Category: Urban

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Community Growing Practice Urban

Fairchild’s Garden

Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) was an English gardener who was based in Hoxton, Shoreditch, a stone’s throw away from me here on Old Street. Fairchild corresponded with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, establishing with him the existence of sex in plants.

Fairchild is famous for scientifically producing an artificial hybrid Dianthus Caryophyllus barbatus which was a cross between a Carnation and a Sweet William. This was earth-shattering stuff, and the god-fearing Fairchild kept the secret for a number of years before finally presenting it to the Royal Society when he lied, claiming it was accidentally created.

The flower, known as Fairchild’s mule (the mule, a cross between a horse and a donkey which cannot breed), did not produce seed which would grow. We now know that this is because the Carnation and Sweet William are, in botanical terms, too-distant relatives of one another.

Fairchild wrote a book which is of interest to London-based growers. In it, he writes of our tiny city gardens, “nosegays”, “where a little is only to be had, we should be content with a little.”

Fairchild’s Garden, at the foot of Columbia Road flower market, was once a very scruffy park, but Hackney council has recently renovated it. It’s looking quite spiffing I must say…

Here one can read the memorial stone which was erected many years later over his earthly remains.

I thought it was a nice gesture to leave a couple of flowers on top of the stone. A Zinnia and Rudbeckia grown in my own garden.

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Community Growing Urban

Calthorpe Community Garden

I must have cycled past the Calthorpe Community Garden a hundred times. I’ve been considering venues for the launch of “The Garden”, and I thought it might be a good place, so resolved to go inside and have a look around. It was a lovely, hot day, in the middle of August.

This “Green Oasis in the Heart of King’s Cross” has been open since 1984.

One walks in across a wooden bridge suspended over a shaded hollow.

It’s a large enough site to have its own signpost!

And map.

Right at the back there are raised beds, a poly tunnel, and a double-bayed compost heap.

There’s a corner where one can buy plants. I picked up a Helichrysum italicum. A curry plant.

Pride of place must go to an impressive Ridan Composter which is great at processing food waste. You add an equal measure of wood chip to your waste, crank the handle, and two to four weeks later you get a partially composted soil out of the bottom. This then needs to compost more on a heap.

Goodbye, Calthorpe Community Garden! Maybe I will be back again soon.

Categories
Growing Soil Urban

Compost Grinder

I found my home-made compost was coming out too chunky. It’s partly to do with using woodchip in the HotBin as a source of “brown” carbon-rich material to counter the “green” nitrogenous material. If I had some coarse sawdust, I would use that instead.

I’m sure there are examples of this, but I’ve not seen it done before. Sieving compost is, after all, a similar process. Sometimes people run a lawnmower over a pile of woodchip – that’s similar in principle too. But I thought I would try grinding it down.

I bought a small industrial apple juicer online and ran the compost through it. Checking all the time for worms, of which there were none. It came out really well. I would like it a bit finer – but it’s an improvement. At the end, I turned a jug of biochar into the mixture and set the end result to work. It’s supported the growth of my red cabbages really well.

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Ecology Urban

Caterpillars

Categories
Ecology Urban

Cracks

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Agriculture Ecology Food Practice Soil Urban

Agnes Denes

(This post courtesy of our roving reporter Lulu)

Wheatfield (1982)

Link

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Ecology Growing Practice Urban

Seeds

You are supposed to pick seed from the strongest plant. None of my “Giant Yellow” sunflowers were very spectacular – but that’s not going to dissuade me from replanting it next year. Maybe its progeny will have a better handle on Old Street?

Once the Velvet Queen sunflower has dried out, I will do the same with these seeds.

Buckwheat
Yarrow
Limanthes
Borage
Calendula
Phacelia

In the past, I’ve grown more buckwheat. Mainly because as a household we eat a lot of the stuff which we buy, and it’s interesting to see how it grows. The takeaway is that you’d need an awful lot of acres to grow enough to be able to use it as food.

The Yarrow, I’m uncertain if the seed of this will work. I picked it up as a pot from Kirsten Hartvig, so I don’t know about its germination etc.

The Limanthes, Borage, and Calendula are now in their third generation from home-saved seed. The Phacelia? Lord knows whether this will work but it was lovely this year, smells fabulous and the bees adore it.

Nigella
Poppies

Nigella (second gen) and Poppies are drying from shelves. And the Nasturtium from Findhorn will give me plenty of plants. I might even sow some of these now. Note to self, sow thinly.

Categories
Ecology Growing Urban

Bugs

Grasshopper
Bumblebee
Bee #1
Bee#2
Fly
Hoverfly
Categories
Community Growing Practice Soil Urban

I Dib

I don’t have much in the way of garden equipment: a trowel (which I bought, somewhat ironically, from No Dig guru Charles Dowding), some secateurs, a couple of watering cans, some propagating trays, a soil blocker, and some gloves. I like it like that.

However, my son bought me a dibber for my birthday. And it’s a very nice thing! The perfect complement to my seed cells.

Here I transplanted some zinnia seedlings into a planting box.

Out they come, and in they go!

And here they are a month or so later. Note the copper tape, which seems to work to repel slugs…

Categories
Ecology Food Growing Organic Practice Soil Urban

Compost in 2024

Unlike with last year’s batch, temperatures in my HotBin have been solidly in the green on its dial. It’s been steaming away. I’ve been filling it up with uncooked vegetable kitchen waste since February, when I set it up after the scaffolding had come down. I’ve been mixing these GREENS with BROWNS, these fine wood chips, and paper waste. If anything, I would say I need a higher proportion of BROWNS in future, but it still smells good and aerobically composted.

The cats were pretty fascinated as I prized off the lid and scooped out the very bottom later from the HotBin. It looks pretty disgusting, I’d agree.

The first thing was to sieve the composted material. Because it’s a HotBin, and by its very nature moist, the result is not a fine tilth, but more like a cakey sludge. That’s a problem I was determined to solve.

Because I’ve found that my own compost is too much like a Black Forest gâteau, I’ve given a lot of thought as to what to add to it to give it some lightness and also the ability to drain better. In the past, I’ve used Perlite, but it’s not really doing anything in the soil.

So, after I’ve come across it repeatedly in my research for “The Garden”, and I’m a huge fan of the Carbon Gold range of compost mixes, I thought I would try amending it with biochar. In the past, I have used Carbon Gold’s own biochar amendment, but I need larger quantities than the small punnets I can get from them.

Then for good measure, and because I’m a little concerned about the possible acidity of my mix, I added a handful or two of Moorland Gold which I’ve been trialling. Really, I’d like to be making all my own compost. I bought too much this year. It seems crazy to be buying compost and throwing away organic matter from the household.

Because I only scooped out the bottom layer, this process only resulted in four small pots-worth. I moved four Lemon Tree seedlings into these pots, which I have grown from pips. There’s a lot of light on the roof garden, so I’m hoping these thrive.