ROOF TOP VEG PLOT

Chelsea Fringe

Photo Naomi Schillinger @outofmyshed

This year I'm opening for Chelsea Fringe with a couple of workshops and some private tours.  Much nicer, I thought, than a free for all.  My plot will be of interest to anyone who wants to grow edibles in an urban location.  Situated five floors up in London W1, five minutes from Oxford Circus, this unlikely garden makes use of raised beds with only six inches of soil.  Wendy grows herbs and salad crops organically. There is a tiny greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers. An elder bush, roses and Japanese wineberries protect the beds from high winds. A grapevine flowers and fruits happily in the bright, uninterrupted light.  

Workshops:
This year Wendy is running two small workshops (maximum six persons) on Sunday 21 May(booked)  and Sunday 4 June (from 2.00pm to 5.00pm).  Entitled ‘Leaf Lore’, she’ll be sharing the knowhow she’s learned over the years about these very special locations. The workshop includes growing information, a tasting and nutritional tips.  We often forget how nutritious home grown organic leaves can be.  The workshop will suit anyone who wants to improve their diet by growing in pots, on a windowsill, a balcony or on a rooftop.  Book by phoning 07957 438 666 or email [email protected].  Workshops £70/person (includes refreshments)

Private tours:
In addition the rooftop plot will be open by appointment on 26, 27, 28 and 29^th right through the bank holiday weekend.  It’s a small plot so appointments are necessary.  Wendy will be happy to give your party (maximum six persons) a private tour of the garden.  Book by phoning 07957 438 666 or email [email protected].  Tours £5/person (includes refreshments)

See the separate workshop page for other events throughout the summer.

 

Note Workshops on Sunday 21 May are fully booked.  Ring to check availability for Sunday 4th June.

Sow and Sow

Saturday 25th March

It's been a lovely day in the garden today.  Everything seems fresh-minted.  In the greenhouse I already have nasturtiums, Empress of India, flowering profusely.  Their green young leaves are at their best now.  As the summer progresses nasturtium leaves can become rough and too peppery in anything but the most feisty of salads.  Their smaller, fresh, young leaves taste subtler.  As they grow the flavour develops, but in many cases older leaves can be too powerful.  I try to get leaf crops to grow fast.  If they slow up, that means to me it is time to harvest and re-sow!

The early potatoes in the greenhouse are looking fantastic.  They've now been earthed up twice.  This year I'm using my own compost, not a purchased mix, so I'm being a little more careful to feed them.  (Though I'm not sure that my home made compost mix isn't richer than some of the bagged compost that I have been forced to buy!) I know that I'm skating on thin ice, having simply planted shop bought Charlotte potatoes that had started to sprout.  It remains to be seen how well they do.  Potatoes I planted a little later, in the open garden are just poking through the soil. It is a bit early to see if they’ve taken okay.

In the raised beds I'm growing loads of spring leaves including mizuna, mustard leaves, ruby chard and lettuces (both hearted and cut-and-come-again).  I’m sowing and planting out at intervals, determined to get a progression of leaves throughout the early summer. The seedlings I planted out only a week or so ago are already at the stage where a few leaves can be harvested. 

Red Little Gem should form tight hearts, so they will be left to mature.

In the living room my early seed trays have divested their first crop of seedlings and have now been replaced with tomatoes and courgette. I’m growing Moneymaker tomatoes (a reliable stalwart) and courgette Tromboncino d’Albegna – the only climbing courgette that I find reliable.  They grow into long ‘trumpet shaped’ fruits, but are better if picked before they become too comical! I've got basil and climbing French beans (Cosse violette) in the greenhouse along with marigolds and sweet peas. 

Suddenly spring is here.  The grapevine has thick brown buds.  The wisteria has furry leaflets and buds that look as if they've been fashioned from gold silk thread. The fan trained elder is in leaf and sports tiny propto-whorls of flowers.

The roses are thriving.  Their leaf shoots are soft.  Already a few aphids are on them. But I've spotted the first ladybird, a hardy harbinger of many, I hope.  And the white skeletons of already munched aphids tell of hover flies already at work.  

The herbs are fabulous at this time of year.  My mint pots already need trimming.  Their thick downy leaves stand ready for mint teas on sunny afternoons.  The sage had been giving flavour to salads and casseroles for weeks.  My parsley bed seems to have resisted the ravages of sługs since I liberally mulched with a kitchen mix of spent coffee grounds and crushed egg shells.  I've taken a pot of each down into the kitchen so that we can have fresh parsley and mint with our meals.  I do this swop-about all summer because my kitchen faces north.  I can't nurture herbs in the kitchen, but once they are mature a pot will last well in summer shade.  But trays of pea shoots and microveg do wonderfully in the shadier spots.  So everything in and out of the garden is flourishing – so far.

I'm opening for Chelsea Fringe this year and running some workshops - see side panel for more details. 

Going Wild

Garden strawberries in the pot last year. This year I'm planting wild!

We are all aware of government advice to eat five portions of fruit and veg every day. But round here, I live right in the centre of London, you can count on the fingers of one hand the shops that sell fresh produce.

When it comes to fruit and veg - fresh is best. Freshly picked fruit and veg contains more nutrients than stuff that's been sitting on the supermarket shelf. Where chemicals are pumped into the package it is done so to improve shelf appeal, not to conserve flavour or nutrients. If you are buying from a supermarket, the chances are that as well as coming from a very long way away, your 'fresh' produce will have been grown using chemicals.  Pesticides are a form of nerve gas - they can freak out our brains as well as an insects.

How can we eat fresh and organic without spending an arm and a leg at the farmers market? My approach is to grow some of my own. Experimenting on my rooftop, where the soil is only six inches deep, has taught me that almost anything can be grown in a small pot or raised beds. I try to grow variety, focusing on foods that perish rather easily.

Every year I grow a few strawberries. This year I’m planning to grow wild strawberries. According to the Washington think tank, the Environmental Working Group, strawberries top the list of polluted crops. That may be due to pressure to provide strawberries all year round.  This forces farmers to spray their crops with high doses pesticides and artificial fertilizers, encouraging them to flower and fruit out of season.

Most pot grown fruit and veg require full sunlight, but strawberries, especially wild strawberries, can be grown in partial shade. When harvested freshly, strawberries are an excellent source of antioxidants, vitamin C, potassium, folate and fibre. Just a handful sprinkled onto your breakfast cereal can add significant nutrition to the diet. Fruit also adds a natural sweet taste without adding too many calories or fat.

The vitamin C in soft fruit is a very fragile commodity. It is degraded by storage, light, heat and mechanical damage. So, if you want to receive a good crop of vitamins from your window boxes, wild strawberries are an excellent choice. The wild varieties are certainly a ‘cut-above’ the normal strawberry. Wild strawberries are packed with complex flavours that degrade very quickly, so if you do happen to find them in a shop, they'll be stratospherically expensive (and probably disappointing). Here in Fitzrovia we hardly ever get a frost, so I'll be quite brave and put them outside soon. (Just throw a teacloth or sheet of plastic over the plants if a night frost is forecast.)

Wild strawberries are perennials, they come back every year. Buy them now as small plants from a reputable supplier. http://www.blackmoor.co.uk offer plug plants by post. I grow my strawberries in a couple of strawberry pots that I’ve stacked up on top of a wheeled plant stand. This allows me to turn the pots around to make sure they all get good light during the ripening season.

Strawberries planted now will crop this year and then even more profusely next year. If you’ve got green fingers you can re-plant strawberry runners that come out in the late summer to form new plants for next year. Growers won’t get a year round crop. Wild strawberries are not cut and come again, like lettuces, but their distinctive leaves can be snipped at any time, to add flavour to a salad and their delicate flowers and scented foliage give visual pleasure and perfume throughout the year.

Wendy Shillam is running ‘How to Grow Fruit and Veg’ workshops in her roof top garden this summer, starting on March 10th. More details of the Spring Workshops can be found here: Spring Workshops.

A slightly shorter version of this article appears in our excellent local newspaper Fitzrovia News

What Old Hands Know About GYO

The end of an unseasonably sunny day in the veg plot.

 If you are struggling to fit gardening into a busy life, juggling family and work commitments around the needs of seedlings and pruning regimes, then this blogpost is for you.

People ask me how I manage such a (seemingly) labour intensive garden.  Until this weekend I never could answer their question.   But something happened that has raised the shades from my eyes.  I now know and can share with you how I do it and I hope that this insight will help you to enjoy your vegplotting more and more.

 

The thinking about it takes longer than the doing

I used to feel guilty reading gardening books rather than getting on with it.  But recently I've learned that gardening is a bit like carpentry, where they say, 'measure three times and cut once'.   Now I treat my reading with the respect it deserves.  You can never learn too much from a book.

 

Plants grow themselves

If you've ever had a month off with flu, or a broken leg, or even a long and glamorous holiday, you will know that plants don't stop growing when your back is turned.  I picked spinach yesterday that I didn't know I had.  The more established a garden becomes the more that weeds simply turn into seedlings from last year's crops.  We Old Hands call them volunteers!

 

Thing go wrong; things go right

Don't stress about the failures.  The difference between a good gardener and a bad one is more to do with attitude than anything else.  Celebrate the successes and learn from the failures.

 

Enjoy being in the veg plot

Don't confine vegetable growing to a bleak corner miles from the house.  You'll never get there.  I'd advise mixing the decorative with the edible.  Incorporate an arbour amongst the runner beans or start transform your shed into a summer house.  That way, as you sit among the cabbages, you be able to watch your garden grow.  Then it's a matter of seconds to snip off a broken twig, thin out a few plants or even broadcast a few seeds.   Forget serried ranks of leeks (too easy for pests to take hold).  Forget demarcation between flowers and fruits.  Complementary planting in the name of the game today.

 

Go with the weather

This weekend the weather has been poor, but last weekend it was amazing in London.   A couple of warm days of bounteous sunshine made me realise that it is sensible to wait for fine weather.  I always used to slightly dread the 'spring offensive'.   Perhaps even my choice of language indicates that I saw it as a bit of a battle.  Honestly, I don't enjoy freezing my fingers off in the garden.    But of course the plants and the soil don't like being disturbed when it's cold or very wet either.   Simply bending the stem of a delicate plant in cold weather can damage it.  And cultivating very cold or very wet soil will destroy the soil structure.

So don't feel guilty if you aren't feeling like venturing outside until the winds and the rain abate.  Your plants won't want to stir themselves either until there is tangible evidence that Spring has sprung.  We can't predict when these lovely sunny weekends will come our way.  But my advice is that when they do, drop everything, get out into the garden and enjoy.  That's what is meant by being at one with nature.  That's what the Old Hands know.   

Wendy is running some gardening workshops this spring in her roof top garden.  Go to this link to find out more.  Sign up by tweeting her @rooftpovegplot or email at [email protected]