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: Nasturtium

So this one’s a bit controversial. You find nasturtium in pretty much every garden these days, and here we are growing it for salad. But that’s because it tastes so good,  just like a mild mustard. And don’t just trust my word for it, I have it on very good authority that the leaves are appreciated in our salad bags - Nat, our lovely volunteer, says she particularly enjoys them! When I was growing up we used to have it in cheese sandwiches. And these days my parents say that it’s a sign that I’m home when the salad on the table is filled with its fragrantly tasting flowers - which rather gratuitously I am including in this week’s pic too, along with the leaves - if you’re lucky you might find those in your bag too!

This particular variety has variegated leaves and unlike other more voracious types, has a fairly confined growing habit, which means that it doesn’t take over the whole of the beds that we plant it in. This, as you can imagine, is rather important in a site as small as ours,  certainly wouldn’t want to swamp the salad bags with the strong flavoured leaves. Although with all the Vitamin C you find in nasturtiums, it might not be a bad thing!

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

Again I find my hand is forced! This week I was all set to give the title to the lovely little mizuna I had been weeding around but, at the last minute, Yaensuk reminded me that this is the last we’ll be seeing of another sweet leaf - miners lettuce.

I can’t really be too annoyed, though, as it’s a leaf I have been intrigued with since my very first day on the site. As we haven’t been harvesting too much of it lately, it had fallen off my radar. I always wondered why it is called miners lettuce? Well, having done a little research, I’ve discovered it is named after the California Gold Rush miners who ate it for vitamin C so they wouldn’t get scurvy. Comes up wild in the spring…perfect timing after the ravages of winter. It’s rather succulent and very pretty with its little white flower, which you can just about see in the picture.

Delicate work?

Another early start today. Am at Allens Gardens for 9am. Bit of a difficult day for me as not feeling 100% full of energy. If the sun hadn’t been shining when I woke up, I definitely would have given Ru a call to say I wouldn’t be able to make it in. But the sun IS shining (though not for long!) and I leave home early so I can pedal slowly to the site.

Ru is very understanding and we decide that I am only going to do ‘delicate’ work today. Delicate in a job where everything is outdoors, no matter what the weather, means no hard digging. I drink lemon balm tea as we walk around the site deciding what tasks there are to done and what’s to be harvested for this week’s salad bags. There’s not too much planting for today and the soil is very wet from all the rain. Lots and lots of weeding to be done!

Ann-Marie arrives and takes on the hard labour – clearing a bed of overgrown nettles and other weeds, digging in a barrow load of compost (or two) and then planting up the chard ( = kind of like spinach). I finish weeding the beds where I had left off last week and then move to the celery bed. This is the last week we are harvesting celery, so once the final leaves are picked, I pull up all the celery plants and every other weed in the bed ( = these go into the compost so I don’t feel bad about pulling them up), rake it smooth and broadcast a green manure mix of seeds over the soil.

Broadcast? Green manure mix? Green manure????

I’ll start at the end. Green manure is plants that are grown which help to fix nutrients in the soil, primarily nitrogen. As we are certified organic at Allens Gardens it’s crucial that we use green manure to help increase the fertility of the soil. We have a five year crop rotation cycle at the site which helps us to manage pests without using horrid chemicals. I’ve slowly been getting my head around the whole system since I started here, but trying to explain it has made me realise that I need to devote more than a few sentences to the subject. More on that soon!

Green manure mix, in this case, is red clover and rye grass. The red clover is a great fixer of nitrogen: simply put, it takes nitrogen from the air and puts it in the soil where it can be used by other plants. Rye grass, on the other hand, is known as a lifter: it has very deep roots so it can access the subsoil and bring nutrients up to the surface. By using a mix, it means both these activities can take place at the same time. Other uses to us include suppressing weeds and improving water retention in the beds.

And, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, broadcast means to cast the seeds out in a broad action. So it is just a case of taking a handful of the seed mix and scattering them across the bed. You then rake it in a little.

I leave some of the celery plants in the bed to grow to seed. Although we do collect the seed, the main reason we do this is to let the plant flower. This attracts the hover fly, a beneficial insect because it likes to eat aphids, so another form of natural pest control. A nice little fact, I learn, is that hover flies have short tongues. The flat flowers of the celery are, therefore, perfect.

This all takes till lunchtime amid some unwelcome cold showers. It is such a cold day for end of May. Ann-Marie leaves and Precious arrives, then Bruce and Farah. A good showing for such bad weather. The support workers come next to get started with the harvesting. And there I will leave them, and you, as I think I have used up my word quota for today…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 2 | Family wandering round: 1 | Dogs: 2 (one came with the family) | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 15kg | Rhubarb: 2.1kg | Water Mint: 100g | Oregano: 20g | Tarragon: 100g

Smells like rain…

First day of rain today. Though I guess that’s really an overstatement. It actually felt as though the skies were easing me into the idea of rainy days at Allens Gardens – drops of rain, followed by sunshine, warmth, then a cold breeze. Sweater on then off, then on again, sunglasses following suit. It was only at lunch time, when we were legitimately allowed to go indoors that the rain really came down. By the time lunch was done, the sun had come out again. April’s temperamental weather in May? But stop me, I’m jumping ahead a few hours…

Again I arrived on time, to find Ru and Ann-Marie already hard at work. Ann-Marie was digging compost into the bed that I had covered over with Precious a couple of weeks ago and then got onto planting red orache (don’t ask! I’ll explain what that is soon) into half of it – a very long bed, the other half still covered ( = really allowing all the plant matter that we had dug into it, to rot and bulk up the soil’s nutrients). Ru and I walked around the site, looking at the various jobs for the day. Not too much rain since last week so top priority was to give most of the beds a good soaking. That’s a job that ran alongside other chores throughout the day, changing the watering system from bed to bed, half an hour on each.

Next priority is planting. My job is to do half a bed of chard. Planting them out in rows a plank’s width apart ( = about the span of my hand, a very helpful measurement for you! Will measure the plank next time!) so each plant has enough room to grow. First of all you dig a small hole, fill it with water ( = we use water mixed with liquid fertilizer, which we have made by ‘drowning’ weeds pulled up from the plot in a big tank and letting them stew for weeks on end) and then plant the seedlings, which Ru brought over from the Springfield greenhouses. I then covered each one with a cut off plastic bottle – a homemade cloche – with a piece of copper wire wrapped around it to deter the nasty slugs. I planted up 6 viola on the very end of the bed – a sweet little pansy-like edible flower, that attracts ‘good’ bugs and livens up any green salad.

Yaensuk arrived then with Anthony, her husband, in tow. She’s a general support worker at Growing Communities and helps with packing the vegetables for the box scheme. Her husband was volunteering for the day. They got going with the harvesting. 20kgs to be collected.

Yaensuk harvests salad greens while Ru explains to volunteer Ann-Marie how far apart seedlings should be planted.

Other jobs: helped Ru with putting netting up for the soft fruit; weeded out the ground elder on the pathways between the raised beds; watered the patch where the rhubarb had been and covered it with compost ( = acts as a mulch to keep the moisture in, though nothing has been planted there yet). Ru left at 3 to get to Springfield for harvesting taking Yaensuk and Anthony with him.

We had a few more things to finish up in our final hour at Allens – Precious on mint-picking duty, Bruce harvesting spinach leaves as well as sweet flowers for the salad bags…

… and me to complete the watering and pack up all the tools. Then I locked up the classroom and the shed and Bruce and I cycle over to Springfield. Lots of work to do over there, but, though I promised last time to tell you what goes down at Springfield, I think I’ve come to the end of this week’s word quota – you’ll definitely have to come back to find out next week!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support worker: 1 | Husband: 1 | Dogs: 2

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | Rhubarb: 2.8kg | Asparagus: 630g | Spring garlic: 100 bunches | Mint: 60g