Category: Growing

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Agriculture Community Ecology Food Growing Organic Spirituality

The Apricot Centre

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.

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Agriculture Community Ecology Growing Organic Practice Soil Spirituality

Ruskin Mill

This is the sixth instalment of the seven posts on Biodynamic farming.

I came across Jason Warland online – reached out to him – and so when travelling back from a conference in Wales arranged to drop in and see him. He works in the gardens at Ruskin Mill outside Stroud as a therapist helping young people. He’s astonishingly knowledgable about the history of Steiner’s thought, and also on the topic of growing – entirely self-educated as far as I’m aware.

Jason is something of a superstar in his own right, as he contributes a column on Biodynamics to one of Rick Rubin’s channels. I didn’t know this before we met in person, and it was funny when Jason told me, because I suspect I was the first person he’d ever mentioned it to who knew who Rick Rubin was.

It was a beautiful evening on Sunday July 7th and we walked up a narrow valley past vegetable gardens, fish ponds, flowforms, past a wood and a pottery workshop. Then we turned left up a steep hill through Park Wood to Gables Farm. This is the main growing centre with whole fields, the characteristic attendant livestock, poly tunnels, and composting site.

Thanks so much to Jason for showing me around. I am so grateful.

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Agriculture Community Food Growing Organic Spirituality

Forest Row #3: Tablehurst Farm

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.

Just like Plaw Hatch, Tablehust Farm has a shop, but also a very nice café where I ate lunch.

Categories
Agriculture Food Growing Spirituality

Forest Row #1: Michael Hall School Vegetable Garden

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. There are 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.

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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.

Categories
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…