Super special salsola

Have you ever eaten samphire? It’s a plant well known to all good foragers out there, salty, succulent, delicious and, best of all, free.

Well, indulging in a little seed searching at the beginning of the year I came across salsola soda from The Real Seed Catalogue,* described as ‘a beautiful ‘candelabra’ shape and crisp, crunchy thin leaves.’ I just had to grow it. And making the case for it’s similarity to the wild samphire, and Ru’s own love for that, it was an easy step to persuading him that we should try our hand at cultivating it for our salad bags. So I’m trialling it at my Clissold site, admittedly in the smallest bed we have but still, we’re giving it a go.

Perhaps I’m writing this blog just a little late for those of you out there who might want to try it, as The Real Seed Catalogue is out of stock of the seeds until December but, just in case you are a member of our box scheme, that’s what those unusual leaves in your salad bags are. I sowed the seeds directly into the soil, as per the instructions on the packet, and sowed a tray at home too, just to keep an eye on their progress.

Having not planted them before, I gave the seeds our usual salad spacing to be safe, a trowel’s length between the plants and 20 cm between the rows, so that you can easily hoe out any weeds. The directly sown seeds grew much quicker than my home sown tray but it was good to know what they looked like as they poked up a spindly shoot and then developed their ‘leaves’. As the shoot grows it separates into many ‘pieces’ - the candelabra description is just perfect, take a look…

This week Ru and I discussed when would be best to harvest it. It was only later when I was weeding the bed, that I realised that they were ready to be picked. So I tried a technique of pinching out the inner tips to get a lovely little sprig. A small, exploratory harvest, to be sure, but one that gleaned great delight from Ru and the other apprentices when I arrived at Springfield, bearing my special leaves.

If you’re lucky enough to get some in your bag over the coming weeks, enjoy!

* The Real Seed Catalogue is an excellent source of vegetable seeds. Every keen gardener I have spoken to speaks of them with almost a reverent awe, as though they are their own secret supplier of all vegetables wonderful and unique. They are not strictly organic but many are heirloom varieties, grown for good taste and variety. The seeds come packaged with what feels like personal instructions to ensure that you get success with your sowings. And they encourage you to save your seeds, which is a far cry from most other seed companies who want you coming back for more, year after year. At the end of the day, you just know they are the real thing! Justifiable promotion ends…

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.

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

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)

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

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

When can getting up earlier be better?

Today I get to the site at 9 rather than my usual 10am start. This change to my schedule is a result of a post-work drink at the pub last week ( = read 6-week debrief session ). Arriving at 10am is great as far as late starts to the day go but I had begun to feel that I was missing out on something…Ru always arrives earlier so when I get there he has already mapped out the day, figured out what needs doing, what’s to be planted, what watered, what quantities will be harvested and how to carve up the tasks. So by the time I get there the list is already written into the book. Basically, as an apprentice, I wasn’t getting the full experience! So, I drag myself out of bed and onto my bike an hour earlier. And wow, it really makes a difference.

Carrying a cup of steaming rooibosch tea, we walk around the site and look at the week’s growth. Lots of planting to be done today - two whole beds need lettuces planted. Also the spring garlic bed, which had been harvested a good two, three weeks ago, is sitting empty so could do with some bulking up on the compost front and planting up. Only a few of the beds need watering along with those in the greenhouse. And Ru has brought some lovely Cape Gooseberries over from the Springfield site to trial at Allens Gardens. Also loads of weeding is needed, especially right up next to the plants where the hoe can’t get to – the plants are put in a plank’s width apart which enables us to hoe between the rows. They are so cheeky those weeds, they grow right within the salad leaves we plant, vying for all those precious nutrients.

Only a few specific tasks today but all quite labour intensive so we get stuck in quickly. Ann-Marie arrives and works on one of the longer beds, I take the other and Ru alternates between the two. He really storms ahead on the planting up bit – leaving me way behind! I guess it’s just knowing how much vigour the young seedlings can take. They are grown in trays with each one in its own little section ( = plug ), so you have to push the plant out from a hole in the bottom. The soil often falls away especially if the stick you use is too thin, it’s so easy to push them up unevenly. And once you’ve got it out of the plug, you have to be careful not to pick it up from the stalk. This is because they are so fragile that they might snap. If they do, then you kill the whole plant. So, always hold the seedlings by the root structure or by the leaves. When you aren’t so used to doing this it means you take quite a while to plant a whole bed – no bad thing if you want healthy plants but just very time consuming. You’ll be pleased to know, though, that I am quickly gaining confidence – you would too if you planted up over 50 lettuces / plants each week!

With all the planting, lunch arrives quickly, despite the extra hour on the day, and with it comes Precious. We sit out in the sun and eat fresh leaves (as well as our home-made lunches, of course). Such fine weather that I am beginning to feel sun-kissed on my bare shoulders. My prayers for a dry day delightfully answered.

A pleasing plate of leaves, picked there and then for lunch. Can get no fresher!

The afternoon sees yet more planting. Precious and I share the garlic bed and the support workers and a friend of Ru’s come to do the harvesting. By four o’clock when it is time to head over to Springfield I have a fine sense of achievement – everything we had planned to do in the morning has been ticked off. Early start next week then? For sure!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 1 | Volunteers: 3 | Support workers: 2 | Helpful friend: 1 | Dogs: 1 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 15kg | Rhubarb: 2.8kg | Mint: 60g

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

Early days…

I pull in at 10 AM on the dot. Have managed to work out a good back-street cycle route from London Fields up to Allens Gardens – takes just 15 minutes door to door. Ann-Marie (regular Tuesday volunteer) and Ru are already hard at work when I arrive.

Ru drops what he’s doing and we go through the list of jobs for the day – all written in a note book kept in the shed. Natalie rings from HQ to find out how much salad we can harvest this week for the box scheme. Ru promises 18 kgs. Not quite sure how he makes these estimates! I’ll learn…

So, first up is planting – always a priority job on a market garden with weekly harvesting. In this case, it involves preparing a new bed – one that’s only ever had a green manure planting (= legumous plants have been grown here and then dug in). This means the soil is ‘typical London, ’ says Ru – clumps of clay dispersed amongst rocky bits, broken up builders rubble. But I manage to rake it out, add some rock dust and seaweed powder to fortify it and then a couple of bags of leaf mulch to get the quality up a bit. Then in go the lettuces, juicy green seedling plugs. I plant up two in each hole, 4 to a row.

This takes all morning. With just one break, in which Ru explains the watering system to me – run by a solar-powered computer system that doesn’t work too well because of the water pressure. Also a cup of fresh nettle tea brought to me by Ann-Marie, which I forget and so gets drunk cold. She’s been down the way, planting spinach. The sun breaks through the clouds on a day that had started off with the threat of rain.

At one we lunch. Ru picks some leaves to add to the lunch we’ve each brought in. More nettle tea flavoured with some sprigs of fresh mint.

The afternoon’s jobs involve digging green manure into a bed that runs almost the length of the entire plot then covering it over with sacking / plastic to allow the leaves to rot into the soil. It’s a grueling job.

Bruce (other apprentice) arrives to get harvesting – starting with the spinach bed. I leave the tough digging work to Farah (who arrived just after lunch) to go pick red-stalked sorrel – most will go in the salad bags but we’re also trialing selling it in separate bags at the stall where the box scheme customers come to collect their weekly veg. Then onto the mint patch to fill a box with sweetly fragrant leaves. Precious arrives to take over and I go back to give Farah a hand. She sighs with relief at the help.

At 3, Ru decides to head off to Springfield with Bruce and leaves me to finish off the jobs at Allens Gardens with the volunteers. I’m sure Farah would have been happy to leave the digging in to another day. But she heroically helped to finish it off and Precious and I scraped up enough sacking / plastic / rusty corrugated iron to cover the length of the bed. Takes longer than I envisage and I only get to Springfield after 5. More on what we get up to there in my next blog…

Weekly stats…
Volunteers: 5 | Potential volunteers: 2 | Visiting friends: 1 | Interested public: 1 family | Dogs: 2 | Fox: 1

(Confession: this is last week’s blog - this week’s will go up in the next next week or so - just getting up to speed!)