Garden Blog

A cold start, the dawn sky like cut pomegranate, the road still, a light here and there, an invisible train behind the Victorian houses, rumbling out empty to the sea. I pull up my collar, whistle *Skip to My Lou* through black coffee lips, as if there are ghouls behind the plane trees and a song will shrivel them, as …

These autumn days, there are only a few flowers left in the garden. One that keeps going is the marigold. Not the French or the African variety, but the common marigold (Calendula officinalis). A well known flower grown in gardens across the UK, with its orange daisy-like blooms. There’s a clump in the garden that has been blooming for six …

The Cereal Project has finished. Most of the plants are dead; once we have removed the ears of corn, the rest is straw. They are in cardboard boxes which have taken a lot of punishment since the first sowing in March. The boxes are bulging, some close to collapse. We pull out the plants and throw them on the nearby …

The temperature has dropped eight degrees and the rains have come. It’s as if the equinox was the cut off, from summery weather. Meteorologically, this is Autumn. The Met office divides the year into four quartiles, whose boundaries are the two solstices and the two equinoxes. For Keats, Autumn was an ecstatic time of year: Season of mists and mellow …

Tea being vegetable matter, it seems obvious to put used tea bags on the compost heap. Unfortunately, nearly all tea bags have plastic film in them to hold the bag together in hot water. If you just bin the bags instead, they go into landfill. The tea inside will rot, and, with the shortage of oxygen, give off methane which …

On Bank Holiday Monday, the Community Garden held a plant sale, and raised £786. Mostly from plants, but around two hundred of this came from food and drink and sale of bric-a-brac. The plants were not only from the garden but from supporters who had been bringing plants along on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday previous to the sale. The …

Two weeks ago we had four consecutive days with temperatures over 30ºC. Now the temperature is below 20°. Summer is past; autumn has rushed in with two storms from across the Irish Sea, Ellen and Francis. If you’d just beamed yourself in somehow through a wormhole, a walk round our garden would tell you the time of year. There are …

There’s blackfly (Aphis fabae) on the willow hedge in the far corner of the garden, near the stage. If you look through the leaves, you can see black clusters round the stems. They are feeding on the sugary sap. Blackfly seem to come from nowhere, and suddenly there are thousands of them. In common with other aphids, blackfly reproduce so …

Along Woodgrange Road, from the station to the Learning Zone, there are a number of planters, and some have fared better than others depending on whether people have been maintaining them. There is now a tap in the water fountain outside the Fox and Hounds, so some of us have been taking a couple of watering cans from the Community …

The Community Garden is now open three days a week: Friday 1 – 3 pm, Saturday 1 – 3 pm, and Sunday 10 am – noon. Do come, it’ll be good to see you. On Wednesday evening, the Garden had its first meeting since January. A real meeting, in the garden, not on Zoom or Skype, but nine of us, …