Cutting the ribbon…

My site at Clissold Park is the oldest of the Growing Communities sites, but today really felt like a ‘cutting the ribbon’ day. We had a great turn out of volunteers (first Tuesdays of the month are Clissold Park days) which meant my usually rather quiet patch was a real hive of activity. We laid porous pipe for the watering system, prepared a bed and planted catalogna lettuce, planted out herbs, dug in green manures, selected a nettle patch and pulled out the rest (more on that soon!), turned the compost and sowed pennyroyal (a creeping mint) by the shed door. We also claimed the long bed by the butterfly tunnel (this is something the Park runs and is well worth a visit now that the butterflies have finally woken up!) which doesn’t have the best soil. We bolstered it up with compost and planted chard - extra seedlings that had no home otherwise.

But the cutting the ribbon moment to which I refer came when we put up the sign at the site’s gate. This has been lovingly crafted by an old school sign-painter. With the sign firmly up, I really feel that the site’s ready to go.

Here are the two apprentices, three volunteers, Ru the grower and that’s me on the far right.

Growing growing growing!

Just wanted to give you a little update on what’s been happening at my site…As you might know, if you have been reading this blog, in my new position as assistant grower, I am tasked with looking after the smallest of Growing Communities’ market garden sites. At this site, we have 3 rotations going - two new ones which we have turned over to salad production this year (now that I am on board to give the salad the attention it needs) and one with longer maturing crops such as pumpkins, garlic and chard.

Last week I planted up the first bed with tatsoi ( = a Japanese salad leaf ) and another with wild rocket, both of which I had sown last month. And this week I sowed some salsola soda straight into the earth. This is a bit of an experiment, both the plant itself and sowing straight in - normally we sow seeds into trays at our Springfield site and take them to the various sites when they are ready for planting. But we thought we would give this a try to see what happens…will keep you posted!

All three beds are covered with fine mesh to keep dem pesky birds from causing damage. One thing about this site is that there are loads and loads of pigeons. We are very close to the deer pens and those opportunistic birds are always around waiting for the Park guys to feed the deer (if you look very closely at the picture, you can just about see them in the background). I’m hoping that the deer feed will hold more of an appeal to the pigeons than our tasty young salad leaves…

Harvested from Clissold this week:
1.5kg rainbow chard - this has been growing over the winter and gave us 6 really beautiful bags of greens with colourful stalks to sell at the farm shop, which is where people pick up their veggie bags.

Ripping it up

Bit of an emotional day last Tuesday. Had to rip up the entire bed of oakleaf lettuce that I planted on my very first day as an apprentice. Pulled up, not because it had anything wrong with it – so I guess that’s good – it just came to the end of its cycle for us. That’s the way with growing, I’m learning. No point in getting sentimental about a bed of lettuce. But just look how beautiful it looked before Ann-Marie and I carefully harvested the whole crop…

We got a good three boxes of leaves from it and we’d been harvesting loads, generally a box or two each week since we started cropping it – so, all in all, it’s done us well. But the time had come to get a new lot of plants in there so that we can keep getting leaves from the bed in the next part of the growing cycle. All going well, the new lettuce, also a green oakleaf, will start delivering in two to four weeks, depending on the weather. Check out the new bed…

…all planted up and under a net to stop the foxes from digging up the clear ground. They seem to have made a habit of finding unprotected soil and digging holes, we have no idea why. A whole bed of cos was trampled last week, so it’s really important to give the beds proection.

The three boxes of oakleaf set the scene for a real bumper crop last week. 23 kgs of salad, which translates to 230 bags of salad for the box scheme and this year’s record harvest. We all felt rather proud.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 7 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 23kg | 2 punnets bright purple plums: 700g | Basil: 150g | Thai basil: 60g | Figs: 500g

(apologies for the short and rather late blog this week – I’ve been really busy in my job outside the site and have been mostly away from a computer since Tuesday)

Keeping the slugs at bay…

A true day of multi-tasking! The barrow loads of compost to be collected from the pile and sieved for the new bed of amaranth makes for a warm start to the day. The sieving helps to make the compost a good fine medium into which we plant the seedlings. I also help Ru to prune and then train the grape vines up the wall on the wild side of the site. There’s been a lot of growth from these vines and we need to make sure that we train them well so that next year they’ll be strong and hopefully we’ll get some fruit.

The new shoots are tied to the wire on the wall to help give the vine support.

After all the exercise involved in preparing the compost, I get some rest by sorting out the site’s cloches. Those of you who understand gardening speak will know what cloches are, the rest of you might have wondered what all the cut up plastic bottles are doing scattered round the site. They’re there to protect the new plants from the nasty slugs. And though it sometimes feels like a bit of a hassle, especially with so many new plants to protect each week, when you come back to the site and find a large proportion of last week’s planting chomped by the slimey little fellows, you realise just how vitally important those half bottles can be. We mostly use recycled 2 litre water bottles, cut in half for the job. In the cooler months it’s ok to leave the top of the bottle on, as they act as mini greenhouses for the new plants, however in the summer, when the sun’s shining and hot, you need to cut the tops and the bottoms off the bottle so it acts as a sleeve and prevents moisture from building up too much. We also tie a piece of copper wire around them which acts as a double deterrant – shocks the slug away from its mission to eat the tender leaves. It’s not a totally fail proof system but the number of plants that we save from the slugs makes it worth the effort.

Volunteer Ann-Marie helps make the cloches

Today, even with collecting all the cloches from the plants from round the site that have outgrown them and making up a batch of new ones, we run out. So we make do with another method of slug-protection. This is a mixture of sand and lime which we dribble in a circle around each plant. We add a little bit of seaweed powder which enriches the soil for the new growth at the same time. The only problem with this method is that if it rains, which no doubt it will, the circle gets washed away and you have to reapply it. Sometimes, maybe, you just have to pray to keep the slugs away…

Two methods of protecting the new plants

The harvest goes particularly well this week. Despite being rained on as I cycled to work, there is a good turnout of volunteers who plough through the day’s tasks…mowing the pathways, netting up some of the fruit trees, planting and harvesting. Ru’s promised Nat at Growing Communities HQ a bumper crop of 21kg and we easily hit our target plus we bag up some extra salad to be sold at the stall. With all the help we get away by 7. I’m worn out but it’s that wonderful tiredness that comes after a productive day.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 6 | Ex-volunteers volunteering: 2 | Friends & Visitors: 4 | Support workers: 2 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 21kg | Extra bags: 12 x 100g | 1 punnet summer fruits: 300g | 1 punnet red currants: 250g | Basil: 60g | Thai basil: 30g | Figs: 225g | Plums: 200g

Red Orache update

It’s been some time since red orache featured as Leaf of the Week but every week at the site they just get better and better and I wish I hadn’t given them fame quite so early! Really a wonderful feature in the salad beds. I thought I would share this picture with you, just to show you how big and beautiful they have become.

Rotating the leaves…

A wonderful day at Allens Gardens today. The sun is out and with it comes loads of volunteers and visitors to the site. This means that while I clear a bed of rocket, that has flowered, to make way for mizuna, all around me chores are being done.

And with the extra hands, Ru gets the cage for the fruit trees done…

This wall runs down the center of the site, separating our major cropping beds from the more wild section. Along the wall, apples and other fruit trees have been planted. These need protection from the pesky squirrels…

The afternoon sees Precious making good progress on the beetle bank she started last week. This, Ru tells us, is another natural pest control. Apparently the beetles we attract by planting perennial plants, prey on the slugs – they even love the slimy beasties more than frogs do!

The extra hands also mean that I have time to ruminate on the subject of 5-year rotations. As I mentioned last week this is something that I have been trying to work out since I started as an apprentice. I’ve begun to understand why it’s such an essential part of organic farming, helped by Ru’s patient explanation and also by a book he’s suggested Bruce and I read. To get certification from the Soil Association, it’s also a practice that has to be done.

Crop rotation helps to manage pests naturally, without chemicals, and maximises the use of the soil without destroying it. It’s rather clever. In The New Organic Grower, Eliot Coleman says that ‘crop rotation is the single most important practice in a multiple-cropping program.’ This is because by rotating your crops you make sure that you get variety and variety, Eliot says, makes biological systems more stable. Basically the more diversity you have, the less likely your plants are to fall prey to pests (imagine how happy they are when they find fields and fields of the same delicious crop, and…how many chemicals you need to keep them away). And your soil will be healthier because each different crop works with it in different ways – remember the difference between the two green manure I planted last week? You can achieve this diversity over time by moving (rotating) your crops through different beds in one-year periods.

According to organic standards, you have to do at least a four-year rotation. This means each year you grow a crop from a different botanic family. In the main beds at Growing Communities we use umbelliferous (like parsley, coriander – this is the carrot family), goose-foot (like spinach, red orache), brassicas (salad kale, mustard leaves) and astera (good old lettuce). Then, when you add the green manures, to help rejuvenate the soil, you get our 5-year rotation system.

As there are different members of each family, it can’t get boring. Different plants are grown throughout the year in the same bed, as long as they are in the same family. So, for example, you can plant mustard leaves after the salad kale has come to the end of its cropping life, because they are both brassicas.

So you see, it is a little bit complicated! And a challenge to capture it in a couple of hundred words, whole books have been written on the subject. I hope by trying to simplify the process here, both for my own understanding and for yours, I haven’t confused you even more!

My day isn’t spent entirely musing on crop rotations. My mum (who’s in London from Zimbabwe) comes to visit over lunch with my cousin and her baby and by the time the day’s done I also prepare a new bed ( = put on SIX barrow loads of compost!!) and plant it out with perilla – a new salad leaf Ru’s trialling.

Forgive me, I’m exhausted, will let you know what family it belongs to next time…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 2 | Excited kids running through : 10 | Other Growing Community staff : 3 | My family : 2 + baby | Dogs: 1 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 11.5kg | Perpetual spinach & chard: 1.6kg | 3 punnets of strawberries | 2 punnets of gooseberries | Rhubarb: 2.1kg | Rosemary: 60g | Tarragon: 100g

Lettuce grow

Thought you’d like to see how the lettuces I planted on the 24th of April are doing. Coming along really well I think.

Ru says they should be ready for harvesting in a couple of weeks, maybe even next week, depending on how much rain we get in the next few days…