Forest Gate Community Garden Sunday, 21 May 2023 The bright yellow pond irises are out, catch ’em quick, some are already fading. There’s a pond in Epping Forest called the Lost Pond. I used to go there with Woodcraft Folk over half term while they were camping at Debden, end of May. Usually the irises…

Forest Gate Community Garden Friday, 12 May 2023   On Bank Holiday Monday, a group of volunteers, organised by the garden, planted out Earlham Bridge. After the planting, it rained overnight, giving the plants a good start. And they will need it, as these beds have proved difficult for us. Last year, we had a…

Forest Gate Community Garden Monday 1st May 2023   A busy weekend for the Garden, beginning with a plant sale on Saturday, with the Garden having plenty of visitors. Then, on Bank Holiday Monday, we had a stall at the Green Fair in Forest Lane Park. I was on the Forest Gate Festival stall, which…

Forest Gate Community Garden Sunday 23 April 2023   Six months ago, I suggested we have a display of wild flowers. This was agreed at a steering group meeting. But how to get them? My first thought was to buy seeds. But the seeds, I could find were mostly collections of wild flowers suitable for…

Saturday 1 April 2023 Forest Gate Community Garden   It’s cold, with a biting wind. I look at the tadpoles in the pond; the mass of them are clustered under water over the remnant of the jelly. I am surprised they are not nearer the surface. Are they clustering to keep warm? I would expect…

Our tadpoles are just coming out of the jelly. A few are free-swimming, though masses of them are clinging to the jelly, and plenty are still inside. In a few days, there will be lots all over the pond. I don’t see any adult frogs, which were present for the spawning. They have done their…

I look at the frogspawn, the embryos are growing in the jelly. We might get the first tadpoles next weekend, if it doesn’t get cold again. We will have thousands of tadpoles, very popular with school visits. They begin as a large black patch on the jelly. If you look close, you see it’s made…

We were given various Fair Trade foods by the Co-op on Woodgrange Road: tea, coffee, bars of chocolate, a range of biscuits, and a bunch of bananas. Fair Trade was set up so that small growers get a fair price for their produce, so they can feed themselves and their families, buy the necessities of…

On Saturday, we had the culmination of Learn Draw Grow – an artistic exploration of Dr John Fothergill’s legacy. He lived from 1712 to 1780, and in 1762 he bought Upton House, now West Ham Park. There, he amassed a large plant collection, said at the time to be second only to Kew’s. Fothergill employed…

February is very much a “between” month, still winter but in sight of spring. February, though, can be treacherous, or unseasonably warm. On 26 February 2019 it was 21º in London, but last February it was minus 23º in Scotland. Meanwhile, Storm Eunice was wreaking havoc in the Garden, blowing down the painted hoarding and…

It has been icy cold for the last week, but dry. This weather is bad for birds, many will freeze to death, as will many insects including bees. We keep our bird feeders full, doing what we can. Nature is an uncaring parent, the trials of her offspring are of no concern. I am reminded…

Winter is a fluid season; when it begins and ends is arguable. With climate change all the more so, as warm spells follow cold spells adding to the confusion. We had a heavy fall of snow on 11 and 12 December. It stuck around for a week, on days that hovered around zero, then the…

It’s been very cold the last few days, no rain, with temperatures close to zero and a few degrees below overnight. There’s ice on the pond and on the trays we have left out for birds. Meteorological winter began on 1st December; we were spoilt with warmer days in November. Now we are at seasonal…

Leaves are falling. The few left in the cherry tree are yellow and red. A fierce wind will clear the branches. The sycamore is two-thirds gone, its yellow leaves continually swept off the paths. Its helicopter seeds are scattered, like invading forces threatening to overwhelm us by sheer numbers. Our birch still has its leaves.…

We have had a lot of rain recently. October had over 100 mm, twice the usual rainfall. November too is giving us daily showers. All our water barrels are brimming, which is ironic, as when you have lots of water, you don’t need it. But Thames Water informs us the hosepipe ban is still on.…

We had our festival, Welcome To Winter, today. A warm, sunny day, on the verge of Halloween. Halloween is short for All Hallows Eve, which is the day before All Saints Day. Traditions associated with Halloween go back to pagan times, and were taken up by Christianity. It was said the recently dead couldn’t go…

It’s a bright sunny morning. Warm in the sun but a little chilly in the shade. The ground is scattered with helicopters from the sycamore, its leaves beginning to yellow. Around the garden are half a dozen artists, painting or using pastels, to portray aspects of our garden. I admire their hardiness as well as…

These are the chilly days as the nights grow longer and autumn deepens. Day temperatures are in the mid-teens, and at night below 10 degrees. I see no animal life in the pond except snails. They are cold-blooded, and dormant. This is the advantage of cold-blooded creatures, by dropping into dormancy they need little food.…

It is Autumn, or nearly so. Meteorological autumn began on 1 September, so we are well into that. But astronomical autumn starts in a few days’ time. The Greenwich Observatory give the date as Friday 23 September. That day will have equal day and night, 12 hours apiece. After the equinox, the nights win out…

On Friday, we tidied up the hundreds of pots filling the back stage in order to make it usable for functions other than storage. This threw up the problem of what to do with the pots. We have far too many. Pots come to us in various ways. We buy plants in pots, plant them…

Forest Gate had 12 hours of rain yesterday, from fierce downpour to drizzle, almost filling the metre cube that collects water from our pergola. It has the largest roof area and we take advantage of that in water collection. Other barrels filled but to a lesser extent, as they are supplied by smaller roofs. The…

It feels like autumn in the garden. There’s lots of leaf fall and leaves on the sycamore and birch are yellowing. This is the effect of heat and drought. The trees are distressed. Getting rid of leaves helps alleviate water shortage, but it is at a cost as the early shutdown of photosynthesis means less…

The weather has been hot and dry for many weeks. July was the driest month on record in the UK, and August continues that way. The garden is suffering. Last Friday, I spent much of my time pulling up dead plants and throwing them on the compost heap. As the drought has gone on and…

It’s been a busy period in the garden this month. There was Forest Gate Festival at the beginning of the month, which split us in two. We were one of the 120 stalls on Osborne Road, and also kept the garden open on the same day. Last week, we had our Summer Celebration with musician…

The pond is low, a foot lower than it was in spring. The hot, dry weather is drying it out rapidly. The underwater plants, hornwort and elodea, are crowding the pond, their fronds and runners weaving all through it, growing in the hot weather but with less room for expansion in the falling water level.…

These are busy summer days, making up for the listless covid days of the last couple of years. The Garden organised the Forest Gate garden trail last weekend, when 18 gardens around the area opened up for visitors. The week before, we’d had a preview morning for the gardeners so they could at least see…

The elder (Sambucus nigra) is in bloom, a white umbrella of tiny flowers, hundreds on our tree. Last week in the countryside I saw many of them in bloom in the hedgerows. One of those trees not too sure whether it is a hedge or a tree. Ours is a tree but quite an untidy…

I water the herbs on the sleepers and in the square raised bed, though we have had a fair bit of rain this week and our tubs are filling. But one mustn’t get complacent, a hot fortnight and we’ll need every drop. It rained all morning through, and brought out the snails. I inadvertantly crushed…

The mystery chewers? Thursday last week, I came into the garden and found four leaflets we had put up had been attacked, up to a third of each chewed away. I replaced them with pristine leaflets. Three days later these were as bad. I suspected snails, but didn’t know they attacked paper. Then we found…

We had a bumper crowd for our Spring Celebration on Saturday, over 200 attendees eager to be out and meeting again after a depressing couple of years. We had music from The Smoke Remains with Paul M. Jones guitar/vocals, and Paul Romane harmonica/vocals. Then the Dog Jammers who had more than a dozen performers with…

Both cherry trees are in bloom, the large pink blossoms merging with the white of the smaller tree. Theirs will be a brief show, but let’s enjoy them on these sunny Easter days. More than half of the new fence has been put in. At the front, there’s a new gate, with the fence stretching…

This weather is typical of April, see-saw temperatures, chilly followed by warmth and back to chilly. ‘Don’t shed a clout till May is out,’ goes the old saw. It is not referring to the month but to the may tree (hawthorn) which will flower in late April, depending on the weather. If we took it…

We’ve had some very warm days for the time of year, touching 20 degrees. There’s lots of wriggling in the frog spawn. Heat accelerates hatching time, as the various chemical reactions are sped up. I wonder how much of the mass is unfertilized. Some to be sure, with so much of it, and fertilization such…

Not only has our pond a mass of frog spawn, but we have had adult frogs too. Not surprising as you can’t get the former without the latter. But we don’t usually see the adults, and we have witnessed them mating too. That’s a lengthy process, with the male on top of the female for…

It is spring. The garden says so. There’s flowers, buds are beginning to open, and there’s birdsong. In the pond I see a great cluster of frog spawn. Such a mass of it, around a square foot I estimate, though not of course regular, but amorphous like a cloud. I do a little counting, and…

We are crowdfunding to replace our fence. The current wooden fence was painted with a bright mural in 2016, now looking rather battered and less bright. A section of the fence on Sprowston and on Earlham, along with the front gate, got blown down by storm Eunice 10 days ago. Temporary repairs have been done,…

The storms keep coming, first Dudley, then Eunice, and as I write along comes Franklin. The not so cuddly threesome, bringing rain and high winds. Storm Eunice hit the garden in some quite surprising ways. A clear plastic pane from the greenhouse roof was blown away to some place unknown. We can’t find it. Not…

It’s been dry for the last four weeks but today it rained. At last. A long dry spell in winter hinders growth, as plants are coming out of winter dormancy and need water in order to make new shoots. But the trouble with rain is you either get too much or too little. And with…

January is the longest month. Beginning at the tail end of Christmas and finishing in sight of spring; it is a shivery time to get through. The days, though, are slowly getting longer and the garden, like a drowsy sleeper, rubs its eyes in the growing light. Buds in trees and bushes form in the…

It was -2ºC in the early hours and the pond is still frozen when I come into the garden at 10 am. The ice isn’t smooth but has ribs in places, rather like a church ceiling. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that ice has more volume than the same weight…

It is biting cold, the wind blowing the last leaves off the sycamore. The cherry is already stripped, though the birch, its leaves gone yellow, has still plenty of little flags. The pond is withered, the iris leaves languid and browning. The papyrus is unhappy this weather, this exiled plant dreaming of the Nile, crocodiles…

We have got our 2m strip back from Gateway. This was ‘loaned’ to the site as they needed it for access for their building work. For us it meant flipping over our roofed pergola, and moving any plants in pots. Plants growing along the boundary in the ground such as ash and Russian vine were…

It has been a typical November week, with rain and temperatures slightly above average, and lots of leaf fall. Most fall this month, some in October, a few in the first week of December, but November is the month when the mass comes down. Most of the fallen leaves, so far, are from the big…

It’s chilly in the garden with a biting wind. This is November without doubt. On Saturday we had our Welcoming Winter festival. There was home-made soup and bread to keep the cold away. We had bulb planting, mostly by children (‘pointed end up’) but a few adults too. Some were planted around the garden but…

COP26 starts on October 30 and is due to finish on 12 November, but is likely to extend through that weekend with all the arguments and attempts at getting coherent policy from the differing interests. In 2009, I went to Copenhagen with the Campaign Against Climate Change. This was COP15, and we were there for…

Changeable weather has come in with the autumn winds. We’ve had lots of rain in the last few weeks, some sun and up-and-down temperatures. The days are shortening; at the end of the month we lose an hour of light. Well, not actually lose; we play with the clock to push an extra daylight hour…

The fencing is going up between us and the Gateway site as the estate nears completion. I recall the trains of concrete lorries going in as work progressed. The main ingredient of concrete is cement which in its manufacture accounts for 8% of climate change gases. At the only consultative meeting between the housing association…

It rained hard in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with thunder and lightning too. I came into the garden in the late morning to find the rain barrels full. The pond could take no more, and was noticeably a little lopsided, the water its spirit level, the westerly end filled to the brim, and…

We had an Indian summer through September with temperatures above average until the last few days. But the weather demon commands: Enough! No more pretending, autumn is autumn not a pretend summer. The temperature has dropped to mid teens, but at least we have no worries about water with the rainfall we are having. The…

Last weekend, the garden had a green couple of days with Dr Bike in the garden helping cyclists keep their bikes maintained, a mini open gardens trail, a plant sale and a tree climate walk. Green issues and climate are much on our minds these days as we home in on November’s COP26 summit in…

Over the next week, we’ll disassemble the display of plants from the continent of America. Reluctant as I am to part company with the Americana, those plants on the sleepers are becoming an eyesore. We’ll leave the sunflowers while they are flowering; the largest are over 6 feet high with their bright yellow clock-like faces.…

It rained on Wednesday, after ten dry days, with temperatures up to 30 degrees, just to test our mettle and our watering cans. Our tap was removed at short notice two weeks ago, so our water butts were on the low side. The rain has partially filled them. So we are OK for now. I…

Water, Snails, CCU The garden has lost its water tap. Without notice, the next door contractors cut us off. We knew this was likely but some notice would have been polite, so at least we could have filled our water barrels. The only plus point is that it is September and cooler, so there is…

We segue into autumn. The garden knows it, with the seeds and the beginning of leaf fall. Though autumn has two definitions, and you may take your pick. There’s meteorological autumn which breaks the year into four sections of three months. September, October and November are autumn. And there’s astronomical autumn, with autumn beginning at…

Autumn is in the air, unavoidably, as the earth makes its yearly journey around the sun. Though the weather can make it seem as if summer is extended or autumn has charged in earlier. This year looks like we are having the latter, but we mortals are playthings of the gods, and things may yet…

The brown slug (Arion ater) that I thought had been eaten by a bird has re-appeared, or perhaps it’s not the same, as I see another shortly after. The former is about as long as my middle finger, plump as a chipolata. The back half of its body has ridges rather like a fingerprint, but…

Last Sunday, for the first time since 2019, we had music again in the garden. About 40 people turned up to hear Lucky Thomas playing his pan (or steel drum as you might know it as). Lucky played a mixture of reggae and popular tunes in a rhythm that made one think of Jamaica and…

Last Sunday Forest Gate had a month’s rain in a few hours. I checked this by measuring with a ruler the water collected in a tin bath that’s in the garden. You can’t put one freak weather event down to climate change, but climate change makes such events more frequent, with the outliers becoming more…

On Wednesday evening I came into the garden to water the plants, only to find the tap not working due to a fault on Gateway’s site next door. The garden was gasping, plants in pots wilting after a week of hot, dry weather. With watering cans we do what we can, using what is in…

There remain tadpoles in the pond even in mid July. Some have left, others are almost frogs with froggy heads and limbs and the tail yet to be absorbed. Others are tadpole-like but with the addition of hind legs. Having got this far, will these tadpoles continue on to full frogdom? I am not sure…

We’ve had lots of rain recently which means lots of growth, in spite of temperatures being on the low side. In the wildflower bed are red and yellow poppies in profusion. The individual flowers don’t last long but others follow in succession. There’s blue borage, cornflowers, and wild carrot, which looks very like cow parsley…

What to do about the snails which are attacking the butternut squash and sunflowers in the square raised bed? I put copper coated mesh around the edge of the bed. It didn’t work; there were snail trails across it. I tried coffee grounds, that didn’t work either. In the meantime, I have been utilising plastic…

All the Americana plants are in place, a display of food plants that originated on the American continent. Most were brought to Europe by Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. A spin-off in the conquistadors’ main quest for gold, land, and dominion.   The plants on display are (see…

  The scourers did not work as a snail barrier (see last week’s blog). A few days after putting them on the sides of the raised bed, the butternut squash and sunflowers were attacked by snails. Some of the smaller sunflower seedlings were chomped away completely, while the butternut squash has suffered damage to its…

Snails. Wet weather increases their number, and we had the rainiest May, followed by a few days of sunshine, and then a deluge last Friday. I came in on Saturday to look at Americana, our display of food plants from the continent of America. And the snails had been at them. Snails are very selective.…

I come into the garden and witness three mesmerised volunteers. I quickly join them as we watch hundreds of tiny spiders crawling on the edge of a plastic table or dangling from threads. They are about 2mm across, and have obviously just hatched. The mother spider lays her eggs in autumn and wraps them in…

It has rained all morning and much of the afternoon. Although May was very wet, the rain stopped in the last week of the month, and the temperature climbed to the mid 20s at the beginning of this week. Such hot, dry weather threatened to dessicate seedlings in our wildflower bed, and dry out our…

It doesn’t feel like May. Not a day to shed a clout. We’ve had lots of rain, we could be heading for a record for the month. And temperatures stay in the chilly teens, feeling colder today with the strong wind. Yesterday, we had a visit from Kay Rowe nursery, all swaddled up and with…

It’s been raining on and off. No complaints after dry April. It’s chilly, though, which has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that plants in flower last longer. Hot days accelerate the life cycle giving shorter flowering times. It’s down to chemistry; the warmer it is, the faster are chemical reactions. Though with living processes…

It’s been cold and windy these first days of May. The wind blew away the blossom from the large cherry in a gale that one can imagine picking up our book shed, like Dorothy’s house in Kansas. But not quite a whirlwind, though it knocked over pots and chairs, and flattened the maize seedlings I…

There’s garlic and garlic and there’s garlic. All tasting and smelling of garlic, but from different plants, closely related, mostly alliums. There’s the garlic we are familiar with in the kitchen, Allium sativum. It’s a bulb and we break off cloves for cooking. Breaking off cloves is also the easiest way of growing it. Simply…

I was surprised to find stitchwort (Stellaria holostea) in the garden. It’s a wild flower common in country hedgerows and woodlands this time of year, but I don’t recall seeing it around here before. It has five white petals, almost looking like ten as each petal is split. And this struck me as the ‘stitch’…

The sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) leaves are just coming out and with them the flowers. The latter are green which might lead one to think they are wind pollinated, as insect pollinated flowers are usually colourful. But it’s nectar that matters most. That’s what insects come for, and the sycamore flowers have it. Colour isn’t everything.…

It has been cold the last week, with frost on some mornings. Cold slows living processes. We, ourselves, are warm blooded but have to swaddle up on cold days and warm our houses in order to function properly. Birds are warm blooded too but really suffer in the cold. Their feathers insulate them but they…

We had lots of rain in the first weeks of March, and then it stopped completely; the rest of the month was dry and hot, with temperatures up to 24ºC. So the hose was used for the first time this year and the garden given a soaking. Our greenhouse plants are especially needful as on…

Spring will not be denied. It is everywhere in the garden. The equinox was last Saturday, when night and day are equal, in the crossover as the days stretch out to summertime. This weekend we play the usual game with the clocks, and bring forward dawn by an hour so there’s an extra hour of…

We don’t use herbicides or pesticides in the community garden. Diseased plants, we prune if possible and suffer a few losses. Artificial chemicals kill off more than the pests that they target, and our aim is to encourage wildlife, not destroy it. A class of pesticides frequently in the news is neonicotinoids. Neonics, the family…

When I came into the garden yesterday, the wind was blowing a gale. The plastic sheeting covering the half-completed flats next door was thrashing like a loose sail. A number of chairs had blown over, and the triangular cover of our display stand had been ripped off. Four years ago, high winds tore down part…

Forest Gate Community Garden is planning for when we can open for visitors. This month, volunteers will be tidying the garden, planting, and generally sprucing up for what we hope will be our April opening, as lockdown eases due to the roll out of the vaccine programme. We have all been too cut off these…

I took a photo of miniature daffodils last week but the picture showed flowers that didn’t look like miniatures, with nothing to judge their size by. So I had another go this week; I took a reel of cotton into the Garden and took a photo of the miniatures next to it. That didn’t work…

It’s chilly though the sun is shining. There’s ripples across the pond to the tune of the wind. The surface vegetation has withered though the underwater oxygenators, hornwort and elodea, are green but providing little oxygen. They need more heat than this February sun is giving out. The forecast says we may get it at…

It’s icy cold. Last night, the temperature dropped to -5ºC. There’s ice on the pond, and on all our water barrels. A very usual phenomenon when it’s so cold. So usual, we don’t normally think about it, too commonplace. Like why do things fall down instead of up, a silly seeming query which led Isaac…

Lockdown is a good time for projects. And what better one could there be than working out how to lower our carbon footprint? You could pick one of these: home energy, travel, food, other purchases. Have a go at lowering your energy use for that sector. Go green! Last week I considered milk, and specifically…

Daffodils are on their way, budding here and there in the garden. We’ll have quite a few in bloom by mid February, but now there’s just a single flower by our middle stage, next to two hellebores also in bloom. We are creeping out of winter as we come to the end of this long…

In the rear of the garden, there’s ivy (Hedera helix) clinging to the fence, between us and the Gateway site. Ivy is adaptable and also grows on the ground, forming dense clumps. It is frequently used as ground cover, though it is rather dull if not interspersed with more colourful plants. We see it everywhere,…

The Garden is closed, and when it will open again is not in our power to say. I’d guess a few months yet, when most people have been vaccinated and the lockdown is relaxed. There’s no way round closure, it is just a pity as we do enjoy having visitors. The days are cold and…

Covid has influenced so much this year. There was to have been mince pies and mulled wine for volunteers on Sunday, but the event was cancelled because of the new stricter rules. It exemplifies the way the year has gone. The garden has been going since 2016, and in normal years, we’ve organised music and…

Plants are dependent on day length. It determines the emergence and growth of flowers and leaves. To be expected when you think about it, as plants get their energy for growth, that is for making new cells, from sunlight. As well as energy, the sugar produced is combined with nitrates to make protein, vital components…

‘Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?’ These are the first lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1880 poem, ‘Spring and Fall’. Margaret, a young girl, is sad because the leaves are falling from the trees. The title uses the US…

The first compost bin I made, over 30 years ago, hadn’t been thought out. It was square with wooden posts and plastic sheet for sides. When nothing much was happening, I added lots of water. The result was an awfully smelly mix, like liquid sewage. So, having failed, I read up on composting to get…

Scattered about the garden are sycamore helicopters. Picked up by the wind, they twirl away from the parent tree. Though many lie at the foot, rather uselessly, as if they were to grow, they would be so overshadowed, they’d fail to make maturity. In truth, none will in our garden as we’ll sweep them up,…

There’s clumps of honey fungus (Armillaria mellea) at the rear of the garden, around various wooden posts. The mushrooms are a warm honey-brown colour, bunches of them tightly packed. It’s the time for mushrooms, damp autumn with still a little warmth in the air. But not everyone loves armillaria. When I worked in the parks…

The rising numbers of coronavirus has necessitated a second lockdown for a month, starting yesterday. The community garden is not closing, though we will monitor the situation. The garden is, in effect, a small park, so visitors are allowed. There’s hand cleanser at the door, and we will take phone numbers, both of which we…

Herbaceous plants are dying back as temperatures fall and the daylight hours lessen. All part of the yearly cycle, their roots remaining alive to put forth new shoots in spring. A season we are planning for. We have been planting daffodil bulbs in various planters: along Woodgrange, McGrath Road, and in the new traffic free…

Many of the sycamore leaves falling from the large sycamore by the fence have tar spot. These are dark brown spots, very evident on the yellow leaf, looking as if they have been sprayed on. Tar spot is a fungal disease, and the spots are the fruiting body, meaning they contain the spores. The spores…

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…

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…

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…

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:…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Four years ago, when our pond was new, it had a small solar powered pump. The role of the pump was to keep the pond oxygenated for animal life such as tadpoles, daphnia, water boatmen, dragonfly and damselfly larvae and so forth. The pump though only worked intermittently, and after a few months we gave…

We re-opened the Garden to the public last Sunday morning. Cautiously, just 10 am to 12 noon, one morning a week. Our protocol is set. There’s gel at the door to make sure visitors come in with clean hands, and a signing-in book. After the welcome, we ask our guests to maintain social distancing. Basic…

Listening to Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ I muse on plant names. Until recently, I thought Salley Gardens referred to the Salvation Army, maybe where they did their band practice. But no. Salley comes from salix which is the genus of willow, which are in the gardens ‘where my love and I…

In these blogs, I have written about the Cereal Project but just in snippets. I thought I’d do an overall piece now that the cereals are maturing. A cereal is a grass which has seeds we use for food. Most grasses have seeds which are too small for food. A few in nature though have…

I snap these sun flies (Helophilus pendulus) on a leaf on the pond. Helophilus means marsh loving and pendulus means hanging, so our pond is their manor. The name sun flies is thought to be a misreading of ‘Helo’ as ‘Helio’ (marsh as sun), as they are no more sunlovers than many other flies. Because…

We are contemplating how we might open the garden to the public once more as the lockdown eases. Museums, art galleries and cinemas are opening on July 4th. Most will have a booking system to keep numbers down for social distancing. A booking system is a possibility for us too. We are less risky as…

The rain began in the early hours of Thursday. It continued for eight hours, and then on and off during the day. It wasn’t heavy but was steady, allowing water to soak deep into the soil. Much more than we can deliver with a hose. We water for around 40 minutes on three nights every…

Phacelia (Phacelia tanacatifolia) is a plant native to SW United States and Mexico. So what is it doing in our wildflower bed? Presumably it was among the seeds in the pack we bought, but that simply pushes the question back a level, like what was there before the Big Bang, or who made God? None…

It’s a chilly, overcast morning, 13ºC, feeling all the colder with a 17mph wind. My source is BBC Weather for E7. That’s a 13 degree drop from last week. Although chilly for me, better for the garden as it allows our watering to sink deeper into the soil, and flowers to mature more slowly, and…

Gateway agreed to put in a water tap as a quid pro quo for the space they have taken from us for as long as their building work continues. I was pessimistic on their timetable for installing it. My feeling was, now that they have what they want, why hurry. But they did it quickly,…

The old pergola has gone. But the roof has been flipped over, so with the retained wall and a new set of posts, we have a new pergola. We have lost space, a two metre passage to the road taken over by Gateway as access for its adjacent site. Our front gate has changed too.…

As we have no visitors, we have gone easy on tidying the garden. This non-activity is friendly to wildlife as a very tidy garden denies habitats. In town gardens, one of the biggest enemies of frogs, once they have left the pond, are the mower and strimmer. Another bonus to our laxity are wild flowers.…

I am watching from the community garden as a bulldozer rips out the white buddleia on the next door site. I am mesmerized by the sound and fury. It is so quick, in no time much of the large shrub is flying in the jaws of the beast. Ten seconds, in a piercing engine growl,…

At last, rain. April, till the last few days, had been absolutely dry, March hardly better. Our water barrels were running low, but a whole day of rain on Tuesday, and rain most days since, have filled them. The pond is a couple of inches higher; the garden sighs with relief. The temperature has dropped,…

There are dandelions in the garden. Which brings up the perennial query, what is a weed? The common answers are: a plant you don’t want, or a plant in the wrong place. A personal answer, either way. So I’ll give my answer; I like dandelions, so they are not weeds. They are wild flowers. I…

The Japanese cherry is still eye-catching in its froth of flowers, but already petals are falling and the leaves are growing. It’s as if the leaves are offended by all that showing off and so are doing their best to hide the display. The cereals (two wheats, oats, barley and rye) are 6 to 8…

As the days are warm, I have moved some trial rice into the greenhouse. I have been growing this at home, and it is pallid, some barely alive. I think it is lack of light, but I can’t be sure. The problem with the greenhouse, which is unheated, is that it gets chilly at night.…

I come in, planning to take some photos and water the plants. I leave my bag on a bench, and take out the camera, intending to take a few snaps of the cereal project. I get as far as the birch by the water butt, when I see the fox. I freeze, knowing if I…

I will blog once a week, so long as it is allowed in the current crisis. My visits to the garden are my outdoor exercise for the day. I do some planting, watering and general garden maintenance. While I am there, only Kevin is present, and we take care to keep our distance from one…

A garden in the time of coronavirus. It is impossible to keep up. On Thursday 19 March, I wrote: “With all local venues shutting down, we decided to swim against the tide, at least temporarily, and open up on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, as well as our usual Friday and Saturday morning. Maybe no substitute…

It’s a bright winter’s day, 7°C, a little chilly, but the sunlight brightens the spirit. It has been a mild winter and our first daffodils are in bloom in an apple tree tub at the rear of the garden. Other daffs are close to flowering, and we’ll have quite a few blooms by the weekend.…

The pond is full to the brim, and surely spills over in the rain. Wheelbarrows are heaped on our twin compost heaps. They will not compost, nor add warmth this time of year, but they give us a little more space, and tell anyone: *No more on the heaps, please. They are full.* It’s chilly…

A chilly morning, which often follows a clear night, but the day warms by the time I get to the garden. Leaves are still hanging on in the trees, but they are yellow and crinkly with those on the cherry trees having patches of red. The buds for next year’s foliage are already there in…

It has rained hard since noon, and is still raining when I arrive. We have had so much rain this month that it must be a record breaker for October. The pond is full and so are our barrels. In spite of the rain, the roof is being put on the back stage. When completed,…

A chilly day to begin with, and raining when we came into the garden, to be greeted by Dean, a senior site officer for Hill, the contractor for the next door site. He has, he tells us, good news and bad. The good news is there is often material available on their site. They use…

A very autumn day, overcast, about 15ºC, when I first arrive. We have few visitors until four o’clock, and then we get mothers and toddlers, and some primary schoolboys who play with our Duplo. Five girls come from Forest Gate Community School. They settle down at a table and have a very civilised picnic. We…

It’s a dull autumn day. Almost all the buddleia has been cut back, and the wild flower bed has been cleared completely. I shall miss the latter. It was the most colourful area of the garden in midsummer with pink campion, blue cornflowers, yellow California poppies, bright red poppies and white wild carrot flowers. When…

Two judges for London in Bloom came to assess our garden on July 5th, a beautiful summer’s day. There was quite a crowd as Bumps & Babies were there, as well as a number of well-wishers. All that week, we’d been sprucing up the garden, finishing with a fresh layer of woodchip. Sophie and Steve…

This weekend is the Autumn Equinox when we have 12 hours day and 12 hours night. After the equinox, night wins out until the shortest day in late December. The already longer nights give us chilly mornings, although it is very pleasant when I arrive at 2pm. Waiting for me is a wheelbarrow of grass…

It’s a warm day, hot even when the sun is in the clouds. We are overlooked by two huge cranes on the building site next to us. One was built yesterday and the other this morning. I know this as I went out to get a paper at 7.30 am and there was only one…

A pleasant day, mostly sunny, about 20ºC. Hopefully, we have left behind those days of fierce heat. No good for flora or fauna. It rained a little yesterday, enough for us to skip evening watering last night, but today many plants were suffering. So we watered on. I took down the leaflets for our Late…

It’s been a hot, dry week with temperatures reaching 33ºC. Today, it drops to 24ºC which is more bearable but it remains dry. We spend much of the afternoon filling our barrels from water we ferry over from Kevin’s flat in Sprowston Road. And then we water the garden. We have lots of plants in…

Most of our flowers have finished their season but there are still plenty of bees. I suspect they are going for levels of nectar they would have disdained a month ago, working harder for less reward. There’s a bumble bee on a clump of purple toadflax. It’s hairy with a sort of brown scarf round…

August is a month that begins in summer and ends in autumn. Today, mid month, feels like an early autumn day. It is warm and windy, and many of the flowers have finished blooming, so you need to look a little harder to see what there is. We have three small pear trees by the…

A painted lady and cabbage white butterfly fly through the pergola. There are lots of butterflies around, and bees too, in the remaining flowering plants: hollyhocks, globe thistles, gazanias, and lychnis. But it is also the time of year for blackberries and there are quite a few by the side of the pond, but difficult…

It’s warm in the garden when I arrive and cloudy. At around 3pm, the sun comes out and it’s hot. This is the walled garden effect, which is why large country houses wall in their vegetable gardens. It protects fruit and veg from the worst of the weather, and gives them more heat in summer.…

The hottest day of the year, peaking at 37ºC in the garden. It’s a record for July in the UK (38.1ºC in Cambridge) but that’s no cause for celebration. These hot days are a prelude of what is to come, payback for our reliance on fossil fuels, on our meat consumption and the population increase.…

It rained this morning, not a lot, a few millimetres, but enough to liven the plants for the day. And limit our watering to the greenhouse plants and those under the pergola walkway. The month has been very dry; we have come in during the evenings to water, especially those plants in pots which dry…

It’s hot and dry, with water stocks low. So reminiscent of last year’s drought. We have had so little rain in the past few weeks that I am too aware of what is to come in the coming decades with climate change. Just before leaving home, I read in the paper about a report from…

Britain in Bloom are coming to judge us tomorrow. So we are having a tidy up. A lorry load of woodchip arrived yesterday, and today we wheelbarrow it around the garden, and spread it over the paths and between the raised beds. But all this tidying up sets me thinking. We have put down more…

The doors are in! Bring out the bunting. A couple of months ago we put the call out for doors, and over 20 came from supporters. Thank you, all. Three weeks ago we took down the crumbling wooden fence at the back. New posts went in last week from donated wood. This week, the doors…

It’s warm, 20ºC, with a fair bit of sunshine. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, and today close,at 16 hours 39 minutes of daylight. The sun rose at 04.42 and will set at 21.21. All of which means the year is half over, and from Saturday, the days grow shorter. But the world…

The afternoon is chilly, around 14ºC, and breezy, making it feel even colder. It had just stopped raining when I arrived. The sky is still grey and glowering. I know we will have few visitors. Last Thursday, we were worrying about the lack of water in our barrels, after three dry weeks. But from then…

A pleasant, mostly sunny afternoon. We are sheltered from the wind. There was a misting of rain this morning, and a few millimetres on Tuesday, but it will take a lot more to make up for the past two dry months. Such slight falls don’t penetrate the soil, so saplings like the walnut and the…

It’s warm in the garden with intermittent sunshine. The overriding topic is water. There’s been little rain in May, and April was a dry month too. Over the spring months the pond has dropped four inches. All the barrels at the back of the centre staging are empty. The metre cube is about a third…

It’s warm and sunny today, and everybody comes to the Garden. Or it seems that way. We have 30 nursery children from Woodgrange with 10 adults, and 10 children with adults from Durning Hall too. That’s apart from after school children, and mothers with babies and toddlers, and a few dad’s too. Irises are in…

It’s warm and sunny today, with a mostly blue sky. Volunteers and visitors are in a good mood in the spring sunshine. The garden is busy, there are parents with toddlers, some with pushchairs, and volunteers who have been to the Methodist Church on Woodgrange. The community centre is due for demolition and we have…

A rainy day, on and off. More on than off. Few visitors. Between showers, I look around the garden. There are lots of birds going to our feeders. I see a blue tit coming out of the bird box by the sycamore and almost at once another going in. They are probably incubating eggs. In…

It’s chilly with a sharp wind, the sky grubby white as if rubbed with charcoal. Earlier in the day there was sunshine but it’s gone for the day. Not a day when we’ll get many visitors. There’s a patch of vetch near the greenhouse. And quite a bit more of it in the wild flower…

It’s 15ºC and overcast. Pleasant when the sun is out and a little chilly when it’s in the clouds. Fairly quiet today. One group of nursery children from Maryland Children’s Centre haven’t come, although we had about eight children from Durning Hall, who haven’t been here before. The adults with them said they had enjoyed…

A sunny day in the garden, about 20 degrees. It’s quiet today, few people realise we are open Thursday afternoons. We’ll likely pick up when the schools go back after Easter. The large flowering cherry is at peak blossom, pink petals are starting to fall. It is such a fragile blossom, a little breeze and…

The sun is shining, but it’s just 12ºC. It feels, though, so much warmer. That must be the effect of the wooden fence round garden, sheltering us. This is the first Thursday opening of the year, the beginning of our summer timetable. There’s flowers and blossom everywhere. There are overhangs of white spiraea florets in…

It is a cold morning, 2 degrees C, though the sun is out, but there is not a lot of heat in its glow. The pond is frozen over and almost full to the brim. The surface vegetation is mostly shrivelled. I see a few snails, hibernating. And no other animal life in the pond.…

I visit the garden on the first day of the new year, not expecting much. It’s chilly, the wind nibbling at my fingers as I write these notes. The garden is dormant, though there are a few flowers here and there that have not read the rules: a small Viburnum tinus, an evergreen shrub, with…

This is the last Thursday of the year for the garden. After this session, we go to the winter timetable, when the garden will open only on Fridays and Saturdays. In the spring, we’ll open on Thursday once more. It’s like an end of term day and the weather adds to this. At first, it’s…

I am surprised how busy we are this afternoon as it’s on the chilly side, 16ºC. pleasant in the sun but parky when the sun is in the clouds, which it is about half the time. We have a visit by eight medical students from QMC. They are very young, like six formers, which is…

It is windy this afternoon, with heavy dark clouds. Rain is forecast, but we escape it and the clouds clear, granting us a little sunshine, giving long autumn shadows. It’s about 20ºC but feels colder because of the wind. The pond is fuller after the weekend rain. There are lots of water fleas. They are…

It’s around 17ºC in the garden, a little chilly when the sun goes in the clouds, but pleasant when it is out. Mothers come with nursery children about 3.30, along with toddlers, and a little later infants from Godwin. We make sure the child gates are on at the front and side gates as the…

A bright sunny afternoon, 23ºC, following a chilly morning. The autumnal equinox was on Sunday (23 September). Now the days grow shorter until late December. The sun rose at five to seven this morning; so late, no wonder the morning was cold. But a great afternoon and, in the sunshine, the garden fills with mothers…

It is mild in the garden, about 20ºC, the skies threatening rain without delivering. Over night, the wind has blown down the large gazebo between the nursery and the pond. The billowing canvas has the power of a sail and its thrashing snapped one of the poles, bent another, and broke a joint fitting. We…

Walking down the road at 7.30 am this morning, I could see my breath; the temperature around 5ºC. And now, at 2pm, it’s over 20ºC. That’s autumn for you. A long clear night gave us a chilly morning, with sunrise close to 7 am, a long way from mid summer sunrises at 4 am. I…

It is pleasant in the sun this afternoon but a little chilly when it clouds over. The wild flower bed has been cleared. Seeing it bare, I think it would make a good area for a sundial with the small stakes around it marking out the hours. It would still be a wild flower bed,…

August is a transition month. The first day is definitely summer, the last is unarguably autumn. So here we are, no denying it: autumn. The days are shorter, we are heading for the equinox. In the garden are blackberries, lots of seed heads, and pears on the tree. It’s sunny and warm, not the fierce…

A sunny, warm day in the garden. This morning, we had rain which has invigorated the garden. It is a pleasure to come in after its gasping state through much of the summer. The wild flower bed is a mass of thistles with brushes of thistledown but here and there are a few white bladder…

It is raining as I get the key for the garden from Durning Hall. We’ve had it all morning, but as I am walking to the side gate of the garden, the rain stops. A pleasant coincidence. I open the door, and am hit by greenness. The garden has grabbed the rain and light, and…

It has rained all day. Our awnings are dripping into buckets which we add to the water butts. We watch the rain in fascination like children who are seeing snow for the first time. It has been ages since we’ve had a prolonged downpour. I stick a garden fork in the earth to see how…

It’s 31ºC in the garden, a clear blue sky with not a single cloud. For an hour, four of us collect water to fill the barrels. We have enough for a few days and will water tonight at 7.30, when the day is cooling. There have been three rainy days in the last week, but…

At 34°C, it is the hottest day of the year. We collect water from Kevin, but don’t work too hard as we have sufficient for a few days, and it is too hot for extended exertion. We have had no rain since 29 May. I keep a journal and on that day, I wrote: ‘Lots…

Another hot day, 28°C, and the drought continues. We have gone seven weeks without rain. People are bringing water to the garden, for which we are grateful, but the bulk comes from Kevin who lives across the road. His flat is up on the second floor; he puts a hosepipe out of his window down…

It’s cooler today, about 25ºC, and cloudy. There’s still no sign of rain. We are watering most evenings to keep as much life going as we can. Many plants have finished flowering, accelerated by heat. Flowering depends on chemical reactions, and these are speeded up as the temperature rises. There are lots of seed heads…

It’s six weeks without rain. The longest drought I can recall, made worse by the heatwave. The pond is a foot lower than it was in May. And there is nothing we can do about it. Any water we get has to go on the plants. A low pond is not as bad as it…

Every evening this week a few of us have come in to water the plants. Our barrels were filled by members who live nearby. Even so, we are barely keeping up; it’s so hot and dry, and we have no running water. Water is essential for plant survival. The various chemical reactions that maintain plant…

Another warm summer’s day, which is not as good as it sounds, even with the sunshine, as we have had no rain at all this month. The garden is gasping, especially problematic as we have no running water. For the past couple of weeks we have been discussing what to do in case of drought.…

It’s 23°C, sunny and breezy in the community garden. We’ve had a week without rain and the plants in pots and raised beds are suffering. We water and we water, but there’s a limit to what you can deliver with a watering can. The large cubic metre tank at the back of the container is…

It is warm in the garden, around 22ºC with intermittent sunshine. The buddleia is 2.5 metres (8 feet) tall and the playhouse is almost hidden. On the inner edge of the buddleia forest, in a raised bed, is an acanthus with a column of white and purple flowers and large, fern like leaves. Another plant…

Warm in the garden today, around 24˚C. The garden is very green with all the rain we have had in the past week. And full of flowers. They are hard to keep up with, it is all happening so quickly. On the pond, there are quite a few azure damselflies, some in mating pairs. I…

The temperature today is about 23˚C, pleasant in the sun, a little cooler towards the time we close as the sky clouds over. We have a visit from a dozen nursery children from Kaye Rowe, along with a teacher, assistants and parents. Most stay about 40 minutes, although a few stay on and don’t go…

We have a sunny day in the garden, with a temperature around 20˚C. We have about 30 visitors. Mums with babies and toddlers to begin with, and, at around 4pm, children from primary schools with parents. The irises are out on pond, also called flags, they are bright yellow. I noticed last year, this was…

The temperature is 17˚C today, pleasant in the sun, a little chilly in the shade. There was a little rain in the early hours but the garden is dry with quite a few plants flagging due to the hot days, up to 29˚C, earlier in the week. We are doing a lot of watering but…

I come into the garden at 2pm, it’s a little chilly, perhaps 14˚C, in a sky half blue, but by 5pm when I leave sky is almost completely blue and the temperature is around 18˚C, the warmth creeping up on us through the afternoon. The Japanese cherry in the children’s area has almost lost its…

The temperature has tumbled this week to 14˚C, chilly when the sun goes in, quite pleasant when the sun is out. Last week it was 27˚C, and over the week we have used a lot of water. The only reservoir left is in the large cube behind the container. Inevitably lack of water will be…

It’s 27˚C in the garden, which contrasts with last Thursday when the temperature was 11˚C, the average for April. Over the afternoon we had 29 visitors, fine weather midweek brings them in, especially mothers with young children. Lots of watering to do today. Although the various tanks are full, they won’t be if this hot…

It’s a chilly, overcast day, no more than 12˚ C. It’s no surprise that I see no flying insects; I am sure the cold weather grounds them. The pond has a solitary pond skater on the surface, but has lots of tadpoles in the clear water which is full to the brim due to all…

It’s a warm sunny day on the first Thursday afternoon the garden has been open in 2018. The garden is tidy after the winter clear up and the new shed, donated by the library, is amid the waisthigh buddleia. There are two great tits on a feeder in the children’s area. In the pond, there’s…

Welcome to the first blog post of Forest Gate Community Garden.   Each week one of our volunteers will contribute to our blog, reporting on progress, events and news related to the Community Garden and the wider community.   We hope you enjoy the blog and if you would like to contribute, volunteer, support or…