There was a groaning mailbag after my now legendary Epic Melon Fail post. Advice, recriminations, condolences, exhortations for me to not give up on my noble quest to grow Melons on Old Street. Thank you all. I felt showered, douched even, with the full spectrum of emotional response.
Melon “Joe”.Melons “Vlad” and “Kim”.
But good things come to those who wait. The plant decided that it really liked the heat, light and wind on the roof garden. I fed it with a dressing of compost and watered it dutifully through the summer. Mildewed plant fell away and a healthy new growth of leaves started up. Bees busied themselves pollinating the yellow flowers and I was stunned to discover, not one, but five melons grew.
Two are still on the plant but last night, in anticipation of the weather finally turning now that it is September, I made the leap and cut two specimens loose.
Melon “Kim”.Melon “Vlad”.
Rules dictate that one has to wait for a melon to smell sweet before cutting it but I just went ahead anyway.
Because I’m a generous soul I gave the larger melon “Kim” to Mrs. Ingram and Master Ingram to share. Miss Ingram doesn’t like melon. Apparently it was delicious.
Lulu discovered this event at the Lisson Gallery and we both hastened there. Playback of a forthcoming reissue of Pharaoh Sanders’ eponymous LP, once on the hip and tiny India Navigation label, now set to become more widely-known on the hip and substantial Luaka Bop.
Luaka Bop have done some amazing reissues over the years. They’ve been as reliable as Strut. A purist, I don’t even mind their repackaging. I have a particular soft spot for their World Psychedelic Series, and should probably be all over this sister series.
I’m not entirely convinced by “the artist” Devon Turnbull’s spiel here (see PR sheet below) but I like the cut of his jib (magical hippie upbringing). He’s also made this stereo himself which shows some serious technical ability. Respect.
Ultimately though, getting to listen to a great, rare, spiritual jazz LP for free on an excellent sound system, I mean, what’s there to complain about? I feel like I ought to reach out to him with my “The “S” Word” book…
At the start we were spoken to a woman from Luaka Bop who explained that Pharaoh Sanders was aware of the playback project before he died and took a keen interest in it. That lent proceedings a nice devotional air.
It’s a hipster jam.
That’s the Devon feller in the peaked cap.
Harvest Time. Such a wonderful piece. Never heard it before so I was in for a treat. It has a definite No Wave feel. Shades of influence from the young bucks of the day, James Blood Ulmer and The Music Revelation Ensemble no doubt. The guitar by Tisziji Muñoz, liquid, is prominent and the backing was been described by the reissue label as having the feel of rock group (though on close inspection they all seem to be jazz heavyweights…)
Nice press shot of the man. I’m hoping I will get the CD given to me at Christmas. Thanks to Lulu for bringing me along.
Buddleja, pronounced “buddly-ah” is an interesting plant. Sometimes called “Summer Lilac” it has grown in my awareness this season a great deal. That learning process itself has been interesting in the way it has emerged slowly from a zone of semantic indifference. A few months ago I was totally ignorant about it as I imagine most people who aren’t gardeners are.
It is native to the Sichuan and Hubei provinces in central China, and also Japan. The plant’s name was given to it by none other than Linnaeus, “the father of modern taxonomy” who named it after the English Botanist the Reverend Adam Buddle. With these oriental and religious overtones it is ripe material for this blog.
However, in the UK it was classed as an invasive species in 1922. It’s a weed. It’s simply too damn successful in our temperate region. Its long frondlike arms which wave around in our constant Atlantic winds spread their seeds like nobody’s business. And the plant itself seems capable of growing on next to no soil. I had to remove a Buddleja from the masonry of our back wall, and a huge plant a metre tall had been sustained by no more than a thimble of earth.
My roof garden.
This Buddleja is in my roof garden. I had found it growing alongside another plant and planted it in this swanky grey pot without knowing what it was. I’ve encouraged many weeds in this way, the Dandelions I’ve written about before, my Ash tree etc.
Its flowers.
And the bees and bugs love it. It’s also known as a Butterfly bush for this reason. It looks very pretty I think!
Round the back of Wormwood Scrubs.
However, once you start noticing the Buddleja, you begin to see it everywhere. I would by lying if I claimed that it did not change my rosy perception of it. Although this runs counter to my avowed impulse to embrace weeds – that contradicts another desire to see diversity. You don’t want to see the same plants everywhere.
Hampstead.
Notwithstanding that it is fascinating to see situations where, I don’t know for what reasons, these plants have grown to stupendous scale in the gardens of London. It may be that they were planted there but I think it’s more likely that they grew there, people thought they looked pretty, and that they were allowed to thrive. I think if the owners knew they were weeds (whatever your philosophy is there) they would cut them down. Leaving aside for the moment all questions of what the right or wrong thing to do in that situation is.
Taking the photo above two elderly women noticed me. It turned out that this was one of their houses. They greeted me a little quizzically. I did give a friendly hello as I scooted off on my bike, but it was still a not entirely comfortable situation. Perfectly legal to take photos of anything on the street of course…
Belsize Park.
Here is a huge bush in the garden of a very grand house in Belsize Park…
Chalk Farm.
Growing out of the back of a block of flats’ shared garden…
Primrose Hill.
In the railway sidings at the back of Primrose Hill…
Islington.Old Street.Old Street.
Around Old Street which is the arse end of Islington – Bunhill being the most densely populated ward in the UK apparently – I’m less surprised to see the Buddleja being cultivated in the parks around here. There’s a sense that no-one (least of all the council) gives a shit about the public space.
In Croydon with its natural ally graffiti.Croydon.Redhill.
It is now often seen there along railway lines and on the sites of derelict factories and other buildings. The plant frequently grew on urban bomb sites during the aftermath of World War II, earning it the nickname of “the bomb site plant”.
And finally even at the Findhorn Foundation, the garden of Eden itself. Its violet flowers now dead as the season is likely to be shorter outside Inverness.
Spotted this massive bee-like fly this morning. It’s called Volucella Zonaria. The species mimic the European hornet but are apparently, unlike the hornet, harmless. I’d be very hard pressed to tell the difference, but if it is a hornet I don’t like the thought of it killing all the lovely bees in my garden. She certainly behaved in a very confident manner.
I’ve only been gardening properly since I sowed my first seeds in February 2021. I definitely gravitated towards to the dream of self-sufficiency that’s made manifest in growing vegetables, but as I’ve commented on before, it’s neither practical from a view of self-supporting, or financially efficient to grow one’s own vegetables on a tiny urban roof. The value of that is more along the lines of the fun of growing and picking food you can actually eat, and the cosmological orientation that brings.
I will continue to do grow veg, hopefully one day on a larger plot, but I’ve come round to the idea that growing flowers, especially ones that the bees like, is a totally righteous activity. Part of the fun, the ritual if you like, with flowers is saving their seed and sowing them oneself. Detailed below is this year’s adventures.
This year on my raised bed I grew beetroot, carrots, and leeks. All from seed I hasten to add.
The Beetroot odyssey started way back in March. The leeks were the only one of the three which didn’t do well. They are still like big blades of grass.
I decided to pickle the beetroot as opposed to just roasting it as usual. Those are Kilner jars sterilising in the oven.
I roasted the carrots with soya sauce and honey.
The recipe I followed for the beetroot pickle advised roasting it rather than boiling it for a better flavour.
I boiled up a pickling vinegar made of coriander seed, mustard seed, chilli, bay, white and red wine vinegar, and a little sugar.
The carrots were delicious this year. Last year I grew a different variety, Amsterdam Forcing, which tasted filthy (dusty in fact…). This year I rooted for Nantes 2.
I ended up with two large jars of beetroot pickle. The pickling vinegar was a bit too tart so I added a little more sugar.
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.
