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

Summer pruning…in the rain

All along the central wall at Allen’s Gardens the fruit trees have been sending up shoots. Apples and pears in training. The trees are small but they already have fruit. They’re a little extra sideline on a site that’s mostly about salad, doing their bit for the biodiversity so necessary in a well rounded organic site.

Ru is back today. And with him comes a flood of volunteers, despite the unpredictable weather. Perfect timing as it means that while they plant up the new beds, Ru teaches me about summer pruning. A bit ironic as it hardly feels like summer – certainly a common cry at the moment – but the time is right as we’ve gone past midsummer, so there’s unlikely to be too much growth (gulp! can’t believe my stint here is already half over…). Summer pruning means we tidy up the trees and make sure they are growing the way we want them to. They’ll take a bigger pruning during winter.

We pull back the netting that’s been protecting the trees from the squirrels and birds and Ru shows me how to cut the new upright shoots back ( = you sharpen your secateurs nice and sharp and make a diagonal cut just above a leaf. It’s got to be really clean and well sloped so that it doesn’t rot ) and train the horizontal branches by tying them to the wires attached to the wall.

Along the wall, the trees are being trained in what is known as an espalier shape. This means they grow up close to the wall and are trained along the wires. In the bed away from the wall, we have a couple of stepover trees, trained to be low enough to, you guessed it, step over. It seems strange to have the trees so low to the ground but it means that we can plant salad plants around them and they don’t make much shade.

The branches of the tree are weighted down with a brick to keep them low. On this bed we are growing Red Orache.

It’s a strange job because you cut back all the upright shoots, take a step back to inspect your work and then see all the ones you’ve missed, despite being sure you had gotten them all the first time. It takes me all morning. All that’s cut away gets put into the compost.

One of the trees seems to have a bit of disease. We consult a tree book but can’t find the cause. Anyone have any ideas?

We then have a belated birthday cake for Ann-Marie, served up with fresh lemon balm tea.

After lunch everyone cracks on with the harvesting, determined to get it all done earlier than we have been. It’s amazing that however much we decide to harvest, we always seem to get away at the same time. With a record 20kg of salad to pack this week, we surprisingly manage to finish by 7.15, just a little earlier than usual, with a little help from a friend of Annie’s, one of the support workers. It would have been even earlier but we were kept longer thanks to the wonderful glut of black currants at Springfield. I wonder how much more they’d be enjoyed by the lucky consumers if it was known that Nat and Bruce spent over an hour in the rain picking them all – truly deliciously local.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Helping friend: 1 | Dog: 1 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | Chard: 6.25kg | 10 punnets of black currants: 3.5kg + loads more which we didn’t package up as we ran out of punnets | 1 punnet summer fruits (red currants, black currants and logan berries): 300g | 1 punnet red currants: 350g | Mint: 30g | Basil: 30g | Thai basil: 30g