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.
More news soon. Stay tuned veggies.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
