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…

Calamity at Clissold

I had to rip out every single one of my lovely new lettuce plants this week. I arrived at the site to find them (planted a couple of weeks ago) mostly dead and the ones that weren’t were terribly wilted – all the horrible signs of a lettuce root aphid attack. And lo and behold, digging up what roots remained found the little blighters still hard at work. It was heartbreaking.

I’ve now covered the bed with a tarpaulin ( = to protect the soil and keep the weeds down) and am hoping that the new batch I sow next week will grow in time to deal with the winter. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then you might remember back to a little over a year ago when we had to deal with the aphids at Allens Gardens. They come down from the poplars and bury underground to do their dirty work on the roots of our lettuces. They even managed to get under the environmesh that was covering the bed against just such an attack. By the time I plant out the next lot, Ru tells me that the aphids should have gone back from whence they came, so we just have to hope that we’ll get a good crop of lettuce despite the set back.

Loathe to bring you only bad news, I can report that the kale is doing magnificently! I harvested a good two boxes ( = 2 kilograms) from the bed that gave me a similar amount last week. Hoorah for the kale!

We grow the kale under environmesh to protect it from the flea beetle, which makes tiny little holes in the leaves.

Correction! Confusing hoverflies with lacewings??

So I was wrong! A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making hoverfly hotels. Well, the clientele we are hoping to attract to our lovely hotels actually happen to be lacewings and not hoverflies. Oops. It’s a pity because ‘Lacewing Hotel’ just doesn’t have the same ring!

But…lacewings are every bit as important to an organic garden as hoverflies. According to Garden Organic, the female lacewing lays about 300 eggs in her lifetime. Each of these develop into a larva which eats anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 aphids. That’s a whole lot of aphid! Don’t have to worry about room service, then?

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

Welcome to hover-fly hotel!

CORRECTION CORRECTION CORRECTION

So, I’ve touched on natural pest control a few times in the writing of this blog. A necessary practice on an organic market garden and one that has varying degrees of success. Most of what I’ve written has been about preventative measures – the cloches and the trails of sand around young plants to ward off slugs and other pests that have a taste for tender young seedlings; garlic sprays to get rid of the aphids on the leaves; and garlic brew watered onto the roots to rid ourselves of the root aphids. To a lesser degree I have spoken about growing plants that attract beneficial bugs, those that prey on destructive aphids and other nasties. But there has been so many other things to write about each week that I haven’t had a chance to go into too much detail about this.

Well, today, we learnt about another natural pest control technique…how to make a hotel for hover flies. This gives them shelter on our site and makes them really cosy. We like hover flies because their larvae eat aphids, thrips and other plant-sucking insects.

Here’s how you build a hotel. First of all, you take a 1 litre plastic water bottle and cut off the bottom. Then you cut some thick corrugated cardboard to the length of the bottle and roll up it up fairly tight.

You jam this into the bottle. Then, to stop the card falling out the bottom, make two little holes on opposite sides and fasten a piece of wire across. This gives the hover flies plenty of access.

Now you’ve got a hotel, where to put it? We tie these up along the fruit cages in the site, inviting the hover flies to stay close to the food we’re hoping they’ll enjoy.

Next week, I’ll show you some of the fantastic looking plants we grow to attract other beneficial insects…

Though first, and I know this is incredibly gratuitous (you’re going to hate me!), take a look at these! Ru found them while draining the liquid feed barrels. Beautiful!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 6 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 9kg | 2.5 kg chard | Tomatoes: 19.5kg

CORRECTION CORRECTION CORRECTION

Hard labour, farewells and ‘summer’ pumpkins…

Harder day today than any other yet. Nine whole wheel-barrow loads of soil to be dug, scraped and shoveled off the former cos-lettuce bed and carted to various piles around the site. Then five loads of compost to be brought to the bed and raked smooth ready for planting. Raised beds normally mean no digging is needed but with the infestation of lettuce-root aphid a couple of weeks ago, Ru deemed it best to take no chances of a repeat attack. So off comes as much soil as we can handle.

A truly exhausting exercise which took three of us all morning to complete. First we used shovels to get the top layer of compost off and into the barrow. Then Nat got out the pickaxe to try to break up the compacted soil beneath. I used the cultivator to try to scrape it up. It’s a strange movement, using this tool, kind of like scratching at the surface. Very tiring, even taking turns with Nat! Meanwhile Ann-Marie was down the way on compost sieving duty, getting it all ready for when we needed it. Then when the compost was on and level, in went the rouge d’hiver, another lettuce Ru’s trialling for the salad bags.

Really can’t complain about the hard work. It wasn’t too bad a day for working up a sweat – cool and with only a threat of rain. The threat became reality at lunch though. Held off until we were all seated down, outside because the smell of garlic in the classroom, the only shelter other than the shed, was totally overbearing. Still soaking for the concoction to treat the soil from those dreaded aphids… My friend pitched up to join us and check out the site, and we had a little leaving party (in the rain and all!) for our volunteer Nat, who’s sadly done her time here and is going back to the States. Ann-Marie stayed on for lunch and we had some cake to commiserate Nat’s departure. Will definitely miss her and her hard-working-always-willing-to-help attitude.

On another sad note, one of the volunteers said today, and I am hoping this is not true, that today was the first day of autumn. Was kind of fitting since we harvested the first of the pumpkins, but summer surely can’t be over??!!

Here the pumpkins sit on the window shelf of the shed, in the sun (when it shines) and out of the rain, ready to eat come Halloween. These pumpkins have been growing on the Wild Side at our Allens Gardens site.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 1 (Bruce is at Climate Camp) | Volunteers: 8 + one baby in tow | Support workers: 1 | Visitors: a few | Friend: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 16kg | 3 punnets blackberries: 750g | Basil: 120g| Tomatoes: 8.5kg!! | Figs: 10

Attack of the root aphid

More emotion today! The drooping leaves of a few of the cos lettuces gave away a whole heap of activity going on under the soil. The lettuce root aphids have been busily doing their damage out of our sight. We had to pull up a whole bed of perfectly healthy-looking cos to try to stop the spread. It’s an affliction that had already wreaked havoc on a bed of the same type of lettuce at the Springfield site – where, again, all the plants had to be ripped out a few weeks ago.

Here you can just about see the root aphid. See the white, ash-like substance just above the plant in Ru’s hand…

Apparently cos lettuce planted between April and late June is more likely to be vulnerable to infestation. But how does this uncharacteristic July weather affect this theory? We don’t know. And, aside from this, Ru says he needs to do more research as none of the books we have give suggestions on how to deal with the little rotters after the attack. Rather they wax lyrical about how you can avoid them by rotating crops and planting resistant varieties. The first method is, of course, something we already do as organic growers. The question is how do you deal with the land once you have pulled up all the plants? We are trying the practice of watering the affected area with the liquid that comes from soaking a mixture of rhubarb leaves and garlic cloves. And at Springfield we’ve planted little gem lettuce in the place of cos as this is supposed to be more resistant. Now it’s just a waiting game to see how these will fare.

Scene of devastation…

Disease and pests, as all gardeners and farmers will testify, add a rather unpalatable twist to the delight of growing food. Really tests your wits but we will not resort to chemicals. And the learning we will gain, especially if we manage to contain the blighters, should help to develop our resilience to such problems in the future. That is the fervent hope and of course we will share our findings with you!

I can’t bear to only bring you bad news this week. So just have to give you this lovely picture of our first tomato harvest…

These are from the greenhouse at Springfield, where the plants have been climbing right up towards the roof. Such a bright and cheery welcome sight to find the tomatoes hidden among the vines.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 7 | Support workers: 1 | Visitors to the site: 3 families | Friends: 3 | Dog: 2 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | 2 punnets blackberries: 600g | Basil: 90g | Chard: 7.5kg | Figs: 11 | Tomatoes: 1.5kg

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

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

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