Overwhelmed by beauty…

Just had to share the fantastic range of edible flowers that go into our salad bags with you, as it’s been some time since I raised the subject of eating them.

This week we picked calendula, pansies, heartsease, daisies, sweet cicily and  woodruff.

Every week I am as delighted as I was the first time I found out that we put  a flower into each of our salad bags – a sweet, precious task.  To all you box scheme members out there – eat them! That’s why they’re in the bag! And everyone else, grow them! It’s a wonderful way of attracting beneficial insects to your garden while brightening your salad bowl…

Growing season a go-go

April’s been a whirlwind of a month, as I’m sure all you gardeners out there will agree! Hardly a moment to spare for sharing my growing tales with you all.

Traditionally, when the clocks change at the end of March, we move the harvesting back to a Tuesday from the winter timetable of Wednesday morning, there now being light enough to get it all done before dark. However, this year’s field of applicants being so good, we were a little behind on the selection of our apprentices…a very real indication of the growing interest in the exciting world of urban agriculture. This meant the first week’s harvesting remained on the Wednesday morning. And that week saw Ru and I picking and then packing 260 bags of salad between us. Seriously hard labour, I tell you! The harvests leapt from just 40 bags in the middle of March to over 200 in a matter of weeks! We just managed to get down to the Climate Change camp in central London, where the ‘Farmers’ Markets not Carbon Markets‘ stall had our very own salad leaves on sale…

Selection made, the following week we were joined by, not two as we had intended, but three new apprentices. One apprentice has been allocated to each of our urban market gardens – Allens Gardens, Springfield Park and to my own site at Clissold Park too. I’m very excited that Sophie will be joining me every week over this growing season.

We also had two wonderful visitors from France – doing a three week internship with us. A terrific spike in numbers to get the salad picked and packed.

Over the winter I’ve been deliberating over what element of the sites I’ll bring to you as a regular feature this year…2007 was Leaf of the Week, 2008 I gave you Dressing of the Month. So what’s it going to be for 2009? Well, I’ve finally settled on something…watch this space, it’s coming soon.

Grabbing the nettle…

Had a wonderful bit of nettle soup this evening! It began with the weeding of the hedge that runs along the length of my site at Clissold Park. All very tender growth at the moment, but come a couple of months’ time and it’ll be big enough to give you a good sting every time you walk along that edge of the garden. Michael gave me a hand weeding it out, pulling up the roots as much as possible without disturbing the logs that sit further under the hedge giving safe haven to wildlife.

Having spent the earlier morning turning the compost, many of the nettles found their way onto the heap (amongst its many wonderful properties, nettle is a fine compost activator), one patch was left for the butterflies (Andy, the butterfly man at Clissold Park gave me much rebuke last year when I was pulling out the nettles – some species totally rely on nettles for laying their eggs – so keeping a patch in a sunny position is really important) but the rest- a goodly amount – came home with me. And tonight we made it into a delicious soup served up with freshly baked soda bread. Fine fare in all its local seasonality!

Try this at home…

Chop one onion, 3 medium potatoes and 3 cloves of garlic. Cover with water and bring to the boil. Add a a veggie stock cube and cook till the potato is soft. Add a good amount of nettles (our soup had about 4 fistfuls – make sure you wash it with gloves on!) and cook for a short while longer. Blend. Serve with a swirl of fresh cream and salt & pepper to taste….

The colour is nothing short of miraculous.

Back in the swing…

It’s been a crazy old month this February, it really has. I had a sudden and irresistible opportunity to leave this wintry island right at the start of it. So while my poor salad leaves at Clissold Park (and some of you!)  languished in the icy cold, I flew south to Cape Town. There, in amongst visiting family, friends and working, I chanced upon a fantastic food growing project called Soil For Life. They are all about getting people to grow food in their own gardens. (Quite like my own project Get Growing then, which we launched the day after I got back. Yes! It’s been crazy!)

From Cape Town, I went up to Kenya, where I was blessed with the chance to visit a tree nursery and plant one myself in the beautiful red soil. More highlights were the amazing nutrition gardens and seeing an abundant vegetable garden tended by a woman in her 90s. Wonderful advertisement for the healthy goodness of this food-growing work!

Now firmly back in London, my site at Clissold Park is open again. My first week back saw me scraping up all the snow that was still accumulated down the side of the butterfly tunnel.

Tried desperately to resuscitate the poor wee chard plants that hadn’t really had a chance to grow before it got cold. We’ll just have to see if they survive.

And we’ve started harvesting again – a good 40 bags of salad a week are making their way into the Growing Communities veggie bags. If you’re a member of the scheme, hope you get a chance to taste the delicious mix – there’s some wonderful daffodil garlic in there too, if you were wondering what that tasty grassy stuff was…

Don’t forget to check out my own project – our deadline for entries is this Sunday…more on that soon.

Gearing up for the year ahead

I’ve not been at the site these last few weeks, hence the Jerusalem artichokes holding fort for longer than they probably ought…and I’m afraid I’m still not quite back in business. We closed all the sites for the coldest part of the year, happily coinciding with Christmas and New Year (a belated season’s greetings to you!). The leaves just don’t grow enough to make it worth while for us to harvest this time of year – pick a leaf one week and you come back a week later to find the plant exactly the same. So there’s no point our labouring in the cold…

The first volunteer day back at Clissold Park will be the 10th February. Looking forward to pulling out all the lovely clean tools we worked on in the cold days before Christmas.

Clissold tools get an extra good clean. A cold job on an extra cold day – so special thanks to all the volunteers who’s  hands almost froze off in the process.

This year is set to be extra special. The apprentices from last year are taking on a new site and so will bring even more land in Hackney under organic salad production for the Growing Communities veggie box. We should get a new set of apprentices to train up on all things salad-y. And my own food growing project is about to take flight – watch this space around the 9th February…

Discovering small treasures…

Have you ever pulled up Jerusalem artichokes? There’s something incredibly satisfying about the job – dare I say even more so than digging up potatoes. I guess it is because you just don’t know what you will get – such wonderful shapes and sizes.

We got around 25kgs this year from across the Growing Communities sites, which all went into our veggie box scheme. I only pulled up around 3kg from Clissold but I was happy with this as they had self seeded and most of the plants had taken a little damage being right next to the path. Next year, I am planning to plant up a lot – they are pretty low maintenance and the yields can be high.

We don’t include these or the globe artichokes in our rotation system as they are perennial ( = live for more than two years ) and they wouldn’t really be classed as salad in anyone’s book. But we like to set aside some space to grow them as they make a welcome addition to the veg box this time of year. If you grow them at home, they look like sunflowers as they grow, but it’s worth cutting back the flowers so that more energy goes into swelling the roots up into tasty tubers for the pot…

We try and save some good specimens for next year’s crop – nice ‘egg sized’ tubers are worth hanging on to, so Ru tells me. I look forward to planting them in the new year.

Collected to plant next year…kind of egg shaped…

Interesting fact: I know people often wonder why they are called Jerusalem Artichokes. Well, my housemate set me straight this week. Apparently it’s all a bit of a mistake really. When it was first discovered it was called girasole, which is Italian for sunflower. This morphed into Jerusalem, and the artichoke comes from the flavour of the tubers, which is kinda familiar to the artichokes you might know…

Awesome yearly yields!

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning to get the harvest in from Clissold before heading to Springfield to help Ru with the packing. Sounds dramatic, but with the sun only coming up at around 7, that’s not really too early. I normally harvest on a Tuesday but I couldn’t make it to the site yesterday, hence the dawn rising. The sun shining certainly made it much easier to get up – a glorious day to be outside. Check out these lettuces veiled by the sunlight…

Having not made it down yesterday, after the harvest was done and the bags of salad dropped off at the Fire Station, I went back to Clissold to do some work on the site. We’re fighting a constant battle at the moment with the leaves along the side of the butterfly tunnel – delights of the passing seasons! It’s north facing which doesn’t make for great conditions anyway, and now, the tunnel’s serving as a wonderful slide for the falling leaves. They all gather up in great big heaps over the cloched chard. Last week, with the help of the volunteers, we rigged up some netting and planks and laid that against the side of the tunnel to try to block the leaves’ path…

But…this week, just as many leaves had fallen onto the really wee plants – doesn’t give them much chance to grow. I think I’ve resigned myself to the fact that anything we get from that bed is a bonus – it’s not one of our main growing beds – and next year I just hope that the summer months bring a return on the effort we’ve expended.

All is not in vain though…as you’ll see from the pic, the leaves that fell have been collected up – all into bin bags which now line the side of the shed to rot down. I’ve pierced the bags to get a bit of air circulating – a good aid to their breaking down into something we can use next year – and weighted them down so they don’t fall over.

On another positive note, tonight’s our AGM at the Old Fire Station. Our director Julie is going to be talking about our plans to get folk to replicate our growing model across London and maybe beyond. It’s been a wicked year despite the lack of summer – Clissold was producing an average of 7kg at the height of the growing season and across all our sites yields were the equivalent of 24 tonnes per hectare per year. We’re pretty proud of that. Shows that urban agriculture really can work!

As the dark draws in…

Now the clocks have changed, our days on the Growing Communities urban market gardens have been shuffled around a little. By 4pm it’s too dark to start packing the salad bags, so we’ve been doing most of the harvesting on Wednesday morning and delivering the salad to the Old Fire Station (Growing Communities HQ) where it’s packed straight into the veggie bags. It was a cold old task this last Wednesday, I tell you, after the snow the night before, but the skies were clear which always makes it good to be outside. It’s just Ru and me packing the salad bags now, as our apprentices finished their stint with us last month. They’re going to be taking on the newest of the Growing Communities sites, the first in our patchwork farm scheme – watch this space!

My Tuesday mornings are still spent down at Clissold Park. Although the leaves are almost done falling from the trees – lots of lovely leaf mould in the making, thanks to volunteer Michael collecting them all up – and our salad leaves are growing at a much slower rate, the site is still looking pretty good. Especially pleasing is the Evening Primrose, which carries on adding its burst of yellow to the autumnal days. If you get the chance, pop the whole flower in your mouth for a delicious nutrient kick…

September’s dressing finalé

I couldn’t believe it this week. Arrived at Allens Gardens from our Clissold Park site (lots to be done there this week!) just a little late, all ready to dive into the last ever salad dressing showdown, and it had begun without me! Unsure whether the volunteer assigned to bringing a dressing would show up to contest apprentice Annie’s sure-to-win mix, Ru took the executive decision to go ahead without us. He had pulled out a bit of dressing left over from a class we had held on the site a couple of weeks ago. Funnily enough, it happened to be a simple one I had thrown together. So the fact that this was all I found left in the salad bowls…

…didn’t matter, as being a contestant, I couldn’t cast my vote anyway…The dressings fought hard but in the end it was Annie who walked away with the final title. Which makes her the overall winner of our ‘monthly dressing’ slot.

Try, what I can only imagine, must be a delicious combination:
2 small cloves of garlic
A splosh of maple syrup
A double splosh of basalmic vinegar (“twice as much as I normally put in” says Annie)
And two thirds again on top of what you’ve got, of olive oil
Oh yes, and the secret ingredient? A big tsp of dark miso

Sad to say, this is the last of my ‘dressing of the month’ features. As September draws to an end, so too does what we consider to be the ‘growing season’ and our apprentices finish their stint with us next week.

Now, what will feature in its place next year? Thank goodness winter’s on its way, gives me time to think!

Late summer dressing – August

This month’s dressing show down – the sixth in our series – had volunteer Martin up against a dressing mixer in absentia…my sister Janet fought for the title of the monthly dresser without being party to the proceedings. Last month Janet had whispered a dressing to me while the votes were going round. So, trusting her promises of a dressing par excellence, I mixed up her suggestion, searching for good organic dried basil and tarragon (found in the nick of time at Food For All on my way to the site!) and substituting soya yoghurt for dairy so that vegan Ru could be part of judging panel.

The battlefield prepared – two wonderful bowls of freshly picked salad…

…not very strong tasting leaves this week – chard and kale are the main features – though we threw in mint and mustardy nasturtiums for good measure.

Sadly for Martin, despite his sneaky use of tasty hemp oil, the creaminess of Janet’s dressing won hands down. As Gabby said ‘a Caesar like dressing will always win’.

So try this one this month, courtesy of my lovely sister:
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tbsp maple syrup
250ml soya yoghurt – or low fat dairy if you ain’t vegan
salt and pepper to taste

I must say, though, that I found that the quantity of vinegar in the winning mix made it a little sharp. You could try using less of the white wine vinegar. And you might not need quite so much dressing – just reduce the quantities…