All change ahead…

Hey, hello! I’m back! But not as you’ve known me, if you have been reading this over the last six months, for I’m no longer an apprentice… From this week I am Assistant Grower!

‘What does this mean!?’ I hear you cry. Well, first up, and most excitingly, it means I have my very own site! With all the knowledge that I amassed as an apprentice (though, as you’ll know, I still have a looooong way to go!) Growing Communities decided that this was the best way of continuing its fledgling learning programme. ‘My’ site, in Clissold Park, is the smallest of the three sites on which we grow food for the local veggie box scheme.

Welcome to my site! Here you can see just how small it is. On the right is the edge of the Butterfly Tunnel, which is run by Clissold Park and is open to the public over the summer months.

It’s actually our oldest site but is one that Ru, Growing Communities’ Grower, has been running in a fairly low maintenance way. For the last year or so, it has been getting a once a month visit from a team of volunteers. Unlike the other sites, only longer developing field crops are grown here – pumpkins, chard, garlic, globe artichokes, and the like. These don’t need too much attention and can be picked for the veggie box infrequently.

Now, however, things are set to change. It’ll now benefit (I hope!) from one day’s work a week from me, with volunteers still coming once a month to give me a hand. So it’s out with the slow developing crops and in with the salad. Will just have to see how much I’ll be able to contribute to the fantastic salad bags I hope I’ve given you a taste for over the last six months. I’m so excited to give it a go.

So, my day at the site this week was spent getting a feel for the place, pacing it out, working out how much equipment I will need, how many metres of hose-pipe I need to set up an irrigation system, how many metres of shade cloth I’ll be needing to cover the beds once they are planted up, how much netting, the number of hoops required. And then there was working out how many lengths of scaffolding planks, or other suitable material, I need to repair the raised beds. Lots of hard construction work to be done before the growing season begins next year…

Here, for example, the bed needs to be restructured to get rid of this incredibly thin path - you can’t even turn around in it!

And then, of course, there’s all the mind stuff to work through, including how the new crop rotations will work if we are to ensure the site meets our organic standards… But that, my friends, will have to come next week. See you then.

ps. I totally realise that this site doesn’t reflect any of the changes: a blog overhaul is on its way too….

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Assistant Grower: 1 | Volunteers: 4 (last volunteer day at this site for the year) | Dog: 1

Bits and bobs on the wild side…

Every week the majority of leaves that go into the salad bags we pack are those that we grow in the main section of Allens Garden - the green oakleafs, the red oraches, cos, the lollo rossos etc. etc. All good leaves, sure, ones that you would find in any salad worth its salt. But it’s on the wild side that things get more interesting. In this section of Allens Garden we follow a more forest-garden approach. It’s not as managed as the other area and when you harvest you really feel like you are foraging. So, of course it means we spend a bit more time picking these leaves, lifting up other plants sometimes to get to them, but the taste that they bring to the salad makes it all worth while.

In a little bit of a departure from my usual blogging style, I thought I would share them all with you - something like a rogues gallery of ‘bits and bobs’, as Ru calls them, ‘the unsung heroes.’ Hope you enjoy!

First up is mint - one of the largest beds on the wild side, this plant has been producing since I arrived in April. Mint in salad is a must - makes it very fresh and surprising. You just pluck out the tender tips…

Next up is salad burnett. A delicate little string of leaves, with a very subtle taste and oh so pretty in your salad bowl…

Then come chives, featured last week as Leaf of the Week. Here they have already been cut back.


The next is a truly delicious leaf called saltbush. It is, as its name suggests, salty. It’s almost as if the leaves were finely dusted with salt.

Then there is buckle-leaf sorrel. This grows voraciously on our site, so needs constant cutting back, which is great for us and, if you like the sour taste, great for our salad eaters too. It’s good with a sweet dressing…

And here, looking nothing like the buckle-leaf variety above, is common sorrel. It does, however, share its taste…

This next one is marjoram, typically used in cooking, as a herb, but as you’ll know from my last couple of leaves, herbs get tossed into our salads too. We make sure we pick the young tender leaves.

And as grand finale, this is Ceylon spinach. I love it that this is spinach. It’s so succulent and it climbs! The leaves get pretty big, which is great because for a moment we thought they weren’t going to get a chance to grow at all - something, we think it might be fleas, rather liked the young plants. Now they are doing really well, climbing up and round the stakes we optimistically put in a few months back. Apparently they can get to 30 ft in their true habitat in Africa and southeast Asia. Now that would be something!

And in conclusion, here they all are together, picked and mixed up, ready to go into this week’s bags. All together they gave us just over a kilo of leaves. It might not seem so much out of a total of 10.8kgs. Yet, without these bits and bobs, the salad just wouldn’t be the same.

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

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10.8kg | 2 punnets blackberries: 600g | Tomatoes: 24kg!! - yes, I know, it’s amazing! We thought the tomatos would peak last week but here we have a whole 6kg more! Those calabash toms are incredible!

Leave us on our own?

‘Whew!’ Huge sighs of relief today as Bruce and I cycle out of Springfield Gardens with 160 freshly packed bags of salad. A little later than usual, that’s for sure, but all feels rather good having managed to run the show and get the harvest in on this, the first day
that Ru has left us alone.

The first part of my day really does begin alone, for a rather worrying length of time I think maybe I will be the only person at Allens Gardens all morning. Ann-Marie, who is always there before me, doesn’t arrive. But, I stay calm, I do the rounds, relishing the quiet of the site and take an estimate of how much I think we’ll be able to harvest today. There’s been a lot of growth but I set on a figure of 8kgs – don’t want to overdo it as overestimating and then coming in short can be rather stressful. Then I give Bruce a call to find out how much we can get from Springfield – he was there yesterday, all day, in the driving rain. We agree to underestimate, though even an underestimation means a kilogram more than we’ve been harvesting recently. We settle on 16kgs!

The cos lettuce promises a good amout of leaves for the bags!

Still no one has shown up. A call from Rachel at HQ brings news that Ann-Marie won’t be in at all – oh dear! I speak to Nat, the buyer for Growing Communities, and tell her how much we will get to her. Then I get going on clearing a couple of beds for new planting.

Soon Nat (another one!) and a new volunteer Tevide arrive – thank goodness! I give Tevide a tour of the site, as I think Ru would do, and then she and Nat take on the planting. Lots of turnip tops to go in this week. They are the same family as mizuna, so they’re replacing the flowering rocket in the greenhouse and some older mizuna outside (more on turnip tops later…).

Before we know it, it’s lunch time. Precious arrives and we sit, chat and discuss the afternoon’s chores. We decide to get going on harvesting immediately after lunch except for Precious who’ll do some much needed weeding – you can hardly see what is rocket and what is weed on some of the beds. At 2, Parnell arrives and she, Nat, Tevide and I go through what needs to be harvested. I make sure they all know how each crop needs to be picked – cos lettuce, for example, can be pinched out with your fingers, taking only the largest of the leaves, while mizuna is a secateur (= hand pruners) job as it is a cut and come again crop (= this means you cut off all the leaves leaving only an inch or two of stems. However you need to make sure that you leave some sign of new growth, so it can grow back!) Everyone selects a bed to work on. Bruce arrives to join in. And Farah turns up to finish off the job she had begun last week - picking tarragon for drying. A great showing in the end – no need for concern!

We easily collect 8 boxes of leaves and at around 4, Bruce and I cycle over to Springfield, following Nat and Tevide who’ve gone ahead on foot. We get there by 4.30, half an hour later than normal – Bruce would usually have gone ahead with Ru leaving me to lock up but we wanted to go over together today, in case any of the boxes fell off the Brox. So already losing a bit of time. The beds at Springfield seem to be groaning with leaves. Very easy to fill our quota. Especially as I realise on weighing the boxes that we’ve actually
collected 11kg at Allens! All that delicious mizuna weighs more than we realise.

Despite the easy collection, two of the volunteers head off at six and with only three of us left to pack we resign ourselves to getting out a bit late. Definitely miss Ru’s speed with packing and chivvying things along…Still, by 8 it’s all in the Brox and ready to go, delightfully hitting the target we had set for ourselves. Sweet success for a hard day’s work. Big thanks to Nat for staying with us right to the end! And of course to everyone else who made the day go smoothly for us.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 0 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 16kg | 3 punnets of black currants: 900g | 1 punnet summer fruits (strawberries, black currants and logan berries): 300g | Mint: 90g | Basil: 30g

I’s an Apprentice!

Woo-hoo! I’m an Apprentice! A good old fashioned Apprentice. I started a couple of weeks ago – one day a week - and from the mere 2 days I’ve done as an Apprentice Grower so far, I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be learning a lot over the next six months: this year’s ‘growing season’. And so as not to be selfish with all this new knowledge, I thought I would share some thoughts / observations / lessons with you as I go along.

You see it’s my first blog too. My idea is that as I gain some skills growing food, hopefully my blog will do a bit of blooming too. Bear with me as I learn the ropes.

Now, how to get this tale growing?

First up, I’ll set the scene. For me, centre stage is to be Allens Gardens, just one of the three sites where Growing Communities grows the salad greens for its organic vegetable box scheme. It’s a hidden gem of a place, just north of Church St in Stoke Newington, north east London. Blink and you’d miss the entrance, even if keeping your eye out for it as you cycle slowly by, worried you’re going to be late on your first day… That’s because it’s the old gardens of a block of listed flats, now open to the public. Story goes that its survival as a park only continues because plans for its development were scuppered when it was discovered that the construction vehicles couldn’t fit through the gates – the listed buildings were in the way. Bummer for ‘development’ = victory for local residents. And a godsend for Growing Communities and all the people who get to eat locally grown salad. Allens Gardens is where I will begin and spend most of my days. Here there are loads of beds for growing veg, a smallish greenhouse, a shed for all the tools, a sweet little pond in the ‘wildlife’ area, a section for the all-crucial compost and a classroom.

 

At about three in the afternoon I’m to go to Springfield. This is Growing Communities’ main site in Upper Clapton – about a 15 minute bike ride from Allens Gardens. At this site, there are the greenhouses for planting and raising seedlings and plants, a polytunnel, a fair few vegetable beds, and of course a compost area and the obligatory shed. It’s here that all the mixing of salad leaves and packaging gets done. I’ll tell you more about that later – don’t want to give it all away in the very first blog. The third site – which takes the total area of all sites up to a massive half an acre – is in Clissold Park. But I’ve still to get there so won’t make out that I know anything about that yet.

And now the players. Firstly, there’s Ru. He’s the Grower for all the Growing Communities sites. He’s the guy I’ll be apprentice to for the next six months. Then there’s Bruce. He’s an apprentice like me. He works Monday at Springfield, then comes across to Allens Gardens Tuesday afternoon to help with harvesting the crop here before we all head over to Springfields. Then there are a whole heap of volunteers, who, like me, you’ll meet as the months go by. Some just pop in every now and again, others come regularly - a weekly fix of growing fun.

So, these will be the main protagonists of my notes. Of course Growing Communities is made up of more than just the people who grow the food but at this early stage I’m not sure how the others will quite fit in. I hope you’ll check back every now and again to find out…