Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 20th March: Sunshine, Sandwich Spread, Sahara Dust and Volunteers
Yippee! It looks like there is wall to wall sunshine on the horizon for a little while and everything is starting to perk up and look just that much greener.
Rosie has been tantalising us with her homemade sandwich spread made with all sorts from the garden, chopped up fine and mixed with mayo, a little bit of tomato and grated cheese. It is the sort of thing that you can make from whatever is available at the time, but has loads of flavour. Rosie has also been roasting some of the dark kale or broccoli leaves to make ‘crisps’ which can be seasoned with all sorts of herbs and spices – absolutely delicious.
It has been one of those weeks where we did not manage to clear the list of things needing to be done from last week, but did manage to get rather a lot done all the same. Wednesday was a particularly busy day as we had hired a drop side truck in order to collect compost from our friends at Hope Farm. The farm make compost from green waste and very kindly allow us to come and collect some for free which is an incredible bonus as compost these days is so expensive. The farm does not sell compost commercially, but supplies their farm plus a few others based in Kent. Collecting the compost is always an easy business as the farm has all the right equipment and can load us up with a couple of bulldozer buckets in a matter of a couple of minutes.
The work is at the other end when we have to unload. Fortunately we had some amazing hard working and delightful volunteers from the Napier Barracks who soon had the compost unloaded and started wheelbarrowing it up to Sandgate Community Garden whilst another load was being collected. In the afternoon they came to Fremantle Park and helped us to start work on the mulching of the area in-between the new orchard trees. There is still much to do there, but soon we can begin to plant up this area with fruit bushes, herbs and flowers. We are grateful to the ‘Friends of Napier Barracks’ for making such a task a much easier one for us at the garden, and we look forward to working with them again.
The family vegetable plots at Fremantle Park had their paths weeded and another layer of wood chips put down. The chips from last year had all but disappeared into the ground, broken down over time, and it was getting difficult to work out where the paths should have been.
On Saturday, more coriander seeds got sown and the first batch of Florence fennel. Early carrots got sown direct into one of the empty beds, watered in and covered in Enviromesh. Carrots and parsnips are the only small seeds sown direct as their tap roots prefer not to be restrained in small sowing modules, but do not mind being in large pots with space. There was not enough time to sow the parsnips so that will be another task for next Wednesday.
As the weather was looking fine and the seed potatoes had sprouted, they got duly planted. We only have the space for first earlies and managed to plant two beds with enough left to create another next Wednesday which is looking like a busy day already.
The winds bringing in the orange dust from the deserts of Africa did not get missed in the garden, our tool box was completely smothered in the stuff and the slugs and snails lurking in the compost bins next door had a fine time making orange dust trails all over it. No rain on the horizon to be washing that off and so the phenomenon will be remaining with us for a while.
What’s next?
- Cut back the butterfly bush this week
- Pot up more seedlings just starting to appear, for relocation
- Tidy up the chard beds ready for their last fling
- Random onions still need removing from the Choke berry bushes
- Collect new hop twine and re-string the hops
- Sow the parsnip seeds
- Finish planting the potatoes
This weeks update from the Sandgate Community Garden Diary.
