Month in the life of an urban gardener: August 2024.
The tasks, problem solving, wildlife spots, learnings and reflections from an organic food grower in a North London kitchen garden.
Welcome to this separate reflection — as part of the Food-Fibre-Fashion publication — on what it’s like to be an urban organic food grower. This started as short snappy videos to condense moments across a month, before realising that actually the narrative and context behind them could be useful, whether successes or mistakes.
As this is part of the wider Food-Fibre-Fashion publication that shares essays, articles and resource newsletters, there will be stories and musings to raise your awareness of how interconnected these systems are, even when we’re looking in small scale, such as an urban garden.
Watch reels of previous months here → July 2024. / June 2024. / May 2024. / April 2024. / March 2024. / February 2024. / January 2024. / December 2023. / November 2023. / October 2023. / September 2023. / August 2023. / July 2023. / June 2023. / May 2023. / April 2023. / March 2023.
This is the tenth in this series of articles — A Month in the Life of an Urban Gardener. To read about the context of where I work, head to the first article.
Watch August 2024 in the form of a reel here.
Listen below or on Spotify:
Images: Exciting flowering from the helichryseum (strawflower), amaranth, and a purple scabious (pincushion flower).
Harvesting.
We frankly don’t have that much growing in proportion to the full garden space and to how many beds we have. A lot is taken up by fruit trees, herb areas, areas under development, paths, and structures. The annual growing space would usually yield more because we cram it full and are harvesting often, but we’re still without consistent customers and so we either don’t harvest as with kale and beetroot, the crop isn’t ready as with squash and sweet potato, or it failed/is already done as with peas and sort of the spring onions because these just bulbed as real onions.
That being said, we were still harvesting enough to sell bits of, eat our own, or make products from. We’ve been able to tantalise the on-site café with punnets of tomatoes and raspberries, and have continued drying rhubarb, apple and berries for a blended tea infusion. We’ve even been making up salads in-house using various excess or larger (and therefore less saleable) produce, such as a raw courgette, bean, apple, chilli and fig salad, or a salad of cucumber, tomato, and the last of the spring onions with some herb, either greek basil, oregano or parsley. It’s somewhat invigorating us that there is a purpose for this nutritious, hard-won food, and yet it’s only a tiny stepping stone — and we’re now heading into winter with limited produce again. Time will need to be spent over the coming months in our outreach to ensure we have customers come spring.
Here are some specific wins and challenges:
Tomatoes → The yield isn’t bad; we have maybe 60 plants, and most look healthy. Fruits aren’t the sweetest though, and that’s probably because of limited concentration of sunshine and warmth. It’s hard to measure (because we don’t have any specific tools) how much water is being used when we hose directly or drip irrigate, but they have been getting a good dousing every fortnight when I push the nozzle into the roots and leave it for 5 minutes, and otherwise have had a “heavy feed” of comfrey tea each week, plus some random irrigation. A toad was spotted having burrowed in a number of these holes left by the nozzle.
Courgette → This is a plant that you need to check on each day. You can leave a fruit because it’s too small, but come back three days later to find it huge. The bigger ones are less attractive because they can often be watery inside, and frankly are hard to price. They receive a thinning of their mildewed leaves and anything excess every 10-14 days.
Cucumber → Something weird was going on this year. Usually ‘Marketmore’ are quite a stubby chubby variety, but this season we were experiencing s-shaped fruit, super long supermarket type ones, and super chunky short ones. That doesn’t seem too hard to deal with, until we discovered the stem end was often horrifically bitter. Our yield was way way higher than previous years, and that’s great, but with no customer and with a mysterious unexpected taste demon, we ended up letting loads go to waste by taking them in and out of the fridge until we could do something with them. It’s likely because of the rainy-hot-rainy-hot weather, but is potentially a seed pollination issue, insect pollination issue, or soil issue. They also got thinned, but likely not as dramatically as needed early on, and there was a lot of excess growth and mildew. We have some on tipi frames, and some clambering over a bed covered in Mypex plastic sheeting with holes. I’m not a fan of the latter because I can’t see where the holes are to water properly, and molluscs can easily hide. This was obviously going to happen and did indeed happen with the early squash plantings, and so we took off the sheeting for the second planting.
Images: Varieties of tomatoes harvested in a box, striped green and plain yellow courgettes, chunky stubby Marketmore cucumbers.
Beans → As usual we do a couple sowings; one in modules and planted out, and then one direct a few weeks later. We’d sown the beans too early under cover, it got hot, they grew very large very quickly and so weren’t productive when they went in the ground, especially as it got rainy again. The second sowing was slow to take off (because of the rain). In actuality, there didn’t seem to be too much of a difference in timing with the succession, as by end of August the majority of the beans had gone over i.e. turned into beans rather than being able to be eaten as a full pod. These are labelled and then harvested when fully dried for sowing the next year. The harvest had been a bit middling, and we’d discovered that two varieties went over quickly or had a disappointingly tough texture in pod form. The standard green runner, purple French Blauhilde and the yellow French ones reign as champions.
Chilli → The ‘Rocoto’ is located in our glasshouse. She has warmth, and so sprawls to the glass roof and the brick wall reaping the benefit of the surrounding infrastructure. She gives out growth, and though we prune her back heavy at least twice a year, she gifts us with beautiful mid-heat chillis. Towards the end of the month the chillis had been shrivelling at the stem and falling, so it was time for a haircut. I was working alone that day and enjoyed the peace of time alone with a plant. Leaving some chillis to ripen on the plant, others were harvested and were left to dry. We’re experimenting with where’s best — usually you’d hang them by their stems in the glasshouse, but the stems had mostly fallen off. The office proved too moist as the dehydrator was switched on a lot, but the polytunnel was allowing them to dry a little. If there doesn’t work then I’ll bring them home to dry in an airing cupboard.
Corn → This was a new crop for us this year, an experiment. While planting of the “three sisters” is common in permaculture practice — in order to utilise the characteristics of each of the three plants: corn as a structure, squash as groundcover and beans to climb up the structure (and also provide varying nutrients and stability for the soil) — we’ve always done a bean pyramidal trellis, a tipi, with squash being shaded out and no room for corn. With a gift of blue corn kernels from Nature’s Rainbow to explore it as a dye crop, some extra plants gifted from a colleague (who runs another market garden), and some extra plants of baby corn gifted from another colleague (who didn’t have room in their garden), we were able to establish a patch at the end of the bean bed. Corn requires wind pollination, so here they should have a good time. The blue corn was sown and potted up earlier, so was most chunky, but as yet hasn’t cobbed up despite its fun blue hairdo. A baby corn was harvested, shared between the team, while we await the main cobs to swell.
Beetroot → We didn’t have a customer for the beetroot, or rather they’d taken all they needed for their supper club and then our bed-full were just awaiting interest. Plenty were starting to bulk up, with a few sized bigger than a hand, but left in the ground until they were needed.
Images: 1. Purple silks of the blue corn look like a fun hairdo on top of the swelling cob; 2. The first (and only) baby corn harvested from our experimental gifted crop; 3. A large beetroot, bigger than my hand, but with no home to go to was left in the ground.
Kohl rabi → A somewhat pointless veg because no one really knows what it is, however, when they grow well, they’re cool to behold. An alien lifeform of the root veg and/or brassica community. We had sown and successfully potted on around 50 seedlings, aware that some would be nibbled. But before they had opportunity to really establish any good roots, the cabbage white caterpillars had descended. We were eventually left with about five plants sturdy enough to go out. It was almost miraculous that this blue one survived and was perfect — no sluggy craters, no leaf damage, beautiful rounded shape. We used it for an on-site salad with apple for crisp on crisp.
Salad → Finally, after I’m pretty sure three sowings, potting ons, and planting outs, we had a crop that rooted and was resilient to pests. Mainly because we had a stretch of very little rain. I won’t attribute the success to the fact that I did the sowing, potting on and planting of everything that’s now in the ground… It also meant that finally our trainees were able to be trained on harvesting salad for an interesting mix. Most market gardens would grow salad as they supply to restaurants or to veg bags or farmer’s markets, and our trainees need to be confident in how to make a product that’ll sell for the £16.50/kg price tag. Overall, salad takes so much effort, medium (that’s soil and minerals) and labour, and therefore making it unusual is really the only way to find a customer willing to purchase it. Still, we struggle with explaining the virtues of just how tasty each individual leaf is in comparison to what you’d get in a supermarket, and just why it’s worth the cost. For us it’s an opportunity to add in more exotic “forage” of plants that readily self-seed, such as wood sorrel, summer purslane, orache and Bengali spinach, along with perennials such as common sorrel and salad burnet, and herbs including nasturtium, borage flowers, parsley and oregano. When I was a trainee I got really fed up of being stuck doing the salad harvest while volunteers got what I saw as fun jobs — simply because it wasn’t the backache of an hour+ harvesting in scorching sun. Now, I’m proud to see and taste our salad mix, a total labour of love.
Berries → We were continuing with dehydrating berries so that they could be used in the tea infusions, but the raspberries were slowing down now, and we don’t have many blackberries anyway. So long sweet little balls of sun!
Images: Salad leaves being tossed to assess the mix, the most perfect blue kohl rabi, and harvesting red and golden raspberries into punnets.
Maintenance.
The on-site builders had finished a big indoor job so came around to us to help sort out some rotting bits. Number one priority was that the base of the frame of our glasshouse was rotting. The main issue was actually that bindweed had been growing up between two panes of glass from where a frame had rotted completely away, blocking out light from the glasshouse and of course looking messy as the plants themselves rotted, but this would involve taking the roof off in order to get the panes out. And as it’s likely the glasshouse will need to come down in a couple years time anyway to get repointing the Grade II brickwork, the builders did a temporary fix by digging out the foundations, screwing metal struts to the wood, and filling the holes with concrete.
They then replaced some broken decking, and also stabilised a fence where soil had subsided (and so saving our narcissi and tulip bulbs too!)
We did some weeding and mulching, particularly around the espalier fruit trees that get forgotten about. The wood chip we had was actually more leafy than chippy, great lightweight stuff for around trees that should break down quickly over a layer of cardboard and not add too much moisture. I however didn’t wear a mask, and as the leafy stuff was mainly eucalyptus (delivered from a local tree surgeon), by the afternoon my throat was raw and I could feel particulates in my lungs.
My colleague and a trainee did a fun task of experimenting with some log rounds that had also been delivered by a local tree surgeon. We have out-of-service climbing holds, some of which were a perfect fit with the log rounds, and so little stools were made. They’ve been used as seats, footrests and even as a table for when drawing the garden and building.
Images: 1. Perhaps a memorial bit of concrete for our resident fox Rufus, who we haven't seen since winter, but "Rufus was here" was scrawled into the wet concrete when builders stirrupped the glasshouse frame; 2. A customer using a new climbing hold tree stump stool as a drawing easel; 3. Pear espalier with freshly weeded and mulched understorey.
Pruning.
Along with the chilli prune, Jenny the kiwi also needed another cut. She throws out bits willy nilly and this was all hanging over the pathway, so I got up as far as I could on the a-frame ladder to trim shoots back to the fruit. We’ll harvest in October so she still has time to grow and ripen the fruits.
This was on a day when I shoved the hose nozzle into the roots of a tomato plant and left it for five minutes while I got on with another task. I was alone in the garden and feeling the burden of having a lot to nurture. It was mid-August and plenty had grown. The figs were also putting out shoots into paths and over a salad bed, and either had rotting fruit on the branch, proto fruit that was too tiny to even become anything in the next year, or too awkward to keep anyway. Sometimes you really have to be ruthless, particulary when it hinders how you access water taps and the shed, so I did chopping there too.
The chilli gathers dust from the brickwork, and with the kiwi hairs and the fig latex, my body had become itchy from pruning all of those. I visibly had a reaction on my arm from where latex sap had got me, and my skin and mouth were struggling. But when you’re on one with tidying, it’s difficult to let go — and perhaps better to just do it there and then while you’re already dying.
Images: 1. Chilli plant post-prune with some chillis left on to ripen, though most harvested for drying; 2. Jenny the kiwi had another cut back of new growth back to fruits, and as usual the cats come for whatever scent the prunings give off; 3. The bushy garden as seen from where the marshmallow was cut down after dying back quite early on in the season, but new growth promoted.
Tidying.
The largest element of our tidying this month was at the start, when we had to prepare our roundhouse ready for the annual summer Garden Party. You’d think that this means the party is all about shining a light on our team and the produce and the space, but that’s not the case. Some marquees go up that actually block the view of the majority of our garden, and the team aren’t asked to contribute in any way.
It was pleasing to get the roundhouse tidied up and dusted, because like any gardeners’ shelter, it turns into a storage area. What really takes the biscuit is that for weeks prior to this party we were told that we’d get some deep cleaners in to sort it out, which of course we said absolutely no to, because not only do we need to use the space up until the day of the event, we also don’t want our stuff being moved and chucked out. That happened anyway, even when we thought we’d caught everything (which included a silk scarf gifted to me from a gurkha upon completing Oxfam’s Trailwalker 100km race I’d left as a talisman amongst other roundhouse amulets).
After we’d cleaned (and particularly me with a dust mask and goggles on) we were still told someone would deep clean. What takes the biscuit further, is that instead of trusting the garden team with running a cob oven for pizzas (as we’ve done in the past), a private company was brought in, who with lacking knowledge destroyed the oven. There was nowt about this party that was to do with the garden, apart from shitting on our expertise, leaving furniture and rubbish out for us to clean up during our workday, and nicking heavily-flowered spearmint for cocktails — that 1. is the worst mint to use for drinks, 2. took flowers for pollinators and that also could’ve went to seed, 3. wasn’t weighed and we’re a business that charges for produce. But a precedent was set, so frankly it’s like they have to do this to us every year.
Images: 1. Sorting, sweeping and emptying the roundhouse ready for the annual garden party; 2. A frog hiding in a gap between the ground and brick bench, disturbed when grass was being cut; 3. Thinning of the cucumber plants during harvest to allow airflow and access to flowers for pollination.
I did get the opportunity, however, to host a hapa zome workshop — up on the platform space that I’d had to tidy and set up with furniture myself, and on the other side of the garden so I wasn’t included in anything or checked in on. I had a good bunch of participation from friends and from families visiting the centre though, and hopefully gave a seed of wisdom for when foraging for natural colour. Hapa zome is the art of directly printing plants onto cloth and paper using leaves, flowers and berries, and in this drop-in workshop the participants were encouraged to respectfully and consciously use the plants of the garden to print colour.
Images: Examples of hapa zome plant printing onto reclaimed cotton fabric during a workshop at the centre's annual garden party.
Planting out.
More lettuces went out, really squeezing them in, making the 2.5 beds bursting. Some were already on the cusp of bolting. The trainees had sown the mustard greens (under strict instructions with how many seeds per module — absolutely no more than two, unless it’s the frills when you can do maximum of five because we can plant in nice clumps — and glances at me as if I was being really finickity when really it’s just that you can’t go sowing 10 seeds per module of a plant that will turn bushy). Hopefully they’ve learnt their lesson. We decided not to do the winter lettuce sowing there and then as the plan suggested because I was still planting out baby plants for summer, which just goes to show how skewed the season had been.
Interplanted with the lettuces were amaranth (for leaves, not grain) and thai basil, and then greek bush basil around the edging of a cucumber bed. An end of a bed was taken up with parsley, to go with the pre-planted nasturtium and spring onion as a companion to the baby lettuces when it was still rainy out and we needed a sacrifice. The nasturtium and spring onions ended up being very happy there and not eaten as a companion plant sometimes is. Bengali spinach, crimson orache, magenta orache and summer purslane popped up themselves as they do each year, along with the ongoing battle with mildewy rocket, some random fennels annoyingly in the middle of a bed (plus the ones already staked and gone to flower), garlic chives, and salad burnet that had now started seeding over this way from its main patch 50cm away.
I think some more beans went in in early August too. And peas. But perhaps this was July… Kales went in, and fortunately were able to bed in roots before only a couple were nibbled by either caterpillars or slugs.
Images: 1. lettuce leaves being harvested for the salad mix, as more lettuce babies went in because these were already bolting; 2. Kale seedlings being potted on into potting mix to boost their access to nutrients and give them more space; 3. A couple weeks later the kale plantlings were ready to go in the ground, here shown being planted in by a trainee.
Wildlife.
River the cat had found a cosy bed on the wool insulation in a crate on a shelf in the polytunnel. A frog was found hiding in a gap between a brick seat, uncovered while trimming the grass around it. A mummified frog was removed from a net. A fly and a spider were wrapped up of the same web but individually, strung from the cucumber tipis. The three-cornered leek patch was weeded and in it was the (or at least a) common newt, bringing excitement that they’re still inhabiting and surviving the space.
The honeybee hives really kicked off with them all hanging out on the front, or cutely on their outside entrance terrace, just to cool down. We supered an empty box onto the largest warre hive (putting it underneath) to give them more space and airflow, but one of them got into my colleague’s suit making him freak out and then getting stung, so we had to extinguish our plan of also supering the other hive.
Images: 1. River the cat finding a good snooze place on a crate of wool insulation on a shelf in the polytunnel; 2. One of the honeybee hives covered in honeybees on the front trying to cool off during a hot spell; 3. Volunteers weeding the three-cornered leek patch discovered that the common newt was still alive!
Gleaning.
A huge undertaking in August is always the collection — or gleaning — of apples and pears from our own garden, but other community orchards and random people’s houses too. A lot of fruit goes to waste across the city because folk don’t know how to use it or have places to distribute the excess. So each year I email our spreadsheet of contacts to find out if they have a crop and if/when we can collect, plus the hunt for new donations. It actually fills me with dread because I don’t like organising myself (with an already strange schedule) around other folk, plus I don’t drive so I have to navigate public transport with equipment and consequential rucksacks of fruit.
Each year we hold a community apple pressing day where we lug out a huge heavy press, do all the juicing, pasteurise (some of) the juice, and then slowly sell it on-site over autumn and winter. This year we were fortunate to be gifted a mini press, so we’ve been able to do additional presses, useful when trees ripen at different times and therefore not all fruit stores well. There’s also loads of windfall in varying degrees of rotting that are best to be used quickly — or otherwise our composting system ends up with way too much mushy fruit.
We’d settled on September 14th for our main press, so in the meantime I was doing the contacting and arranging, while we harvested and stored what we could from our own orchard. We had a couple of mini presses, with some of the juice going straight for cider-making.
Images: 1. Using the mini press to juice on-site windfall apples; 2. Pouring pear juice into a demijohn for it to ferment into perry; 3. A harvest of local pears collected into net bags; 4. A collection of Howgate Wonder apples transported via shopping bag on the bus (along with a rucksack full, and a later collection of a rucksack full!)
I’m genuinely in denial that August has been and gone. While I’m joining in with the complaints that there wasn’t enough sun and warmth, it’s also that I didn’t feel like I stopped to totally enjoy this bountiful month. Because I was in and out of the city for festival workshops and all the prep that entailed, plus normal work with less colleagues around, and other bitty freelance things, my brief moments of respite revolved around a ritual Friday morning hour in the local coffee shop with a long black, brioche bun and reading (either Rooted, Unearthed, Rootbound or Why Women Grow).
Of course I realistically did have some summer, because I’m a gardener. And I did have a couple of afternoons sat in a local park with tins of natural cider from a converted railway arch shop, with various deli foods from one of the many organic grocery stores. That and the coffee shop reading, meandering of the streets to forage dried fallen flower petals, and spending time in my garden doing batch textile bundle dyeing are actually what London summers are for me; not going too far, but exploring the outside enough that I don’t despair from suffocation. However, it simply wasn’t enough to get a real summer vibe. Probably additionally thwarted by spending weekends in a shady windy sometimes rainy forest with canopy cover during the workshops at Camp Wildfire.
There’s been a significantly chilly switch to autumn. Swiftly there was leaf fall, unpredictable rain, and temperature drop. Where our crops were coming along well, a line has now been drawn where there’s no way we’ll get much more from the tomatoes, courgette, cucumber and squash. It’s quite a rude awakening of questioning whether you truly appreciated what you had when you had it. While I have gratitude for seasons and seasonal shifts that are noticeable (last year I remember grumbling that we went from summer to winter with no autumn), I have been left slightly remorseful and disappointed. Nothing to do but bed in though, and embrace that I’ll no longer be wearing shorts for work, and that it’s mustard time.
Images: 1. A curved cucumber perhaps useful as a phone; 2. Basket harvest of plums from my home tree to make compote and plum wine with; 3. Rucksack full of apples collected from a private house.