Pre-spring tool care

Today was my first day back working on the site this year. Although I’m going to be looking after our Clissold Park site, this was the day for tool care at Allens Gardens. So that’s where I was. If you think of it like washing dishes then it’s a bit of a massive chore. But if you can think of it as a ritual, a preparation for the growing months ahead, it becomes both therapeutic and symbolic.

At Allens Gardens, like all our sites, we have a fair few tools, so the process of cleaning them is not insignificant, it took all morning and ate just a little into the afternoon, with various volunteers helping out along the way. We started by taking all the tools to be cleaned, sharpened and oiled out of the shed – lining up the shovels and spades, the forks, rakes, the pickaxe and all the smaller tools – trowels, hand forks and secateurs. Then we made up a bucket of warm soapy water. With a hard brush I washed away all the remnants of last year’s digging. Of course we clean the tools every time we put them away at the end of a day’s work, but there’s always that extra little bit that needs a hard scrub to get it off. And the oiling helps to prevent rust and deterioration.

Methodically, I lined up the clean tools to dry as I washed the others. Once that was done, it was time to sharpen, first wiping away any excess suds and water and then working out which side of the tool to sharpen, or both, in case of the pickaxe. On the spades we sharpened the bottom edge. Using a sharpening rock at a 45 degree angle, you can get them pretty sharp. Worth testing this sharpness at a perpendicular angle and not by running your finger along the newly lethal blade! Then it was onto oiling. We use linseed on all the wood and 3-in-1 oil for the metal. You can always use vegetable oil on the metal if you prefer.

And that was it. All that was left to do was to put all the tools neatly back into the shed that Ru had been cleaning in the meantime. A job well done and one that makes you really feel well set for the year ahead.

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!

All change ahead…

Hey, hello! I’m back! But not as you’ve known me, if you have been reading this over the last six months, for I’m no longer an apprentice… From this week I am Assistant Grower!

‘What does this mean!?’ I hear you cry. Well, first up, and most excitingly, it means I have my very own site! With all the knowledge that I amassed as an apprentice (though, as you’ll know, I still have a looooong way to go!) Growing Communities decided that this was the best way of continuing its fledgling learning programme. ‘My’ site, in Clissold Park, is the smallest of the three sites on which we grow food for the local veggie box scheme.

Welcome to my site! Here you can see just how small it is. On the right is the edge of the Butterfly Tunnel, which is run by Clissold Park and is open to the public over the summer months.

It’s actually our oldest site but is one that Ru, Growing Communities’ Grower, has been running in a fairly low maintenance way. For the last year or so, it has been getting a once a month visit from a team of volunteers. Unlike the other sites, only longer developing field crops are grown here – pumpkins, chard, garlic, globe artichokes, and the like. These don’t need too much attention and can be picked for the veggie box infrequently.

Now, however, things are set to change. It’ll now benefit (I hope!) from one day’s work a week from me, with volunteers still coming once a month to give me a hand. So it’s out with the slow developing crops and in with the salad. Will just have to see how much I’ll be able to contribute to the fantastic salad bags I hope I’ve given you a taste for over the last six months. I’m so excited to give it a go.

So, my day at the site this week was spent getting a feel for the place, pacing it out, working out how much equipment I will need, how many metres of hose-pipe I need to set up an irrigation system, how many metres of shade cloth I’ll be needing to cover the beds once they are planted up, how much netting, the number of hoops required. And then there was working out how many lengths of scaffolding planks, or other suitable material, I need to repair the raised beds. Lots of hard construction work to be done before the growing season begins next year…

Here, for example, the bed needs to be restructured to get rid of this incredibly thin path - you can’t even turn around in it!

And then, of course, there’s all the mind stuff to work through, including how the new crop rotations will work if we are to ensure the site meets our organic standards… But that, my friends, will have to come next week. See you then.

ps. I totally realise that this site doesn’t reflect any of the changes: a blog overhaul is on its way too….

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Assistant Grower: 1 | Volunteers: 4 (last volunteer day at this site for the year) | Dog: 1

So long…for now…

So. My last week as an apprentice. My last ‘leaf of the week’ just written, even though there are loads more leaves to feed the feature for weeks to come (how I love the diversity of our salad bags!). But it’s time up. My six months of being an Apprentice Grower are over. A good growing season in which, as I hope my posts on this will testify, I’ve learnt a huge amount. I hope they’ve taught you something too.

And, what next? Well, first up, I’m taking a bit of a break for October. A trip or two away, while I ruminate on the next step on this growing path I’ve decided to go down. I should warn you that there are some exciting developments brewing…

So, maybe take a break too, but don’t go away entirely. Check this every now and again. This blog will continue to tell its growing tales…I’ll be back soon.

Leaf of the Week: Lattughino

Well, here’s another winter lettuce for you, this one with a more unpronounceable name than any of the other leaves I have brought to you this growing season – it’s called Lattughino, and believe me I have had to ask Ru to tell me its name loads of time before it stuck. Here’s a rather sweet little one…we take about 2-3 leaves off one this size.

It, like last week’s Rouge d’Hiver, has a reddish tinge to its leaves. It’s proving to be really productive, which is great as we head into the cold months.

Testing, one, two three…

Today is soil testing time. A strange thing to be doing on the last day of my apprenticeship, with the soil such an integral part of our growing days. But this is an activity that only needs to be done once every twelve months or so, and Ru leaves it to a time of year when there’s not so much to do and the weather is fairly good. The clear skies mean that we can set up a table outside to make an outdoor lab. First though, we have to collect the soil.

We take samples from two different places on the site. First you check the structure of the soil. You can use a spade to do this, digging one length down into the soil and cutting it out. We have the advantage of a damaged raised bed which needs fixing. We pull away the slab of concrete and look at the how much the soil has been compacted, what life there is down beneath the surface. Our soil looks pretty good. It has a good amount of activity going on – earthworms doing their groovy thing and a millipede rushes through. And being a raised bed which doesn’t get trodden on, it is fairly airy. The addition of lots of yummy compost has helped with that.

The next thing you test for is the texture of the soil. You do this by taking a handful and kneading it into a ribbon or sausage shape. You’re checking to see how well it holds together. Ours has some malleability but is sandy as well. Ru says this means it is a sandy clay loam. ‘Sandy’ and ‘clay’ are pretty self-explanatory, I think. ‘Loam’ means it has a high content of organic matter. There are lots of different types of soil ranging from sandy, loam to clay, with lots of variations in between including loamy sand, silty loam, clay loam etc etc. What this helps to determine is how well your soil retains water, sand will be poor, while clay keeps water well, too well in some cases. This can help you decide what plants to grow but also what you should add to balance it.

Once these two physical tests are done, it is time for the science. Here we have a special soil testing kit to check out how the soil is doing as far as its nutrient content is concerned. We also test the pH or acidity levels of the soil. On the nutrient front we are testing for nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K). NPK are what are known as the macronutrients. The nitrogen helps with the leaves, phosphorus for the fruit and flowers and potassium for the roots.

All laid out and ready for testing!

For each of the tests, you have to make sure your soil sample is dry. Then you get rid of any sticks and stones and crumble it up a little. Into your test tube you put about 1ml of soil. You add different solutions to test for each nutrient, wait various times (all instructions will come with your testing kit – don’t want to bore you with too much detail) …and then you check colouring for the N and P and the cloudiness of the K solution. Felt just like being back in science class.

And our results – from Bed 1 we got a pH of 6.8, which means it is slightly acid, and from Bed 2 a pH of 7 – bang on neutral. Bed 1 was low on both nitrogen and phosphorus and high to medium on potassium. Bed 2 had low to medium N, a medium/high P and high K. Ru thinks this is pretty good and reckons that this is typical of a site that has been reclaimed for growing food in London. It can only get better with all the compost we are adding!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 90g | Tomatoes: 3.5kg | Cape Gooseberries: 300g

Correction! Confusing hoverflies with lacewings??

So I was wrong! A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making hoverfly hotels. Well, the clientele we are hoping to attract to our lovely hotels actually happen to be lacewings and not hoverflies. Oops. It’s a pity because ‘Lacewing Hotel’ just doesn’t have the same ring!

But…lacewings are every bit as important to an organic garden as hoverflies. According to Garden Organic, the female lacewing lays about 300 eggs in her lifetime. Each of these develop into a larva which eats anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 aphids. That’s a whole lot of aphid! Don’t have to worry about room service, then?

Leaf of the Week: Rouge d’Hiver

Now here’s a good looking leaf with its blushing sides. This is the lettuce that we used to replace all the cos with a while back. It’s growing OK but not brilliantly, just taking its time to establish.

Sometimes called winter lettuce it tolerates the cold well, hardly a surprising fact as the name translates to winter red. What might be more interesting is that the colder it is, the redder it gets, so if you want a colourful salad, it’s good to plant it as the cold descends!

Caped treasures…

Only one more week to go before my growing season at Growing Communities is done. So I know I should be frantically sharing new knowledge with you but please indulge me here, for today I harvested the first of the Cape Gooseberries !!

Remember them? I introduced this fruit to you a while back and wondered how they would grow here in the UK. Well, it’s been mixed. At Allens Gardens there is a bit of a race against time as the warm weather comes to an end (though September’s being surprisingly summery!), while at Springfield, where the ample greenhouse gives them the shelter and warmth they need, the plants have grown in leaps and bounds.

So today, in an act reminiscent of my childhood, I crawled under these bushes to hunt out the ripened fruit. And there I learnt that the pure pleasure of my memory hasn’t dissipated with age: finding a perfectly ripened gooseberry, safe within its protective cape, is as much like finding a treasure as it was when I was a kid. Of course my adult size makes it harder to crawl quite all the way under! And it was also a very different and, I can tell you, a quite dissappointing experience having to collect the fruits and not stuff them immediately into my mouth.

You can tell they are ready by the colour of the cape, which turns from green to an orangey-purpley colour, then dries. The drier the cape, the more delicious the fruit. Here they are collected, the delightful fruits of my labour.

As my time as an apprentice at Growing Communities draws to an end, you might have noted the quantity of salad that we are harvesting is diminishing. We’re getting around 10kg of salad a week from the sites compared to over double that a few months ago. That’s partly because we are turning the beds over to winter crops – mustard leaves, cabbages, perpetual spinach etc – though the colder months will also bring less growth…hence the end of this year’s ‘growing season’…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 120g | Tomatoes: 7kg | Cape Gooseberries: 400g

Leaf of the Week: Kale

After my bits and bobs blog a couple of weeks ago I realised I had shot myself in the foot. Each one of those ‘random’ leaves was a potential subject for this feature and I had used them all up! Even with only 3 more weeks, including this one, left to go, I thought I might have done myself a disservice. But no! The range of leaves we grow for the salad bags at Growing Communities goes way beyond my expectation. Here, growing in perfect time to take the title of leaf of the week, is kale.

This has actually made a bit of a comeback because I recognise it from my first few weeks at Growing Communities back in April. It’s a member of the brassica family and has that wonderful soft gray look. Unsurprisingly it has the same texture as cabbage and taste but this kale, grown for salad, is not as tough as the one you might boil up to get your vitamins…