It all started so well in April. And for a while I was convinced that my cunning plan to grow melons in my study was going to work.
23rd May 2023June 25th 2023
When the flowers showed, and indoors in the absence of insects, I thought I would have a go at pollinating the plant myself.
I tried to identify male from female flowers, once I’d found what I thought was a male flower, I stripped its petals away to expose its pistil, and jammed it into the female one. Fascinating that some of the flowers are bisexual!
What I guessed was a male flower with its petals removed.
This was a really hopeless shot in the dark. It was really hard to tell which gender was which, and obviously there was no indication that what I’d done was correct. No visible orgasm for instance! Right there I gained yet more respect for the work of insects in pollination.
Insemination unlikely.1st July 2023
Then at the start of July I started to notice a mould on the leaves. I tried spraying the plant with a very mild solution of bicarbonate of soda – which is supposed to help. However, jammed up against the window it was hard to get at all the leaves. The problem is apparently lack of airflow but there could be other reasons why the mould had spread.
It was quite sad seeing this mould spread so I decided that, given that the roof garden area is very warm, and because central London is a concrete heat island, there might be a chance that the plant would survive outdoors. I reasoned I would be able to give it a proper spray outside also, and that might help.
I very carefully took it down and transported it outside. I had done the same thing last summer with a tomato plant I started in my study (until it became too unruly), and that had worked very well, so I reasoned I stood a good chance of making this work.
At first it looked pretty good. And I was delighted to see some hover flies working the melon’s flowers. Somehow, then, it might stand a chance of being pollinated and therefore bearing fruit.
15th July 2023
However, recently it started to look in very poor health.
Some of these leaves look particularly unwell. Others I guess less so. But it seems highly unlikely these three plants, sown so lovingly and with so much hope for their future, are going to bear fruit. Sick veg for real.
My son Sam’s biology teacher gave him some Nigella seeds. I sowed them in October 2022 over where I had previously grown Buckwheat. The Buckwheat, which is leguminous and puts nitrogen back into the soil, was with a view to restoring the container to use. Before the Buckwheat I had grown Broad Beans, itself also leguminous.
Over the past three years I haven’t dug up any containers or pots. This has been to see whether the no dig principles work in this context. I have never pulled old plants out by the roots (unless they have been Beetroot or Carrots!), only cut them off at the base of the stem, and have just dressed over the previous patch with some compost.
Over the course of a season the soil level subsides. This is partly owing to compaction through gravity but is also because the plants’ growth is the soil’s output of matter, of carbon. So it does make some room for compost to be layered on top. So far this has worked fine for me.
In January 2023 I could see some slight signs of growth, but really I thought these were weeds, or possibly the Buckwheat growing back. I’m not expert enough to identify plants at this size.
These were taken in March and April. I was excited about the growth, but was still pretty sure that this was a weed or the Buckwheat growing back (itself sometimes viewed as a weed!).
By mid May the growth was looking luscious and I was beginning to be hopeful that I’d had some success with the Nigella seeds.
Then it became clear from their alien bulbous heads and magnificent flowers that this was Nigella and that the experiment had worked.
These two images below taken on my phone through a magnifying glass I got for my birthday. There’s a pretty chromatic aberration and a lovely background blur from the shallow focus. The architecture of these flowers is just exquisite.
In the first week of June things really took off. There is some kind of ecstacy at this time of year. Indeed in the period leading up to the summer solstice on June 21st one’s garden is truly magnificent. Thereafter the promise of the summer feels like it is ebbing away quite dramatically.
Before I gardened I definitely got the feeling of summer as being a longer phenomenon. It’s interesting how the practice connects you to the seasons. In London it might still be hot, giving the sense of a perpetuating season, but the reality is different.
I’m still planting new seeds though now directly outdoors: Rudbeckia, Hyssop, Buckwheat, Lady Di Beans, Courgette, Lettuce, Leeks. But this maybe with a view to hopefully squeezing a crop in before the end of the year, and expecting less growth.
This was taken on the 8th June – not a great shot but shows the full flowering.
And this on 21st June at the solstice. As you can see all the petals have fallen away.
With the flowers giving up the ghost I got a bit more relaxed about the cats wanting to wander in the bed. Here’s the Grey Cat enjoying herself. I love her expression in the second photo: “I am not here. You can not see me!”
At the start of July I cut the flowers and hung them to dry in my study window. The day before yesterday I noticed that the seeds had started to drop from the heads onto the window-ledge.
This morning I put the whole bouquet in a large, clear, plastic bin bag and shook it gently. Then I decanted the seeds into a jam jar.
Nigella Sativa, to give it its fancy name, is an ornamental flower but its seed is also used a spice (sometimes called Black Caraway or Black Cumin) and is also implemented in traditional medicine systems, Unani and Tibb, Ayurveda and Siddha. In this sense it’s also a crop. I will probably try eating some, maybe as a spice on some of carrots, and then sow the rest in the autumn.
In early May I posted about Wild Mitchell Street. I was excited to see at the end of June that things had really run riot. I was poised to return to the space to take some more photos.
However, it seems I was too slow. In their infinite wisdom the council arranged for it all to be cut down. Of course no one entertained the idea of “chop and drop” to at least let the vegetation work as mulch and rebuild the soil – to what end I suppose?
The true Permaculture garden is supposed to be nothing but vegetables. And I know that Charles Dowding dismisses growing flowers as child’s play. Dowding does grow a few though.
The thing is I have such a small space that growing vegetables is largely meaningless. I feel I’m actually performing more of a service to the world to grow flowers that insects like. Two of the flowers here, the Wild Rocket and Courgette are actually vegetables of course…
The odd one out here is the Dahlia. My grandmother used to love Dahlias and Mrs. Ingram wanted me to grow them. They do look very ornamental don’t they? But to balance that civilised element out, the Bristly Ox Tongue and Fringed Willowherb are weeds that I have cultivated. I had no idea what they were but the app “Picture This” says that’s what they are.
Until today I was sure the Bristly Ox Tongue was Hyssop, which seeds I sowed there but obviously didn’t germinate. It’s an incredibly exotic weed gotta say. Needless to say Hyssop doesn’t look anything like it.
Are you suffering from hay fever at the moment? Maybe you are not sniveling and sneezing but still feeling brackish? The pollution load in the city can make matters even worse.
Rather than reaching for an anti-histamine tablet, try taking Vitamin C. It’s extremely effective as an anti-histamine. Right away you will notice a radical improvement in your symptoms. You are also doing yourself a lot of good.
I like these NaturesPlus tablets. They’re food-based. I just take 250mg which is very low. Any Vitamin C tablets would probably be as good. Honestly, try it!
This is the second part of the Sick Veg cat series. The first being dedicated to the Black Cat. This to her older frenemy the Grey Cat. I know I shouldn’t really post pictures of my cats. I’m sure it represents some kind of degeneration. I ought to be more preoccupied with my perception of other people’s perception of me.
The cats are my garden helpers. They like nothing more than to hang out with me when I water the plants in the morning. In the case of the Black Cat she also likes it when I am killing slugs by torch light. So exciting. They both love chasing hoverflies.
The Black Cat likes to clamber all over everything. The Grey Cat, who is a lot older, likes to lie in the sun. Also to watch water from the tap. She will come and get me, lead me to the hosepipe, and sit and watch the water trickling over the roof totally transfixed until I turn it off. She might do this two or three times in an afternoon. In the summer they both take as much delight in the garden as me.
It’s been a disappointing year for my broad beans. These were my own kept beans, that much was exciting, but I believe I sowed them in too shallow a container for them to really thrive. It also felt like the slugs and snails weakened them in April. Rather than limp on I decided to pull the plug now and plant something else shortly.
That’s a nice heap of stalks for the compost. And the troughs, no doubt full of leguminous nitrogen, will be good for something else.
I was able to thin out the beetroot a lot. These were multi-sown so I twisted out the larger roots from the clusters of three.
This year I’m going to eat the tops. I’m slightly ashamed that last I threw them away. I’ll chop them up, steam them, and fry them in garlic like I do with kale and cavallo nero.
Here’s everything tidied up before it went into the fridge. We had the broad beans steamed with some basmati rice yesterday for lunch.
At night on the same day I went back for the chamomile. This had grown unruly and the leaves had dipped which meant apparently they were ready for cropping.
You don’t have to wait for them to be dry to turn them into tea. You can just go right on ahead and steep them in boiling water when they are fresh.
This morning I was repotting oak seedlings. These were grown from acorns I picked up on Hampstead Heath. Cosmos, and in the foreground courgette, also felt the love.
My own compost is fine for established plants and, well, filler – but you need something proper if you’re cherishing something.
So few of these courgette seedlings survived. I’m not taking any chances with them.
I don’t like to get into the whole G.A.S. thing with growing like I did around music. Of buying stuff. I have enough. Too much in fact.
Horticulture and agriculture are the same as the music business to some extent. Make no mistake, there’s no end of accessories and toys that are marketed to growers and farmers. To say nothing of the cost of land itself. But nowadays I’m a bit weary of being a consumer, and wary of being targeted as one.
Some products, however, are justifiable purchases. I couldn’t simply heap a load of rotting mulch into a corner of my roof garden. It would be exposed to the elements, stink, and be a magnet for pests. So in October 2022 I bought a Hotbin Mini so as to start my own composting. Here is the inside of the pristine bin which is starting to see a lot of wear and tear now.
It’s an ingenious system which drains leachate to a tank beneath it, is insulated by design (accentuating the thermal generation of the composting process), and it doesn’t require turning. The first thing you do is layer a bunch of sticks into the bottom.
Then you load, in layers, green and brown waste.
As I understand it green waste is: food scraps (uncooked vegetables, no meat) and garden waste (weeds are fine). Brown waste is: cardboard, paper and woodchip. This layering of the two kinds of material means that you preserve aeration. If you are just using green waste it tends to coalesce into a sludge. The technical term for this latter effect is anaerobic composting and it generates a lot of foul-smelling methane.
Your aim is to establish aerobic composting which is seen as being the way to get a superior compost. It evidently wasn’t always so, however, as I have recently been reading some sixties’ gardening books which, suggest t’other over the one.
Here’s a rather fetching full bin at the end of last year. [I don’t think those are flowers I grew actually.]
At the top of the bin there is a thermometer. I have never managed to get my heap to the heady heights of 50 degrees centigrade, but when everything is steaming away I have reached 40 degrees. A compost heap is, essentially, a bonfire…
After a straight sixty days last year, just as we were heading into winter, I pulled the plug on the process so as to download my black gold. [A note in passing: you can see the blue leachate cap here at the bottom. I emptied this liquid out and used it as a plant feed a lot last year – but I wasn’t convinced of its efficacy so this year I haven’t bothered.]
I believe that 2022’s compost broke down anaerobically a lot. Looking at it, it does appear a bit putrid. I had a few bad smells out in the garden which this year I have totally avoided.
However, I still got three large pots of excellent compost out of it. I dressed the surface with a good commercial compost to create a tilth and planted in them. Today these pots have an Ash Tree, a Dahlia, and Amaranth growing in them.
To solve the issue of the anaerobic effect I was having, I reasoned that I needed to get more aeration through the Hotbin. This March I went to a hardware store and bought a measure of plumber’s copper pipe.
This I drilled regularly-spaced holes in.
And sunk it down the middle of my new burgeoning heap.
This must have made a difference to the aeration. There are many accounts of people creating this style of chimney in compost heaps. However, the ones I have read of are created by building heaps around pipes (without holes in them) and then removing the pipe once the heap has reached its summit so as to create a natural cavity. Of course, it is highly unlikely I have pioneered a new technique.
Here is the pipe in situ. Towards the end of March I needed some more compost so I opened the bin up to see what was cooking.
To me this looked like a less noxious concoction than my previous batch. No, it doesn’t have that fine, chocolatey, crumbly, look of professional compost. However, mine is not ground up in any way or dried.
I have looked at grinders but reason that’s just another gadget that would sit on a shelf and only be used twice a year. What counts is its richness and biological liveliness – of which I have no way of measuring.
This time I needed to fill two pots to plant on Calendula seedlings that I had started indoors at the end of winter.
Again, the surface is dressed with commercial compost. Here are the Calendula seedlings, or Marigold as they are sometime called, moved onto my own compost.
This time I only emptied half the Hotbin with a view to keeping it running like a perpetual stew.
Here it is again, more recently, running at full capacity.
