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

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