View from the shed – end June

Having missed out a month, I thought I would pop up this view from the shed. A bit of an action shot as two of volunteers clear the sorrel bed for green manures…

Always a bit of a wrench to pull out a crop that’s still going fairly strong but we needed to get the green manures in and the soil will thank us for it.

Slimy diversity…

It’s been a while since I posted a tale from the grosser side of gardening, but I just can’t resist sharing this one with you…

Today, I gave Tom, one of our newest volunteers, the job of compost turning to add to his widening range of experiences in the food growing process. It’s a fine old job, seeing how fresh (or perhaps starting to rot) ingredients are miraculously transformed into more recognisable compost – a precious commodity on our sites. Today was the second turning and the life Tom found in there was incredible.

Now, some slugs in your compost bin is not a bad thing, per se. Slugs like to eat decaying plant material, aiding the decomposition process, and perhaps, while they are focused on that, their minds (if they have such a thing!) are not on our delicate and delectable salad leaves…However, the quantity we unearthed was something else!

Here they are all collected up in a 1 litre yoghurt pot. Whoever thought there could be so many shapes, colours and sizes in slug?

Why were there so many? Well, my theory has set upon the ‘soft’ nature of our volunteers and my apprentice at Allens Gardens. Hard-working? Certainly. Enthusiastic and wonderfully curious about all things to do with salad growing? For sure! But ruthless, they are not. On a site that abounds in slugs and snails, testament of which is the speed that our lettuces get devoured on planting, a certain harshness must be applied. But I can’t, and wouldn’t, enforce this. And so, along with the weeds and other plant debris, the slugs are slung into the compost heap. And there they live rather too happily. Having a few is fine. And the eggs that they lay in there should be killed off in the heat of the composting process. But the more there are, the more chance there is that some of these eggs might get spread over our sites in the resulting compost. A bit of a recipe for disaster, really. Turning the compost today was a good time then to adjust the balance, and this rather large pot of slugs went on a little trip down the road, to a place they were likely to do less damage…for this, they have apprentice Emma to thank for her intervention…

View from the Shed – June

It’s been over a month since I posted the last view from the shed. It’s not for lack of thought that there’s been this delay, but rather that the picture that I took in May didn’t seem to convey any change in view. And yet, so much has been changing week by week, day by day…

So I had begun to feel that my aim to share the season’s changes with you was perhaps a rather dull endeavour, when most of the beds are kept covered against pests. You’d really need to come down regularly to get a sense of it, but then what would the purpose of this blog be?

And then, today, rustling around in the shed, stealing brief moments away from the incessant rain, I turned and saw this view. With the mesh thrown off the bed of turnip tops* that I had just been weeding, I was struck by just how much you could see the change since the last view. Though perhaps a dull rainy day, the garden is awash with the colour of the sage flowering alongside the polytunnel. Were you actually there, you would hear the busy hum of the many bees.

* And just a little note on the turnip tops…wow! what a fast growing, abundant crop for the salad bags. Last week we took 6 kgs of leaves from this one bed only! Brassicas, the family to which turnip tops, rocket, mizuna amongst others belong, aren’t brilliant at this time of year. They tend to go to flower pretty quickly in the heat. But you should get at least one or two good cuts off them. And, in their defence, most of the flowers from the brassica family are rather tasty too.