Into the Blue

Super busy.  The myopic May focus on urgent sowing, cultivation and planting requirements often shields you from the garden’s  unravelling beauty  surrounding  you. But you can always rely on something from sideways knocking you sideways, out the blue.

A lot comes out the blue in late spring. Makes you wonder if the blue is a little congested the rest of the time. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s our fallows at Hawkwood that often surprise me most.  In the green manure beds under glass, phacelia and buckwheat are in head-turning bloom right now. The latter joined flowers of chervil, mustard, watercress, rocket and calendula in this week’s edible bouquets crafted by Pretty Delicious. These went with three hundred potted plants including wild rocket, cornflower, lemon balm, mint, oregano, alfalfa, nasturtium and  viola, which we raised, at shotgun speed, to adorn the tables at Deesha and Vishal’s wedding on Saturday. Chives and borage never looked so happy as when I pushed them down the glasshouse aisle in the Danish trolley. Just the right amount of better and worse weather.

White petals of bird cherry and apple are starting to confetti the soils now. Four beds of squash are planted up. The plants were willing but the air a little bleak. They need a bit more warmth to grow or they may perish: every burst of sunshine is to be greeted now, and on Wednesday we did our version of a sundance, planting out sunflowers amidst the chicory on the Entrance Field. Sunflowers famously follow the sun as it arcs through the sky, so perhaps there is a tiny reverse attraction. It’s a long shot, but so is the sowing of tomato seed in freezing February.

Under the protection of the glass, the tomatoes are now shrub size, in need of their first sideshooting.  Hannnah here says tomato pinching season is wedding season: countless occasions she’s been sat at the banquet and asked to explain her green stained hands. I tell volunteers that the quickest way to aquire green fingers is to pinch out tomatoes. I think it’s true.

And on Friday the first of the spring- sown salads made it into the mix. It’s a lettuce, “Sadawi”, a deep red looseleaf type. It is buttery and full flavoured with no bitterness. After a winter without, I didn’t realise how much I missed lettuce, how good it can taste.

Soon we will be awash with the stuff, and we will start taking it for granted. Something else will jump out from the blue to be flavour, or colour of the month. The cuckoo is back, announcing t the season is fully under way, and young, stretched before us, the possibilities all but endless and only vanishing where the land meets the blue.

On The Yellow Cress Road

“The best things in any garden happens by accident” – Monty Don

Our loyal box scheme members and market stall supporters will this week receive something very special in their salad bags: leaves of the Walthamstow yellow-cress.

I began trudging the Yellow-Cress Road at the start of this millenium. I had moved to Walthamstow, in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The council there had marked the centenary of the death of its most celebrated son, William Morris, in 1996, and by the time I arrived they had still, quite understandably, not managed to bring themselves to take down the party decorations. His portrait was pinned to many of the town’s streetlights, like a Robert Mugabe or a Chairman Mao: for a moment I thought I might have stepped into some Arts & Crafts socialist utopia.

It didn’t take long to be disillusioned, yet here I stayed. I had come to pursue the vision of OrganicLea: “to sustainably rehabilitate the food growing heritage of the Lea Valley”, a vision to which, of all the landowners in the Lea Valley, only the aforementioned council had offered any practical assistance.

Around this time I was reading the latest book by Richard Maybe. The botanist and writer, perhaps still most famous for his seminal foraging manual, Food For Free, had published his epic guide to UK plants and their social relevance, Flora Britanica. Much of the book concerned plant lore from exotic rural locations I could only dream of, but one small entry leapt out at me:

“An up-and-coming cousin of water-cress is Walthamstow yellow-cress, Rorripa x armoracioides, a speciality of the damp wasteland round Walthamstow Reservoirs in London”

Magic. Our little unassuming corner of East London had, hidden away, its very own variety of watercress. Surely this deserved further investigation; bringing to light; celebration. Trouble was, the cress really was hidden away. The reservoirs were, or so I thought, the preserve of a few anglers, and even if I could sneak in under the pretence of fishing, I would end up scouring vast bodies of water for a particular, undescribed form of watercress: needles and haystacks came to mind, only with a higher likelihood of getting my feet soaked. The trail went cold for a decade or so.

Despite the hype, I, like many people in the Lea Valley, found nothing to thank the 2012 Olympic Games for: save the one, following, thing. Inevitably, a small portion of all the money being sloshed around was grasped to fund some interesting fringe cultural activities: one was a botanical boat cruise of the Lower Lea, narrated by none other than Mr. Maybe. Just like the sporting spectacle, tickets for this were hard to come by, but at least one deserving local got hold of one: my friend Nicole, a founding mother of OrganicLea.

Agent Nicole was duly dispatched to make enquiries as to the whereabouts of the, now grail-like, wildflower, but the mission was an anti-climax. Maybe had no recollection of the Walthamstow. He stated, in his defence, that it had been a long time since he had researched the book. A fair point: but the fact that the yellow-cress had become extinct even in the mind of edible weeds’ most public champion, made my chances of finding the plant, and perhaps the plant’s chances of protection, that bit slimmer.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, a serendipitous meeting shortly afterwards turned things around, for good. Anaelle, one of OrganicLea’s garden outreach workers, had been training gardeners at the wonderful  “Living Under One Sun” community garden in Tottenham. For their end-of-course summer trip, they came to Hawkwood. Amongst their number was a botanist called Brian Wurzell, who was fascinated by our plantlife: not so much, I have to admit, by our resplendent vegetable cultivars as our rare forms of fungal disease: but that’s another story. Knowing, by reputation, that Brian had carried out ecological studies in the region for a number of years, I thought to ask him if, by chance, he had ever heard tell of the mythical yellow-cress. “Yes”, he replied without hesitation, I discovered it!” Cue bright light and choirs of angels.

Here, in the words of a subsequent e-mail from Brian, are the facts: “I originally found [it] close to the Lockwood Reservoir in 1971, was totally baffled and eventually, in 1974, was directed by the BSBI to send a specimen to Dr. Bengt Jonsell at Uppsala University, Sweden. He replied straightaway to give me its name, Rorippa x armoracioides, and its parental ancestors, R. austriaca and R.sylvestris. It was already known in Scandinavia but this was the first record for GB. The English name which commemorates its original site is again given in Clive Stace’s New Flora” [which is kind of the bible for serious botanists].

Immediately Brian seized on my interest in the plant, as he was concerned that it was seriously threatened in its current location. Thus it was on a bright Guy Fawkes Day 02012 that he took me to Walthamstow reservoirs, “our Lake District” as he calls it, and showed me the original site of discovery and, low and behold, more precious than gold. The flower of Waltham Forest.

He had eventually found the plant in two other London locations, both of which were since built on, and the original Lockwood colony has been reduced, first, by the building of a ring main over half of its extent, and now by the rapid encroachment of Himalayan Giant blackberry into the remainder. Having sought the permission of the Fishery, I dug up a number of rhizomes already struggling in the shade of the bramble, and set off to Hawkwood to pot them up immediately.

Here, they were brought on in trays, left outside through a harsh Scandinavian-style winter, then brought back in again to get it flushing early. The Yellow Cress was, alongside lettuce “Cerbiatta”, our first transplants of the year to go out, planted by myself Aimee and Jem one fine April day, in spring’s youth.

Although in the watercress genus, the yellow-cress neither shares a close appearance, nor the habitats, of the former. It grows in rough grassland, and looks not unlike the oriental salad Mizuna, with its light green colour, serrated leaves and slight hairiness. Though Brian himself had never tasted the plant, we assumed that any relative of watercress must have salading potential.

The yellow-cress has a mild, mustard flavour, that might be unpalatable if you were faced with a huge plateful of it, but adds a fine piquance to a bowl of mixed salad leaves. I’ve always felt that a mixed salad was a preferable ideal of a multi-cultural society than a melting pot: that different additions can complement, and temper, each other, creating something greater than the sum of its parts, rather than reducing them to a common denominator. In its finer moments, Walthamstow, a town of great social diversity with no one dominant group, achieves this.

At the risk of taking such plant-people analogies a little far, which is not something that has ever worried me before mind, I love the yellow-cress because it is a true Walthamstownian. Which is to say, like all East Enders, it is an immigrant to these parts. Brian posits that it most likely arrived here, as a piece of vegetative material, or seed (though most of the cress’ seed is sterile) on the feet of a bird migrating from Northern Scandinavia.  The cress might theoretically have settled anywhere in this green and pleasant land, or beyond, yet it found its niche here, in this rough patch of city earth, after the splendour of the fjords. Like I did, hailing from the rolling fields of Hertfordshire; or our Tuesday volunteer Nava, transplanted from the farmlands of Sri Lanka: we all find something of beauty, something worth living and fighting for, in this Dirty Old Town, though we may not have ended up here wholly by choice.

We hope you enjoy the taste of the Walthamstow yellow-cress, and that you may become as glad of this plant as we are: glad of our communities, our wild and cultivated places, our capacity to rescue one another, and our ability to surprise one another; surprise ourselves.

Laughing With the Land

I had an inkling this might happen.

A  rush and a push and a simultaneous explosion of blackthorn, peach, almond, gage, pear and apple. Never in a month of May Days have the bees got up to such a heady cocktail. Similarly the seedlings, sat in two-month sulk on the staging, lurch suddenly into becoming: all wanting to get outside now.

Any minute now. Even in years of steadier defrosting, spring’s emergency is a moment of nervous excitement, a brinking of stress and joy, for the gardener. Right now, this urban market gardener is chasing his tail and the only thing keeping things together is the amazing, steady work being done by the sowers, potters, cultivators, planters and grocers at Hawkwood. Somehow Hannah seems to find happy homes for not just the mixed salad and rhubarb, but also the endive, wild rocket and nettles, whatever fits and bursts they put on. Clare’s maternity left a gaping hole in the crucial plant stalls portfolio, but Marlene has jumped into her veggie biker boots: everything’s gonna be alright.

Every week Jo& co. play seedling tetris, bravely attempting to wedge in trays and pots whose combined surface area exceeds that of the sought-after hot bench. Nights are still cold. Late frost hunches in the peripheral like a pick pocket. Plants are trollied out of the glasshouse, then back in a day later at the drop of a centigrade. Fleece still rolls back and forth across the beds. Late Friday evening, venturing out after the coop meeting to re-cover the chervil, asparagus shoots peeped at me over the soil surface parapet.  More rummaging in the dusk for rolls of fleece. Sane people would be driven to distraction by all this to-ing and fro-ing. But you have to laugh, the sky was a picture.

The deep winter mulching of the asparagus beds now seems a myth-like memory. At the time, feeding organic matter to beds showing no signs of life – death beds – seemed as much a faith-based ritual as a horticultural task. Of course, it’s both. Miracles are a fact of life. Kneeling before the soil, the spears of Gjimlin (our Dutch cultivar) point straight up, directing your eyes to the patient sky.

Early London asparagus on the stalls at the weekend, we had the last laugh. Out loud. With the land.

Seems Like Years

“Little darling, it’s been a long, cold , lonely winter,little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear”

(The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun)

Oli, our Building Development Worker, reckons it’s been an eighteen month winter: only a mild exaggeration. Nature the teacher, though, doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for itself, but is patient and resourceful. Flower buds wait; seedlings go-slow; and, as the  leaves do not register on the trees , the wood pigeons show surprising cunning in getting through the brassica netting, and diversify their diet to include our red clover, and wild sorrel. It was beginning to look like we might have to follow suit, until this blessed week.

You can die of patience. The winter may have already dragged on too long for some gardeners’ friends: many frogs, newts and hedgehogs will have slept too long to wake up; bees’ supplies, too, run dry. Clare and Cathy have done what they can, and called an emergency wildlife gardening workshop at Hawkwood this Sunday, so local gardeners can take action to save some small souls as they rise exhausted. Maybe there is such a thing as society, after all.

After the burst of shine at the weekend, some souls are starting to stir. Woodpeckers are rattling around the adjacent woodland; a few bumbles, butterflies and hoverflies have waved at us in the glasshouse. Yesterday the soil thermometer in the Entrance Field struck six degrees, heralding the start of the growing season.

Some three months after we first began mapping the site, in 2009, Sean cantered into the building with an amazed expression on his face, claiming to have stumbled upon “the magical realm”. It turned out that this beautiful and mysteriously hidden hollow within the wildlife area had, in 1985, been dug out as a pond habitat for the endangered Great Crested Newt, with a small grant from the GLC and the blessing of their newt-loving leader, “Red Ken” Livingstone. Ken’s Magical Realm, as it has since became known, now homes the cob oven and fire pit; and is where Jonny has spent many a winter Wednesday, magicking the most elaborate compost toilet.

The dramas of London’s history echo even through its gardens. If you stroll down the hill from Ken’s Magical Realm, you soon reach the newly developed and freshly named strip at the top of the West Bank terrace. On Tuesday, we sowed  clover and planted early potatoes at Thatcher’s End. Tamped the dirt down.

Here comes the sun. Doo doo doo doo.

 

 

 

Searching for Some Spring

Across the land snow has driven the spring back in, making this the slowest start to a season since I began to record, if not since records began. Consequently, we’ve never been so prepared, with much of the winter work list fully ticked off, the ground still too wet to do the rest. Courtesy of Cathy and the City & Guilds Gardening class, we’ve even got round to getting the new tomato supports up, a good month – hopefully in more than one sense – before they will be pressed into action. You could have been fooled into thinking we were a highly organized operation, at least until we ran out of string, close to the raised bed’s finish line.

I am slightly ashamed to declare that, in the life of this project, we’ve now got through nine kilometres of polypropylene twine, that’s enough to tether the glasshouse to our distribution and outreach consulate, the Hornbeam Café. Quite what the purpose of doing such a thing is somewhat unclear though, so maybe we’ve made the right move after all, in using it to for plant supports.

Would that we could stitch a lifeline for other organic growers. The Hungry Gap arriving early after last year’s famously poor harvests, the last thing needed was an extended hiatus before the spring crops mature. However much you squint at them, the short-range weather forecasts don’t look too pretty: air temperatures of less than ten degrees do not a growing season make.

In the top corner of my little office pinboard is a quote from one of my organic growing gurus, Ian Tolhurst: “If you worry about the weather, you are in the wrong job”. I try to follow this teaching, and, like all religious followers, I am careful to find the loopholes in the text: there is nothing in Tolhurst’s commandment that prohibits one from being grumpy about the weather, for a start.

With the light growing and the sap rising, it feels like spring’s tightly coiled, ready to burst forth as soon a temperatures pick up. Stephen, Kate, Ian and I got the glory leg, finishing the heavy mulching of asparagus beds and paths, and right away I could hear the soft spears starting to stir. All we are all waiting for is for someone to bring us a bit of sunshine…

Perhaps it’ll be the ten rescued hedgehogs Stephen will be bringing from South Essex Wildlife Centre. Or this year’s flux of trainees. Usually, they start in April and have to hit the ground running: this year, Aimee, Jen, Olivia, Paul, Rob, Holly and Kristen will begin, next week, pretty much at the beginning. The seeds that have been sown sit, pent, on the glasshouse staging, the first stage of their brilliant journey. Unworried and unhurried.

Something to Sprout About

“March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”, so they say. This year, the lion has been lying down with the lamb a lot. Over the glasshouse salads, the horticultural fleece has been going back and forth like a turnip hoer’s elbow, as gladdening sun rapidly rotates to wild wet and bitter cold. Yet the spring tide takes, irresistibly.

My biometric diary entries are heavily concentrated into March, April and May; the Firsty Times. All the great debuts occur here: the first blackthorn blossom; the first bee; the first hoverfly:  through to the premier bluebells and mayflowers. All bring the news we all need to hear: we can start again.

In the garden, a series of firsts crests the ridge between bright and dark side. It is not uncommon to sow the first seeds (tomatoes always tomatoes) indoors whilst the world outside freezes over. Even so, Wednesday was remarkable. Having issued notice to the winter compost heap residents that normal management operations would commence, we spent the day turning a good few tonnes of partially decomposed matter a few metres to the left. We moved a mountain. The day warmed a little, and the heat rose from the centre of the windrow. We were sweating and some of us stripped to T-shirts , as we dug on in the face of the blizzard.

Short sleeves in the snow. This is a tough month. A friend who worked through winter on farms in the Arctic Circle in Finland once told me that the real horrors – the suicides, domestic violence and narcotic oblivion – peak not in the depths of midwinter, when dark and ice have everyone in their absolute grip, but during the meltdown, just as the colour and warmth appear, but are not quite in grasp. Just a kiss away.

The labour, hope, movement for something better, which is in sight but still has to be worked at: this month deserves its own verb, Marching. As the rich ramp up their attacks on our lives, our communities, and our sweet earth, there is much to March about right now, in the streets…and in the fields and gardens.

In the latter, here at Hawkwood, there is glory. There are few more awesome sights in horticulture than the current two highlights; the pink stems of blanching rhubarb rising in the darkness of our Cockney Blanching Benders, fists of clenched golden leaves; and the almighty hatching of the tiny seed. We’ve taken to celebrating this time of germination by making spring our beansprout season. Beans, lentils, sometimes alfalfa, mustard, clover, are germinated indoors en masse, for inclusion in our weekly vegeboxes. Of course, we – and you – could be sprouting all year round, as many people do: but for us, sprouts’ great niche is that they are a very quick-growing and nutritious something to help fill the looming Hungry Gap. In turn they help tune us in to the underlying energy of the moment, that of birth, renewal, awakening.

Later, we March out.

Spring of Memories

Say what you like about them, but I wouldn’t have got where I am today without a good food scandal every so often. The Tesco horsemeat saga is merely the latest chapter: in recent memory, over the white noise of pesticide contamination, there’s been salmonella, e-coli, foot and mouth, “mad cow”, bird flu, genetic engineering. In the war of worlds, all battles lost by the military-industrial-agricultural world; all sparking minor flurries of interest in sustainable alternatives, some of which is sustained. The growth in organic food and farming, in localised food systems, over the last three decades, can be traced in some part to such publicised calamities.

These scandals serve as reminders, snoozed alarms, of what is going on relentlessly under our noses, even as attention drifts to the next news story. They are all legally born of the modern food system’s complicated, heavy, input and supply chain, tethered to the twisted logic of profit.

I think this is a time of reminders. The seed swap event at the Hornbeam Centre on Friday was a reminder of the eternal promise of seeds, and the power of cultural exchange and community: people power buzzing and swarming through the cracks in the edifices of corporate power, in the belly of London.

On the day the last of the dry asparagus stems was fed to the wood burner, we began mulching up the asparagus beds, remembering the sleek spears’ sliding white to green, and their sublime spring succulence.

I’m remembering how the spring seed sowing schedule is meant to go again; remembering to check on the plants again; rediscover them as they rediscover growth. They are remembering themselves. As we remember again, after The Long Trudge through the winter garden, how to handle the hoe and plug tray: we re-member ourselves of planet Earth.

The bird song, the freshest green, the chitting seed, the golden light. It all comes flooding back.