Leaf of the week – pancalieri endive

This leaf has been just incredible over the last month. We planted it in our new polytunnel at Clissold Park and it has been giving and giving: each week we are harvesting around 6kg of leaves. Like other endives, pancalieri, is a little on the bitter side, so it’s a good idea to use a sweet dressing. According to a little bit of internet research, endive can provide us with: dietary fibre, chromium, potassium, copper, iron, manganese, vitamin E, A, C, K, magnesium, phospherous, thiamin, riboflavin, folate, pantothenic acid, calcium, iron, potassium, zinc. All good reasons to get a serving in your salad bowl – especially if it is harvested as soon as possible before eating…

With our main product a mixed salad bag however, we’ve definitely learnt the first lesson of the polytunnel: don’t plant up two beds with the same variety, otherwise it can drown the bag!

It’s a sign!

We’ve got some smashing new signs up at our Springfield site. With Ida’s help – last year’s apprentice and a micro-farmer this year – we managed to get an environmental award from the Castle to put up some information panels around all of our sites – letting visitors and volunteers know what we are doing and letting us get on with the work…

It took a little while to work out what we wanted exactly, so it was really exciting to take delivery of the signs, printed on metal by Sussex Signs, designed by the fabulous Hui Hui Ng and with oak posts perfectly bent by community carpenter Tom Trimmins. Then it was a matter of getting together a small posse for the afternoon to put them up…just in time for an event in Springfield Park on Sunday.

Thanks to Emma and Shelagh for all their hard work getting the posts into the ground and to Tom for teaching us how to do it. And Tom thanked us for teaching him something – he’d read the signs while putting them up. Great result! Now to get them up at Allens and Clissold….

Volunteers digging the holes…

Posts waiting to go…

Checking out the signs…

And they’re up!

And here’s one close up, though you’ll have to come down and have a wander round to get the full story…

View from the Shed – August

This is a rather common sight at our gardens – collective action to get a bed planted up. Two people have the job of making the holes all the way down the bed and filling them with water…then two others follow behind, filling those holes with the seedlings. Leaf celery featured this week…

The fifth person in this pic (in the purple jumper) is working on another bed, getting the weeds up from the rainbow chard that was planted a couple of weeks back.