Category: Urban
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…
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.
Astonished that this worked so well!
I planted a couple of chitting spuds in a fabric pot in March. I watered the abundant foliage until the plant looked like it was dying. That’s how it’s done. At this point, I stopped watering it so it would dry it out. Then, what is this magic? I dug out the fellers. Delicious taters – quite a return on my original investment!
Categories
Steiner House
It feels like yesterday, but it was two years ago in June 2022 that I first went to Steiner House in London. It is situated just west of Regent’s Park.
The visit reminded me of my drop-in to Cecil Sharp House way back in 2007. That, on the north side of Regent’s Park, is another building-as-ideological-portal. However, in that case the agenda was English Folk Arts, and in this it is the Anthroposophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner.
I chose that Saturday because there was going to be a market stall open selling biodynamic produce from a variety of growers. This is where I bought this delicious apple juice.
On the ground floor there is a bookshop. It stocks many of Steiner’s own titles, largely lectures he gave which were dutifully transcribed and published, but also books by a wide range of authors on subjects, many not directly relating to Steiner thought. It’s a very interesting shop and has a more diverse offering than for instance than that at Swedenborg House.
The exterior of the building, as you can see from the opening photo, has this wonderfully eccentric art-deco styling. And this is carried on into the building’s interior.
In the stairwell cavity, there is what looks like a glass flowform. These are Steiner’s ritualistic sculptures, which are designed to energise water. It would be great one day to visit the Goetheanum in Switzerland and see more of this quirky architecture.
On the ground floor, the café and bookshop are open to the public. On the first floor, one is able to access the library. Here you can discover the full complement of Steiner’s hundreds of publications.
This shelf of art books caught my eye. I do like it that Anthroposophy covers the full range of human experience in the cosmos; from the most “spiritual” and etheric to the most “grounded” and integrated.
These boxes contain back issues of The Golden Blade, the Anthroposophical journal.
As I was making my way out, I asked the librarian which of Steiner’s own books that he would recommend for a neophyte. He selected the following for me How To Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and Occult Sceince. I’ve subsequently read these three, and they are certainly interesting, the first being the most indispensable.
In fact, my own recommendation to a beginner would be Steiner’s Autobiography The Story of my Life, which I think gives one a better idea of where he was coming from. The librarian also recommended the two books on the right as good supplementary reading. I haven’t read them…yet. If you get the opportunity, it’s definitely worth visiting Steiner House.
This just literally after the solstice on the 20th June. Peak bloom.
Towards the end of June and the wet weather we’ve had has collided with the glorious sunshine, making everything very lush. It’s looking so beautiful and the bees and hover flies are enjoying themselves.
But there’s more to come. The dahlias, zinnias, echinacea, and poppies have yet to bloom. My neighbours, who look down on me, tell me they are enjoying it.
Categories
Black Cat Jungle
[Photos by Lulu]
Thanks to Sukhdev for sharing this documentary with me about New York City Garden Activists. Quite a lot of the film’s focus is upon things which happen in gardens, rather than growing. This is a typical media bias. It’s impossibly rare to come across any commentary which connects the dots between farming and culture.
However, the featured Adam Purple is definitely an interesting figure. I’d be including him and “The Garden of Life” in the book in greater depth were I, (a) not already discussing an arguably more interesting guerilla gardener, (b) as Sukhdev points out, Purple was, regrettably, an unsavoury character.
Purple’s “Garden of Eden”, built by him single-handedly over five years starting in 1975, was a well-known open, community garden on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The garden began when the city and the neighborhood were blighted with urban decay. A building was razed in 1973 on Eldridge Street behind Purple’s apartment, and he decided to plant something with his companion, Eve.
The process of clearing the lot took some time since the couple would only use hand tools. Modern machinery was considered “counter-revolutionary.” He would haul manure from the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park and created a highly fertile topsoil. The garden was ready to be planted in the spring of 1975. The garden was designed around concentric circles with a yin-yang symbol in the center. As buildings were torn down on either side, Purple would add new rings to the garden, allowing it to grow. By the end, it was 15,000 square feet featuring a wide range of produce, including corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. He regularly bicycled to Central Park to collect horse manure to use as fertilizer.
Wikipedia entry
In the film, Purple is shown with an enlargement of a photograph from the September 1984 edition of National Geographic. My curiosity got the better of me, and I tracked down a copy of the issue on eBay for a few bob. It’s a truly glorious photograph.
The article which it is a part of, “Do we treat our soil like dirt?” By Boyd Gibbons, with photographs by Steven C. Wilson, is excellent. I thought I would go ahead and share it here. I love the illustrated soil cutaway especially.
