appearance…

Well, it’s officially April as our new apprentices started today – the best way to spend a bank holiday, I reckon. I’m delighted to welcome Emma and Ximena to Growing Communities for this growing season…two Hackney locals keen to learn how an urban market garden is run. I’ll introduce them to you in my usual ‘This is…’  style when they’ve had a chance to settle in…if they’ll let me!

We also had our annual volunteer forum in which bees and an exciting new seed bank idea featured, along with updates on all the sites and some rather delicious, if a little hard, vegan carrot cake.

The new propagation area at Allens Gardens is bringing on some lovely little seedlings. Our own-saved red orache is doing particularly well and will need to be hardened off in the next couple of weeks, all signs that  the growing season is starting in earnest. Exciting times!