Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Forest Gate”
Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The sun rose at 8.02 am and will set at 3.51 pm, giving us 7 hours and 49 minutes of day. The longest day, the Summer Solstice on June 21st 2026, is 16 hours and 38 minutes, more than twice as long. Today’s sunrise is not, though, the latest …
We had a lot of rain yesterday. It started in the early morning. I can’t say when. I popped into the garden at 7.30 am, holding my umbrella. I had one task and that was to see the rain gauge. It registered 10 mm, a satisfying amount after a very dry month. Just 4 mm in total before this, which …
The garden had a stall at Forest Gate Festival today, held yearly on Osborne Road. Kate brought a bin of soil and showed some soil science. Wooden medallions were painted, many by children and some adults too. And we had a plant sale, mostly with plants donated by Underleaf. The owners of Underleaf, a couple, moved into the new flats …
[This is the closing speech by Fiona Leckenby to People Powered Places at the Gate on 22 January 2025. Fiona is the Garden’s outreach worker but has also cares for local street planters over the year. Derek] Save our Street Planters came out of a real sadness about the state of the planters around our area. My aim was to …
On Christmas Eve, we had the celebration of the area’s Advent Street Calendar. Date numbers went up in house windows, one house at a time, from the 1 December to the 25 December (with one exception) in the streets participating: Earlham Grove, Clova Road, and Sprowston Road. The garden was 24, the only one not a house. 21was due to …
Today we are welcoming winter, and have adopted the Danish word ‘hygge’ for the event. It means cosy, comfortable, warm, perhaps with cake and coffee. I have looked up the pronunciation, and without getting into phonetics, the closest I can get is that it rhymes with cougar, the mountain lion, which is definitely not a hygge (hougar) creature, should one …
On Sunday, I led the walk to the Witch’s Tree. You never know in advance how many are going to come to such events. My daughter guessed seven, I was more optimistic and reckoned there’d be ten of us. We were both wildly out as 34 showed up, half of them children. The walk started from the garden at 1.10 …
Warm air holds more moisture. But you may have noted, I said it is chilly. Well, moisture in the air is picked up over the sea, mostly the Atlantic and that retains its summer warmth well into late autumn. Warm air also has more energy, which gives us fierce winds and storms. Around the country there has been some very wet weather, with extensive flooding in places like Looe in Cornwall:
We have had quite a bit of rain this week, including a couple of furious, rainbursts. They lasted less than ten minutes, but the rain belted down in stair rods, to replenish our almost empty metre cubes (IBCs). Except one. We have three, they hold about a 1000 litres each. Two were filled by the rain to about a third, but one not at all. The pipe from the pergola gutter wasn’t quite reaching the orifice of the IBC. It must have become dislodged, and the water would have gushed out and onto the ground. We have added a piece of pipe to make sure the water goes where it should.
I look for spiders in their webs about the garden. This should be their breeding days. I see a web or two but no spiders. It has been so dry and that’s bad for insects and spiders, and for the garden in general. Our water barrels are empty. We have three metre-cubes (IBCs) each with a capacity of a 1000 litres, and smaller barrels too, giving us roughly another 1000. So 4000 litres in total, all used up in watering plants. But we have the hose and we fill up the central cascade of barrels so we can water until this drought breaks.
