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…