Month in the life of a gardener: March.
The tasks, problem solving, wildlife spots, learnings and reflections from an organic food grower in a North London kitchen garden.
Welcome to this reflection 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.
Watch reels of previous months here →
February 2024. / January 2024. / December 2023. / November 2023. / October 2023. / September 2023. / August 2023. / July 2023. / June 2023. / May 2023. / April 2023. / March 2023.
These stories form part of the Food-Fibre-Fashion publication shared to Substack and LinkedIn. There will be stories and musings to raise your awareness of how interconnected our food, fibre and fashion systems are, even when we’re looking in small scale, such as an urban garden.
This is the fifth 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 March 2024 in the form of a reel here.
Listen here or on Spotify:
Images: 1. A cosy toad in the glasshouse lettuce bed; 2. A phallic rhubarb flower brought some light relief; 3. A beautiful round red chilli on the rocoto plant; 4. A stag beetle larvae in a dead wood tunnel.
Traineeships.
Each year we take on a number of people willing to give one day a week to practical learning. I was one of those folk, back in 2019. As I mentioned in the first edition in this series, it was the consistency (and perhaps ritual) of Thursday volunteering that led me to realise that I was on a path that made sense, and to give up this learning for paid work did not make sense. Being accepted onto the traineeship opened up a lifestyle and livelihood, and ultimately a greater embodiment of the values I already held.
While you can go do a Level 1 or 2 certificate in horticulture, these courses are usually cost prohibitive, are never that accessible transport-wise, and often focus on landscape and ornamentals over food growing. The traineeships that are offered in urban gardens, and some in larger spaces in (what we’d describe as) the outskirts of London, do have a food focus. Not having a qualification in the traditional sense can, on paper, make it look like you’re inexperienced, yet most spaces would prefer you to have seen a number of seasons out. The certificates can give you a theoretical grounding (so I’ve been told) though don’t prepare you for the agility, adaptability and resilience required to actually grow food.
In our space, there’s the added bonus of learning to grow produce suitable for restaurants and cafes, it’s designed using permaculture principles, and while we’re not a community garden (because we operate within a business) we do have the community really as our main focus. We like to share knowledge, and glean knowledge.
After restarting the programme in 2023 following a pandemic hiatus, where we had 3 trainees and found it delightful to have these fresh minds around (and additional labour), this year we advertised again. At the start of the month we read through some 30 applications, eventually whittling it down to 8 candidates for interview. We’re looking for folk that have already shown commitment to food growing, even if not in a practical sense, because for us it then shows that this will be a worthwhile placement. Unfortunately it isn’t paid; there isn’t really any argument to explain why all of these food traineeships are voluntary, though I can vouch that the experience gained builds confidence and opens you up to various employments.
A good chunk of time then was spent reading applications, interviewing and deliberating. We now have 4 trainees starting in April, and we’ll see how that melds with our capacity.
Images: 1. Reading through traineeship applications; 2. Bagging up salad for a customer; 3. Mashing up "grade out" veg from a veg box scheme for our compost; 4. Foraging street petals for rehydrating for natural dyeing.
Sowing.
Sowing kicks off properly in March. A lot of seed packets and garden advice sites will give you the broad statement of “sow in spring” or “March-May” and so unless you have experience with a certain family or variety, a lot of sowing is based on intuition and experimentation. Oftentimes, we will just end up with a slew of bad weather even when apps say we won’t, so gardeners will proceed with caution in March. It’s hard not to get carried away — as like I say, seed packets say sow in March — but you have to visualise how much space you’re going to be taking up, the germination rate and timeframe, the weather of course, and if you genuinely have a place to put the plants (or if you’re just sowing because you feel like it).
At the time of writing I still haven’t managed to sow any dye plants, simply because the glasshouse space needs to have a focus on the food and other stuff for the garden. That being said, I do hope that the dye plants can offer some income eventually, or even just the engagement with visitors, but I still see the dyes and fibres as a side project, and I really shouldn’t. It’s a viable aspect of any permaculture, urban and forest garden and really should be highlighted in any food growing space to help folk visualise the interconnection between what we weat and what we wear.
However, I did focus on sowing flowers. We tend to miss the window on these, and if you don’t give dedicated time to research, then you’re unlikely to see any seedlings. That’s because flowers are just really hard. Total props to Aweside Farm in East Sussex who grow beds and beds of edible flowers for restaurants. Unlike food crops that generally have a couple day germination rate and are pretty standard in what they need (lightly covered, light, some warmth maybe), flowers are finickity. Some need light, some don’t. Some require covering, some don’t. Some can take up to 60 days to germinate. Some require stratification (placed in a fridge to resemble the outside frost), some require nicking (to resemble a natural process, probably being nibbled by an animal?), some require full on heat (forget the phrase, as if there’s a fire). You may know that (what we class as) “wildflowers” like the worse soil and yet it needs to be tilled enough so there’s contact and seeds won’t blow away, but poor enough that there isn’t too much nutrition.
All of this needs to be taken into account, especially when you’re also using the space for food crops. Currently there are trays of flower seeds that have part germinated, part not germinated, and that’s where it’s difficult to have patience because you need your space reclaiming and for things to move on. But in terms of what we’ve sown — ok there are i fact some plants that can be used for colour, such as the cosmos, scabiosa and tagetes, but these are also good for us in terms of companion cropping and being pollinator-friendly. Otherwise we’ve tried some weird old seeds, like mexican tea and gaillardia, along with other ornamentals rudbeckia and echinacea. I successfully did sunflowers for the first time, and hope they reach past this current potting on stage. Of course some flowers or nicely flowering plants are also herbs, such as camomile and yarrow and we have these as standard, so we’ll just continue sowing these until our beds are actually at capacity.
The glasshouse staging area though is very full, and now we’re at a point where some seedlings need potting on to give them space and nutrition, and so ensues the dance of propogation.
Images: 1. Potting on some onion seedlings; 2. Tomato seedlings have germinated; 3. Some of the flower seeds blanket sown in a tray have germinated; 4. Strawberry runners potted up for sale.
Maintenance.
At the start of March we weren’t yet technically in spring, and we definitely weren’t feeling any shift, as the temperature dropped and some mornings were even a little frosty. This means maintenance work can still take priority, and a big chunk of our and volunteer time was moving massive logs that had been dumped on our living hedge by a tree surgeon. That’s right — on, not even by. So with the hedge now starting to resume leafy life, we needed to shift the weight off and fix it up. Logs were moved from this place to a more suitable place and then slowly trickled into areas of the garden where they’d be useful according to the state of decomposition they were in.
Rotting logs were piled up by our pond to create a lovely soggy environment for all sorts of creatures. The longer and better condition logs were moved to the Forest Garden to demarcate the paths. Logs that were round and flat were placed in various fairy circle shapes for garden visitors.
As you may have gathered from my previous episodes, I love consolidation. This task felt monumental in tidying up the space. Just the clear boundary of this is path and this isn’t path really sings to my need for some sort of rules. It looks like a garden — rather than a messy jumble — though it may not stop children from being children. I’d also discovered a desire line through some of the trees, and so I foraged for bricks to make a new path here too. Really satisfying.
Images: 1-4. Moving tree stumps from the living hedge into various areas of the garden, as dead wood areas, as path marking and as seating, along with using bricks from some other pathways.
Mushrooms.
The logs that were previously shocked had been hung up and periodically watered via the sprinkler system. This feigns a forest environment and the mycelium inside the logs are encouraged to fruit. We in fact did have a good flush of super cute oyster mushrooms and were waiting to harvest until more had grown to full size — until on that chosen harvest day we discovered them yellow and shrivelled. Probably they weren’t receiving enough moisture and humidity. Our customer still took them as he was pickling them, and a timer was set on the tap so that they’re be watered 10 minutes every day. The mushrooms had started flushing again, but the tap kept blowing the timer hardware off leaking water everywhere. And the shiitake logs, however, still show no signs of life so perhaps they dried out too. It’s never straightforward.
Images: 1-3. Oyster mushrooms a few days apart after they started fruiting; 4. They went "over" and became yellow and shrivelled, but were still harvested.
During the log moving, we spotted loads of cool mushrooms, such as brackets, Jelly Ears (or ‘wood ears’, Auricularia auricula-judae), Turkey Tail (Coriolus versicolor) and King Alfred’s Cakes (or ‘coal fungus’, Daldinia concentrica) — the latter being useful as natural firelighters so they were a particularly useful find.
Images: 1. Wood ear mushrooms; 2. Turkey tail mushrooms; 3. A type of bracket mushroom; 4. King Alfred's cake natural firelighter.
Bees.
Realising that the dandelions were up and the temperature was generally consistently above 10˚C, we were aware that we’d have to start assembling bait hives (to encourage swarms) and increasing the size of the existing hives. This meant we needed to clean equipment. Once warmth comes, the honeybee brood will start to increase as their Mother lays eggs, and foragers forage for pollen and nectar for the energy stores that the nurse bees feed to the eggs. As the family increases, they’ll need space (or decide they simply don’t like that home for another season), and this prompts them to swarm.
Our equipment is covered in dried propolis and wax from previous families, along with disgustingly, a lot of wax moths that had settled in. Most of the stuff was actually donated, or given back in a poor condition, which is a pain because cleaning takes ages. We have kit for the standard “national” hives, as well as kit for the smaller minimal intervention “warre” style hives, and we need a bit of both to suit our existing families, and new families we hope to attract. The comb and propolis was scraped off the frames and boxes into a big trug, and once everything has been cleaned, we’ll melt this down a few times to separate out wax and propolis for use in products.
It’s worth noting that any beeswax or propolis products you’d buy in the shop will most likely come from honeybee colonies that were alive at the time. The frame would be taken and processed for honey, wax and propolis, with an empty frame replaced, so forcing the honeybees to build from scratch. Sometimes brood may even be in these cells dependent on where a beekeeper takes a frame from (and how concerned they are). Any beeswax and propolis we get (and in fact honey too) comes only from families that have died. You have to be snappy to catch this before robbers (bees, wasps, mice) get in, which is what happened to our log hive. So often you end up with bits of messy wax comb, but once processed down, is just as good, though not as “clean” in the traditional sense. Propolis though, is likely the most anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal ingredient — which is why it’s extracted and commodified — as it’s what the bees use to clean cells and seal the hive.
The hives are buzzing with activity and the families look healthy in the sense that forage is coming in. We will likely inspect in late April or May before any swarming usually occurs, to see if we can spot any new mother cells (which essentially guarantees they’re readying for a swarm) and to check for any disease, and to see their rate of production for whether they need an additional box yet.
Images: 1. Propolis scraps scraped off a frame; 2. Different states of wax from "dirty" comb to the blank frame sheets; 3. A wax moth cocooned on a frame.
Mice.
Ok so we’re in an old building, and we have a staff room where food is kept, so mice are pretty standard. Unfortunately they’d nested and then found their way into our office. We had noticed poo, but nothing else drastic. Until one day it was pointed out that the locker leak all staff thought was from a mop bucket, turned out to be bags of apple juice that the mice had eaten through, and the juice was slowly trickling out underneath the plasterboard wall. So ensued a full day cleaning the office, discovering that they’d also nibbled through a crate of tablecloths and leather (we store for events), a bag of flour, and the inside of a saved birch branch. Clearly the best stuff for nests. Frustratingly, despite cleaning, the next day there was poo back on the shelves we’d emptied. They’re rude and unnecessary, and I’m fed up of them because I have them at home too.
Images: Cleaning our office of mouse droppings and the ravages of their thieving, such as the chewed leather.
First aid training.
I’ve been wanting to do both a normal first aid course and an outdoor first aid course for some time. It seems an essential life skill. In scenarios requiring some first aid, I am able to deliver compassion, speed and some sort of intellect (or intuition, maybe), but I don’t have the overall procedural knowledge. Or at least I didn’t. I didn’t know how to do CPR, or why and when I’d perform this, and this felt useful wisdom particularly because I’m frequently out in felly mountainous landscapes alone. Not that I’d be doing CPR on myself, but on others if there isn’t anyone else about.
So I was very pleased when an opportunity arose at work to complete a two day emergency outdoor first aid course. I had focused on the CPR scenario though, and was totally intimidated by this aspect, utterly disregarding all the other stuff that may be required. With consistent practice at assessing situations, approaching casulaties and finding a solution — with outdoor scenarios on day two where I killed my casualty twice — it was emotionally draining. My brain was full of all this new anatomical knowledge, stuff about diseases I hadn’t previously considered, and concerns about remembering symptoms of conditions I’d never seen before. Plus the trauma I hadn’t anticipated emerging; nothing gruelling (like a colleague who has in fact performed CPR before), but it was very triggering playing a stroke casualty on the anniversary of my grandma’s death, who died from a second stroke.
I’m not totally convinced that in a scenario requiring first aid I’d be able to remember it all, though I am more aware of procedures and necessary equipment. It was drilled into us that anyone conducting first aid must simply be able to show that their actions were completed reasonably, and that you can only do what you can do. This information felt somewhat more overwhelming, because I’m the type of character who believes there’s always more to learn, to be done, to be acted on. I would go to sleep and wake up imagining scenarios, which was heavy and anxiety-inducing. Though I do reckon, even after a couple weeks on (and in fact, it feels way longer ago), that I’d be able to adequately wrap you up in various bandages for various injuries, administer an epi pen, perform CPR, put you in a recovery position (even on a mountain into an emergency bag, or with a suspected head and neck injury), create a tourniquet, and perhaps importantly for me, recognise a stroke.
There’s a lot of garden-related incidences that could occur, quite frighteningly depicted during our course — such as falling out of a tree onto logs breaking ribs, collapsing a lung, and breaking one side of the pelvis — and now at work I feel like I’m even more aware of all the stuff that can go wrong. So, please don’t climb those logs, be careful of that trip hazard, don’t put stuff on top of the first aid boxes, tell me if you’re anaphylaxis, don’t climb that tree, don’t eat that plant…
Images: Emergency outdoor first aid training course, with indoor segments for ease, using the CPR dummies and practicing rolls for people with head/neck injuries.
Nature weaving.
This is the second year of leading workshops in textile nature connection activities. I sometimes host them in my work garden, but also at venues and in public green spaces. I was asked, quite marvellously, by Tate Britain to host a nature weaving workshop as part of their Sunday Social afternoon of activities, so I went along with my crate of foraged branches, plant materials, yarns, rocks and tools to lead gallery visitors in this experimental craft amongst detailed rich paintings. It was chaotic and full, and all participants took to it with their unique personality.
Images: The chaos of Tate Britain's Sunday Social workshop leading a nature weaving activity of foraged plant materials and reclaimed yarns.
On the last Saturday of every month now, we host a volunteering day. And as the March one was over Easter weekend, we presented a playful task for volunteers (after they’d done some maintenance work of course). We’ve been developing the Miniplots section so that it’s easier to navigate, tidier, more welcoming and more efficient. After weaving a metal chair frame with old climbing rope last winter, I’d had in mind to weave a windbreak. My colleague had taken up the Miniplots as his project, leading the volunteers in fixing beds, and had repurposed metal osts to create a balistrade that would demarcate a seating section.
So on this warm Saturday I guided my colleague and volunteers in using climbing rope to weave panels that would create a large windbreak. It equired problem solving — the warp and weft switch to the other way around, and the balistrade and panels needed to be taken into account. I should’ve explored it on my own before inviting the volunteers around, because of course some just have to talk over you and then go and do their own thing, and then in order to keep the integrity of the structure, you have to micro manage and re-do… but others took to it well, figuring it out on their own or asking for a second opinion when unsure. It’s a real collaborative effort and should function as I’d originally envisioned, but with more durable prowess because of my colleague’s framework. It’ll be a work in progress throughout April.
Images: Staff and volunteers warp and weft old used climbing rope around this repurposed steel bar structure to create a functional windbreak.
March was a month where I think I didn’t garden too much. Days were taken up with first aid or interviews. I also had a bout of sciatic nerve pain unable to bend, and a congested cold, plus my plantar fasciitis simply won’t go away — so workdays towards the end of the month were more about staying in situ to not aggravate my body further. The weather is still discombobulating too, with simultaneous rain and sunshine. And yet, looking back, it does also feel that it was full and productive. Seedlings have come up, big tasks are in motion, I’ve learnt stuff, we’ve got our trainees.
April is going to bring a big surge in harvesting, so my focus is on finishing the produce catalogue I started in, I don’t know, way back in December, in order that we have some customers for all the stuff. I need to prioritise dye plants and flax so this project area keeps moving, and as this is our first full season as real beekeepers out on our own, we have a lot of prep to do. It feels a bit more logistically mental; that these activities require more headspace and brain power than last summer and the one before, and definitely the ones before that. That’s probably just because each year I become more settled, I learn and iterate myself as a grower, our team shifts (though now it feels stable), and the rest of life reminds you of what’s of value and what’s at stake. As I said above, this is an embodiment of all the other practices. I’m unsure if I’m rooted to this particular space as much as I think I am; but take me away from consistent working of the land and I’m sure I’d feel uprooted nevertheless. It ties me to my being, my needs, my outlook, my values.
These snapshots across a month form part of a bigger picture. An attunement to seasonality and place and interconnection of ecosystems. I know for sure that come next April when I’m writing about March, there may be similar tasks (even if I’m not here in London) but it won’t be the same. I’ll have grown and shifted as much as the world and its inhabitants have too.
Images: 1. Dehydrating saved flower petals for later use in bundle dye workshops; 2. Apple blossom; 3. A sneaky hazel seedling in the wild garlic patch; 4. Freshly harvested salad leaves with a simple balsamic dressing.