A new year's tidy garden thanks to recycled old bricks

This winter we were given hundreds of old bricks and what with all the slabs we have been given over the years it has spurred us on to organise ourselves better. 

Bricked beds towards the hut

We now have a lovely circular space ready for sowing a low growing flowering meadow, three large well defined beds for rotating our larger crops such as potatoes, alliums and sweetcorn, a well organised mulch depot and also a practical space for compost tea making and pernicios weed drowning.  

Bricked preschool and trampoline beds

Bricks on our mound by the herb spiral

A circular, bricked bed

New large beds with brick frames

The most important job in any garden is looking after the soil and getting plenty of organic matter and nutrients into it and now, finally, we have got ourselves well organised on this front. In addition to our great row of compost heaps, we have somewhere to store our fallen leaves to create a good seed compost. 

Our mulch depot

We also have a place to store woodchips so they can mature for over a year before using and a bay for storing the soil improver we get from the green-waste recycling plant and other organic matter that can be used as a mulch. Mulching reduces digging, watering and weeding, and improves the soil. However, to do this you need mulch and we are always finding ourselves short of materials to mulch with and places to store it. Our mulch depot looks very neat now. 

If you are interested in how the soil improver we get from Amey Cespa is made, here is a great little video 

Happy New Year! How to force rhubarb for an early crop

Happy New Year from the Empty Common Community Garden! Our coordinator Charlotte has sent in this update accompanied by beautiful photos. This year we did not have snow, aside a brief spell in December that was melted before lunchtime, the weather has been cold, reaching freezing temperatures on some nights and milder than usual on some days. 

We have just covered two of our rhubarb plants for force them into producing an early crop. We found two old metal dustbins with rotten bottoms in a skip a few years ago but no lids so have been covering the bins with bits of plywood. Yesterday, while walking along the towpath, I did a double take - there, by the river Cam, were the two lids we needed. 

Although thrilled to find these, I did think it was a sad indictment of how we live, the lids were there because of a change in children's behaviour from fishing with nets and rods for fish to magnet fishing for rubbish. You can buy beautiful terracotta pots with lids but these are super expensive and we think our rustic rubbish bins, which were once rubbish themselves look nice too.

Forcing rhubarb isn't a natural process and it is a little mean on the plant so we are only forcing two of our many plants and give them a few years off in between. Any rhubarb can be forced, but some varieties such as "Victoria" and "Stockbridge Arrow" have been bred especially with forcing in mind. Other varieties to seek out are those with "Early" in the name, such as "Timperley Early". We don't know most of the varieties we have as they have been divided from others' plants, but we do have a late rhubarb that we have never forced called "Livingstone", which is great as we can start picking those when our other plants need a rest.