Season’s greetings!

I’ve not been inactive on the site these past few weeks but the run up to Christmas has meant little, or no time for getting my notes up here. And no time now either, sadly. However, when I was at the site last week, I was visited by some very curious wildlife - at first impression this site feels much more lively than our other two sites.

So, as a little bit of a Christmas present, I leave these common visitors with you!

Always interested, there are a number of robins on the Clissold site - very territorial!

There are so many squirrels, I think it is going to be interesting to see how they interact with the salad next year! This one was particularly undeterred by my presence.

Have a lovely festive break! Here’s to lots of growing next year!

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

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

Red-breasted resident…

I’ve been away this week so haven’t been to the site - hence the lack of words on this. The coming week, however, is going to be really interesting as Ru is taking a holiday and Bruce and I have been tasked with running the show. Definitely worth checking back here to see how we get on! I think I am most concerned about estimating how much we will be able to harvest for the salad bags. It’s one thing to say ‘wow, this has really grown!’ but quite another to work out how much that growth translates to in terms of weight!

Though I haven’t been around, I am sure this little red-breasted visitor has been…

I took this picture last week. He was a wonderful subject and hopped around very close to my camera’s lens. We see robins a lot at the site as they absolutely love it when we dig up the soil, unearthing all those delicious worms.