The clocks have gone back this Saturday.  Daylight hours are reducing fast as time goes on, but there is an abundance of free food out there if you are a forager, and apparently this year is a ‘mast year’ which is a superabundance that occurs every five to ten years.  The trees synchronise their most productive years, giving so much fruit and nuts that the animals can never eat them all, and there is the best chance for new saplings to establish themselves.   Apparently this is an evolutionary tactic that happens with some insects and animals too.  Nature is just amazing!  We are inundated by sycamore seeds again this autumn and are doing our best to pick up as many of them as we can with the leaves, or in the spring we will have a forest starting to grow.  We certainly had experience of that this year, and had to put the hoes to good use.  If any of the saplings get a hold, the roots go down very deep.

Exciting news of this week is that we have had a delivery of a couple of bottles of beer from the local Hythe brewery Hop Fuzz made with the hops from the Hythe Hops scheme, and so contains some of our own grown hops.  Both bottles were put into a lottery and were won by two of our gardeners, Julie and Rosie.  In the photograph below of the two bottles, you can read on the label that the brew is made with Hythe hops from ‘a team of interested people from the local community who together, want to grow hops and turn them into beer’.   Some of the proceeds also go towards supporting the local bumblebee conservation trust.   More brews from Hop Fuzz and Docker breweries will be happening before Christmas, and will be appearing in bottles and cans somewhere near you.

Docker brewery made another delivery of spent hops to our compost bins this week, and very glad we are to have them.  The smell coming from the bins was something wonderful for a change.  We are investing in another stacked wooden compost bin so that we can continue to make even more ‘black gold’, the most important bit of the garden that nourishes all the fruit and vegetables.

Rain was very much the feature of this week, which completely washed out our Wednesday meeting and half of Saturday too.  However we got broad beans and autumn peas sown, and the winter purslane got planted.  Winter purslane or claytonia is very rich in vitamin c and prefers to grow in the winter months.  We shall see if we like it enough to make it a regular feature.

What’s next?

• Finish the wood treatment on the new and old compost bins

• Sow a few more broad beans

• Are we going to net this pond?

• Order the fleece

• Dig up strawberry plants

• Move herbs to herb garden area

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Both the garlic and the elephant garlic got planted this week, and still time to plant more, as well as broad beans which could happen next week.  All the garlic had been saved from last year. 

The biggest job of the week was to turn out all of the compost bins, move and then repack them.  It is always a good opportunity to see if the compost is too dry or too wet, and to make adjustments.  Fallen leaves get collected every session, and it will take several months to fill the leaf mould compost bin.  We are thinking it would be a good idea to cover the pond surface with netting to catch falling leaves that will pollute the pond, but we have to think of the wildlife that use it and make it safe for them too.

The strawberry planters got planted up, and so we have many strawberry plants left, a few will go to some of the Incredible Edible projects in the area, and perhaps others will go to the Fremantle park project.  Nothing gets wasted, and even if things get delegated to the compost bin, it goes to make excellent compost. 

Below is a picture of one of the Fremantle Park planters being well looked after by locals.  Pleased to say, everything is currently looking lush and green there.

Now we have had plenty of rain, and beds are being cleared we can continue easily with the ‘big weed’ and work through the entire plot catching things before they have a chance to flower – again they get added to the compost bin.  Something is also making the most of the softer, pliable soil and trying to dig several holes up against the wall.  Perhaps they are trying to dig their way to the other side.  Always interesting to see and wonder at what the wildlife are up to, and the abandoned chewed up trainer left behind on the path leads you to imagine all sorts of things going on when we are not around!

What’s next?

• Sort out some netting for the pond

• Sow broad bean seeds

• Move the bench

• Re-arrange the herbs

• Start moving strawberry plants

• Order some fleece and another compost bin

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