These little guys grown from seed: Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, cabbage, and calabrese broccoli. They have had enough time under the grow lights.
They need to go out under the cool autumn sun. It’s amazing how much more light there is outdoors, even on an autumn day, than indoors under lights.
They’re going in here, which is some of the finest topsoil rescued from my raised bed, with added biochar (not stirred in yet).
God bless the little blighters. Just the strongest seedlings which have shown the most vigorous growth. The rest I am going to eat as microgreens for my tea.
All tucked in for the winter. With, I think, plenty of space for them. At least for the time being. If Kiki the cat digs these out, I will throttle her. Or at least swear at her!
After an exquisite Indian Summer, it seems Autumn is now truly upon us. Consequently, I’m packing up the garden for the year.
It’s bittersweet looking back at it at its height in August in comparison with where it is now below.
The only glimmer of hope is in these seedlings of brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, cabbage, and calabrese. I thought I would try and get these established and see if I could grow them through the winter outdoors. That might just about be possible.
I had grown a little before November 2021, zinnias from seed and dahlias from bulbs in 2020, but never vegetables or indeed anything with serious intent.
It was a combination of two things, reading Theodore Roszak’s collection of essays “Ecopsychology” (1995) in August 2021, and watching an interview with Eliot Coleman in October 2021, that truly set me on this path. The latter providing maybe the lightning bolt moment.
Immediately before this I had been reading Alfred Adler’s majestic “Understanding Human Nature” (1927), at the tail end of my research after “Retreat” , which carried on quite a long time after the end of that book’s publication in 2020. Indeed, I must have finished “Retreat” in mid 2019 and there I was still working through, not even yet fully integrating, the ideas I had unearthed in that book.
So my journey into gardening had nothing, per se, to do with lockdown, as it did for many people. However, the same etheric conditions that we all experienced in lockdown, the ones which gave rise to other phenomenon like the huge growth in the amount of dreaming recorded in western populations, and the emergence of racial trauma out from the unconscious onto the social canvas, tracked in parallel my own etheric research into the dematerialised highs of LSD and meditation against the backdrop of the counterculture, and that generation’s subsequent post-countercultural integrated fascination with organic farming.
The immediate upshot was that I was keen to get involved somehow in growing food. I’m yet to totally work out how to make that transition in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a massive leap for a music-obsessed animator working in the centre of a city to undertake. A more etheric, less integrated existence it would be hard to devise, perhaps a coder working on a space station would be able to trump me? In consequence, the journey back to earth is harder to make.
Working on my psyche art project, I got in the habit of picking up pieces of wood in the street. Some time in November 2021 I found two huge beautiful huge planks of wood in this skip on Pear Tree Street round the corner from where I live, and decided that they would make the basis of an excellent raised bed.
I cut them to size outside in the street, soaked them in linseed oil to protect them from the weather, and assembled them with beautiful rust-proof, stainless steel screws. The frame looked great already.
Because it was going to be resting on a slate roof, with a base level of large stones beneath the soil, I left a centimetre gap along the bottom to help with drainage. I didn’t want it filling up like a swimming pool and busting through the roof. Accordingly, I rested it straddled on top of a supporting wall which runs beneath the surface.
I designed the bed with a central column, so I could suspend mesh across it. The mesh to protect against insects, slugs, and snails. This worked very well, but was a faff to remove every time. Eventually, when it became clear that the black cat wanted to scramble over the top of it, I built a bamboo frame to rest upon the columns.
I bought a number of bags of a mixture of topsoil and compost. This is where I betrayed my ignorance, indeed none other than Charles Dowding rolled his eyes when I revealed to him that I had been convinced by a garden supplier that it was necessary to have a mix of the two. Compost on its own would have been superior. I mixed a huge bag of perlite in with this – both to lighten the mixture and allow it to drain better. I don’t really like perlite, an industrial product, with the benefit of hindsight biochar would have been better, if more expensive.
And so it was for nearly three years.
Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures I’ve posted of all the things I grew here over the past three years? Carrots, Cabbage, Spinach, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cavalo Nero, Rocket, and Beetroot. More besides.
But this year it had to come to an end.
I got sick of the rigmarole of removing and replacing the netting. I’m figuring that a small greenhouse, or a cold frame would be more interactive, that I might have more fun with something like that if we stay put.
Also, I needed to tidy up the roof garden because we’ve put the house on the market and, well, it looked too bloody eccentric.
So everything got harvested.
And the whole thing was dismantled. I was surprised how horrible and clay-like the first soil I used was. It came off in large clods. Also, how meagre was the inch-thick topsoil which I had created with fine mulches and biochar. This I bagged up and kept. There was no digging ever on this patch, and I would have liked to have seen more evidence of soil structure. Maybe that’s precisely what I had? Sure, it was productive…
And this is how the space looks now. Like a regular bourgeois roof terrace.
I’ve got to work out the big picture. Sure, I’m dismantling this tiny part of the dream – but I’m working on a much larger and transformative scale these days. Times are very hard in consequence, but that’s to be expected.
As I wrap up growing on my roof garden this year, it’s an opportunity to look back at the food I grew and enjoyed eating at home.
I decided in February that because my raised bed was such a nuisance to remove its protective mesh from, that I wanted to grow something in there that (a) I could plant and leave alone the entire season (b) I really enjoyed eating. This year’s massive beetroot patch was the result.
These seeds were the “Bolivar” variety from Tamar Organics, which I started in seed trays in March. I did weed the bed once or twice, but mainly left them alone. I cropped and thinned them once and then took out the whole bed on the 19th August.
A previous year I pickled these and made a hash of the pickling mixture – way too sharp… This year I worked hard on it, and I’ve been loving these delicious beetroot pickles. One or two a day, sometimes before a meal, a great way to kickstart the tum.
I covered my success with potatoes in a previous post, but never showed what a delicious meal they made. Here, baked and roasted.
These are the “Lady Di” variety runner beans, visible on the top right-hand side, which I grew from last year’s beans. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a nice crop from these, and I have no idea why I have persevered with them. They eat very badly, tasting as though they are run through with bits of hard plastic.
Perhaps the first year’s crop was tender, and I’m forgetting, and that they’ve subsequently shed their characteristics? Never again.
I’ve grown vine tomatoes before – but this year decided I would give the “determinate” bush variety a go.
Growing in containers without much wall space, this made practical sense. I chose the Jani variety which had the advantage of getting going quite quickly in the season. It’s easy to grow something like tomatoes, and suddenly it’s July and one finds they are still green – so that speed in a tomato variety is very valuable.
Practical considerations aside, I have to admit to being disappointed by the flavour in these. I wouldn’t grow them again. Edible, certainly, but…
This rosemary bush has, I believe, grown from seeds started in 2023. I’m so proud of it!
Damn, what a wonderful thing Rosemary is! Green all year round, bees love its beautiful small blue flowers, it’s an amazing medicinal herb (sometimes I just chew on a branch when I am outside in the garden), and it’s really valuable in the kitchen. The potatoes shown above were roasted with it and some garlic.
This Amaranth is now in its third season on the roof garden. Grown from its own seed twice. It loves the sun but more than any other plant needs careful watering, wilting quite quickly without sufficient care. I haven’t yet eaten my own Amaranth, but one day I shall.
Finally, there’s my “Red Drumhead” cabbages. Here showing the twins being united in a single planter with a Comfrey plant between them.
Cabbage takes a long time to grow and in the past I’ve settled for cabbage leaves but no crown. But this year I’ve only gone and smashed it. Check out the head on that whoppa!
When in Devon, we went to lunch at the Riverford Field Kitchen. Wow, what a treat that was! What they cook is largely made from ingredients grown on-site.
After lunch, we went and had a look at the kitchen’s gardens. There is a large field to its right and an incredibly long poly tunnel.
This is the seventh and final post picturing my trips to Biodynamic farms in 2023 and 2024.
The background to these visits is the research for my forthcoming book “The Garden”, which is due to be published by Repeater in 2025. There’s a very thoroughly researched chapter on Steiner, agriculture, and the Hippies at the front of it.
I was extremely fortunate to meet, beforehand, director of the Apricot Centre Rachel Phillips. Visiting Devon this summer for my tiny 5-day yearly holiday, I took the opportunity to drop in and see the market garden and CSA she runs with legendary Biodynamic grower Marina O’Connell. I came across Marina’s work some time previously when, visiting Steiner House, I was recommended and bought a copy of her excellent book Designing Regenerative Food Systems.
Nobody was around when, this time with the beautiful Mrs Ingram, we dropped under invitation to see the exquisite site. The pollinator garden of flowers was particularly special and welcome to see. My aunt recently remarked to me that a visit by car to Devon in the sixties would leave a car’s windscreen thick with dead bugs – and that today there will be practically none.
Everything was bursting with life, though there were the telltale signs that the year’s growing season was coming to an end.
My third visit of the day was to Tablehurst Farm. It is possibly the most renowned of the local Biodynamic farms. Once connected to Emerson College, the agricultural wing of it so-to-speak, for many years it has operated autonomously. It abuts the college.
Notable sights here were the enormous water-tower-sized barrels for making Steiner’s preparations at massive scale. This featured impressive Steinerite flowforms that are visible in the photo. The huge compost mounds were also remarkable. I thought that the pigs and chickens seemed especially happy and lively.
Plaw Hatch Farm just up the road has cattle at its epicentre. This is the way Steiner would have wanted it. Indeed, Laurie Donaldson of Michael Hall School got his cow manure for growing vegetables from here.
I didn’t get the opportunity to meet the herd, but inside the deliciously-stocked farm shop there are photos of them all with their names.
This is the first post in what is a large series of six posts covering Biodynamic gardens and farms I have visited in the past year and a half.
The first three posts date from Saturday July 22nd, just over a year ago, when I visited Forest Row. Forest Row, a small town in East Sussex, is the spiritual home of Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic agriculture in the UK. It is the home of the notable Biodynamic farms Plaw Hatch and Tablehurst Farm, as well as the Steiner adult education centre, Emerson College.
Remarkably, very nearby, ten minutes away, is the important Scientology HQ at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead. So you’re really spoilt for esoteric religions. Nearby too is Ashdown Forest, home of Winnie the Pooh’s sylvan forays. Rock fans might be interested to know of the proximity of Hammerwood Park, once owned by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour was once a resident. Presumably there is something of a spaghetti junction of ley lines running through the area.
The then-resident gardener Laurie Donaldson, who now works in Hereford at the Growing Local CSA, showed me around the vegetable garden of Michael Hall School. I had reached out to Laurie through the WWOOF network, where they were advertising for assistance.
This Steiner children’s school (photos visible towards the foot of the column) was relying on Laurie to look after their beautiful walled garden. Part of the children’s education was to take part in working with the plants.
Laurie was able to point out, with justified pride, that the garden was financially profitable. There was an eager market for the incredibly vital biodynamic produce he had been growing there.
This was my first sighting of the Phacelia flower, which pollinators adore.
