A Weekend in London meeting fellow Grow Your Owners

I recently went to visit fellow gardening friends in the big smoke that is London.  It's funny going back after living there up until 6 months ago.  Forgot how everything seems closer together - the streets are narrower and you are in much closer proximity to people on public transport than in more roomy Birmingham (or my version of living in Birmingham at least).

Despite London's crowdedness, there's lots of amazing urban gardening going on, brilliantly joined up by the wonderful http://projectdirt.com/  Come on you brummies with green projects - just start posting your projects and events on this brilliant website and we'll all be joined up in Birmingham too.  

I went to see two London projects, the Lambeth Poly http://projectdirt.com/group/lambeth-poly-tulse-hill and Transition Town Wandsworth's Bramford Community Garden


http://ttwandsworth.wordpress.com/community-garden/
http://projectdirt.com/group/bramfordcommunitygarden

The lead for the Lambeth Poly is Fiona Law AKA for three days a week is the brilliant South London Master Gardener Coordinator - an essential link and support to the garden army of South London Master Gardeners (and I should know as I was a very enthused and passionate Master Gardener until I moved to Birmingham last April!)

The Lambeth Poly "is a community initiative to grow skills, food resilience and social enterprise."  This is the first project and the vision is to have more polytunnels in the area supplying salad leaves and stir fry leaves to the local community, run by the local community.  The aim is to have more of these polytunnels in other areas of Lambeth.  This really looks like something that could be done in other cities/urban community areas around the UK - especially Birmingham.

Whilst catching up with Fiona and sharing news, I gave her some seeds I'd saved from my garden that I thought may make a useful addition to the Lambeth Poly offerings.  Well one to trial at the very least - one of my favourites: Kai Lan.

Later on I caught up with Miranda, the powerhouse behind Transition Town Wandsworth's Bramford Community Garden.  We shared news and she updated me on how Bramford Garden is going.

I updated Miranda on the Lambeth Poly and she suggested the idea of a pop up greenhouse or a poly tunnel on wheels for vacant areas not being used - ingenious!

Some of you may remember that I used to blog about Bramford Garden from time to time as I mentored at the garden and got my hands dirty there every Sunday until I moved away to Birmingham.  Happy days and happy memories so I really wanted to go back and see how the garden's was going. 

Of course there was lots going on in the garden.  The globe artichoke I planted well over a year ago flowered this summer.  I planted it when I didn't have a garden with sufficient room to grow one of these beauties.  The flower was so beautiful Bramford Gardeners didn't have the heart to harvest it!  Miranda was concerned that it was dying off but the only part that had dried up was the flower stalk.  Like a good perennial, it had divided and there were fresh green shoots at the base.  I was so pleased to see it - all those feeds of worm tea from my wormery had naturally paid off.

I was also really pleased to see the rhubarb.  I also planted this on site as my garden was too small.  They'd had a good harvest from the rhubarb about a month after my departure to Birmingham.  Another plant that really benefited from lots of worm tea feeding.

Actually my parting gift to the garden was a few bottles of worm tea!!

There were lots of cabbage growing and looking so healthy in the garden.  Naturally brassicas are doing great all over the country as they are particularly suited to our climate.  There were also really lovely flowers growing at all the edges and the compost had really come along.

I'd brought some saved Kai Lan seeds for Bramford Garden too so I planted them in one of the beds.  They can take their leaves as cut and come again and if they forget to harvest the leaves, they'll get some lovely white flowers that can also be eaten or left to fully go to seed and allowed to self seed if they want some more new shoots.

They have a few new garden members, one of which is Mustafa who seems to really love gardening.  A recent convert I believe.

Naturally, at the end of the gardening session, any harvested veg was divided out between gardeners so I had some lovely potatoes which came back with me in my rucksack for my kitchen stocks.

I really miss being involved with all of these gardening projects and going back reminded me how involved I was and how much food I used to get from gardening and mentoring local growers in Wandsworth.

I have recently been to see the Urban Veg garden at Winterbourne House and Gardens and have high hopes for involvement in that project.  It will be a project that I can bring all the lessons learned in London through working with school gardens and community gardens and build on that knowledge further. 

http://www.winterbourne.org.uk/education/garden-projects
http://urbanvegwhg.wordpress.com/
 
And I am really looking forward to my future visits to London to share stories and experiences of growing in these two cities.

Spring Sunshine in the Community Garden

Gardening in Bramford Community Garden on Sunday was such a sheer pleasure this weekend.  It usually is a pleasure, catching up with  TTWandsworth garden friends, a good spot of weekly gardening on the plot working through our exciting action plan. 

But this weekend we were especially spoilt with the hazy spring sunshine that gave it that extra special nostalgic feeling a bit like playing outside when you were a child.

There were chats, Federico brought a good selection of heritage and unusual seeds so a spot of seed swapping (he has a really good selection of Cucurbits!) and we started our Biochar test bed.  There were preparations for the Big Dig event next Saturday and distribution of flyers.  Please come along and garden with us next Saturday from 11am ttwandsworth@hotmail.co.uk

It was so lovely sowing the seeds when this is an annual pleasure I am so far denying myself this year with my soon to happen move up to Birmingham in three weeks.  But I was able to get my fix in sowing some carrot, parsnip, spinach and beetroot seeds in the Biochar test raised bed and its mirror test bed without the Biochar.

I am definitely going to have to come back for a few visits to see the garden in a month or two just to see how things are coming along.  So many exciting things planned for this year... The results of the Biochar test, crop rotation plan, wild flower meadow, edible orchard and that doesn't include all the events and socialising... I think June would be a good month to pop down for a visit!

New Year, New Jobs in the Community Garden

This morning was the first 2012 Sunday session of Transition Town Wandsworth's Community Garden.  We had lots of jobs to do and 5 energetic volunteers so we got cracking with our spades and gardening tools.

We had a lovely mild day to work in.


We had several jobs to do:

1.  We have a mound of compost and either need to contain it or use it up rather quickly.  As our community garden is located within a public park we need to make our compost heap look more beautiful.  However, we have the dilemma of not being able to build a structure against the wall to contain it in a wooden structure and are not sure how to deal with it.  Gardening generates waste plant material and it would be great to be able to turn it into usable material for the garden.

So in the meantime, we buried the partly composted material from the compost heap into trenches where the soil is not so rich and fertile.   

Any ideas on a remedy for this?

2.  We had a separate mound of fully composted material kindly donated by the Council so we distributed it as top soil for the raised beds. 

3.  We removed leaves from the base of plants to try to prevent botrytis on the lower leaves of plants.  Botrytis is a fungal condition which occurs in damp environments and is commonly found on strawberry plants. The fallen leaves bunched up at the base of perennials and keeping in moisture is prime breeding ground for this condition.

With 5 volunteers we were able to make a good stab at the jobs but weren't able to complete them all so will have to finish them off in next Sunday's session.

We need more to come and join us, its great fun and the more the merrier!  Bramford Community Garden is a big site in Wandsworth's Bramford Park.  If you want to join us - please get in touch! Email: ttwandsworth@hotmail.co.uk
 
For more information:
Bramford Community Garden Project Dirt 
Transition Town Wandsworth 

Obviously hard work must be rewarded so we shared out the harvested veg :)  Not bad going for January!

Off to warm up in a nearby cafe with a well deserved hot chocolate.

Community Gardening

City dwellers often find frustratingly long allotment waiting lists and for many getting an allotment is just a pipe dream.  In my area, allotment lists are 8 years long.  But there are other gardening opportunities for those with no space of their own...

Another option is to find wasted spaces of land near you and find out who owns it.  You  might be pleasantly surprised who will be willing to let you turn a disused space into an edible oasis.

You can also try asking your Council.  According to the Landshare site:

"Did you know that your council has a legal duty to provide you with an allotment? You just need a group of 6 council tax paying residents and to make a written application".

I garden and mentor at the Bramford Community Garden which is situated in a public park in Wandsworth.  Here's more information about the garden Bramford Community Garden

Sowing the pictorial meadow

Bramford Community Garden is a Transition Town Wandsworth initiative and they have been growing on the site since August 2010.  In the garden there are edibles, ornamentals and even a few areas of a pictorial annual flower meadow.  So I guess you could call it an ornamental edible garden (it's about 50/50 of each).  We don't have designated areas that we garden but rather, all garden the beds together, weeding, planting, etc and share out the produce.
  
They are now receiving very positive feedback from the local community who see the garden develop.

Gardening at a community garden is a lovely experience for many reasons.  Here are some of mine:  

• In big cities, many people don't have growing space so it provides more opportunity to grow your own and garden

• Gardening is good for the soul and can be stress relieving, therapeutic and an escape from the hustle and bustle of a busy working life

•  There is nothing that beats cooking and eating food you've grown yourself, its worth so much more than its equivalent value in the supermarket and always tastes amazing fresh from the earth

•  Meeting new faces and making friends in your community - the social aspect of gardening in groups

• Share out crops to take home

Pictorial Meadow

Shaping the herb spiral

 
 I joined the garden back in February 2011 when they requested help from a Master Gardener through Garden Organic's Master Gardener Programme and since joining I have inspired the idea of building a herb spiral which we all built by moving lots of compost onto a bed to create the spiral and planted lots of herbs and a great big horseradish back in April 2011.  I also donated and planted a few large perennials which would have never succeeded in my small garden (globe artichoke, rhubarb), brought the garden many seedlings which I propogated in May and transported over in an interesting fashion on my bicycle!  And I continue to bring ideas and inspirations of growing and cooking your own food.

Freshly completed herb spiral

In return, I've made some really lovely friends with people who have similar interests in wild life and eating seasonal garden produce.  I've also had quite a few extra veggies to take home and cook with.  For me, the really amazing benefit has been the opportunity to grow the larger perennials, to participate and experiment in larger scale garden projects and have another garden to compare my home experimentations to.  What's in season at the Bramford Community Garden is not necessarily the same as what's in season in my small garden.  I find the community garden is usually a few weeks ahead of my garden which is interesting as my home garden is south facing and sheltered and the community garden a north facing garden which is highly exposed.  However, it is always good to have some comparisons to draw from.

Established herb spiral

If you would like to come and garden at the Bramford Community Garden please email me.  It would be great to have more growers to garden with us.

If you don't live in Wandsworth, there could be a community garden near you.  Take a look at Hugh's Landshare  site.