Seeds, growing, snails...

Photo: Kathy Cassidy

I hope you all enjoyed the Seedy Sunday event in Trumpington. Charlotte set up a stall and some of us popped in on the day to say hello and pick up some seeds. It got really busy at one point, with adults crowding around the tables, children doing crafts with seeds, twigs and pine cones, and people of all ages enjoying the delicious cakes and savoury bites sold by the WI institute. 

Growing and dealing with snails

Now we have our seeds, we are lining up pots and compost, perhaps with some help from young gardeners. For those without a heated greenhouse, it's all about placing pots on windowsills and perhaps a sunny corner in the conservatory. Towards late May, usually after the Chelsea Gardening Show, you can start planting outside - that's what programmes like Gardeners' World advise us to do every year. Of course if you have a polytunnel (and one is planned for the Empty Common Garden) it can be earlier... 

Whether it's May or before, there is one issue that is already on our mind: snails and slugs. They are a big nuisance and if you, like me, tried multiple ways unsuccessfully - beer, nut shells, grit, egg shells, pellets (not suitable for organic gardening though), an inverted melon with flesh scooped out (yes, it sounds crazy but somebody advised that) - you will know how frustrating it is. Personally there is nothing more effective than picking snails up and disposing of them, but you have to get out early in the morning to catch them at it. Another way I discovered recently is to combine pellets with plastic bird nets, I don't know why it works, but I managed to grow salad and rocket in the autumn and throughout the winter with very little damage to the leaves.

A spot of unusual recycling

At the Empty Common Garden we have come up with an alternative solution to protecting young plants, using recycled plastic bottles. Empty snail shells are also coming in handy - in this picture of our young mulberry bush - as a top for spiky sticks. 

If you have any recycling or snail tip, we would like to hear it. Please leave a comment or a link to your blog post on the subject. Thank you.

Birdwatching Weekend & Seedy Sunday reminder

If you are a gardener or allotment holder you might consider birds as annoying scavengers and even 'pests'. For instance, if you have soft fruit trees and bushes, you might have to use nets to prevent birds from 'stealing' your fruit. In times gone by, farmers used scarecrows in their fields to scare birds off crops - they now have very noisy contractions or use cages, nets and/or polytunnels.

Many birds are helpful allies, especially in organic gardening. The Royal Horticultural Society offers advice on how to attract birds into your garden. Click here to read the article. And who doesn't welcome a visit from a curious robin?

Birdwatching Weekend

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is asking bird lovers across the country to spend one hour over the weekend of 24-25 January and record the different species of birds that visit their gardens.

You can register for this year’s Big Garden Bird Watch and report back with the approximate number and variety of birds you spot. The RSPB has been collating numbers since 1979 to help better understand which birds are on the decline and how we can help to prevent it. Since then, over 7 million have been counted. The top 10 most common garden birds spotted in 2014 were:

1. House sparrow
2. Blue tit
3. Starling
4. Blackbird
5. Woodpigeon
6. Chaffinch
7. Goldfinch
8. Great tit
9. Collared dove
10. Robin

Although the house sparrow is still at number one, this cheerful chap has remained on the red list as their numbers were still down to 62% from the first Big Garden Bird Watch. As the RSPB and the RHS point out, there are lots we can do to encourage birds into the garden, particularly in winter when food is scarce. Providing plenty of good-quality food on bird tables, and hanging fat balls is an easy way to do this. We can also help wild birds by retaining some “untidy” areas over the winter months - which encourages insects, another important source of food.

Jordan Lee, from Birstall Garden Centre, says: “As gardeners, we understand that our native birds - and visitors of course – play as important a part in making our gardens beautiful, as our plants and flowers do. So why not take part in this worthwhile project?”

Don't forget that tomorrow is Seedy Sunday! You can find information about the event in our previous blog post. Click here to view it. Please pay us a visit, we have our own table at the event. If you have kids, they get in for free and there is an activity to keep them busy!

Seedy Sunday, here we come!

Isn't it remarkable how gardening swaps can look very similar?
 Seed swap in Urbana, USA. Photo: Ryan Griffis, Wikimedia 

This year, Empty Common Community Garden will have a stall at Seedy Sunday. If you don't know about this annual Cambridge seed swap, here is the event information from Transition Cambridge's website:

Trumpington Seedy Sunday

 25 January 2015, 13:30-16:00

 Village Hall, High Street, Trumpington CB2 9HZ

Swap seeds with other gardeners. If you don't have any spare seeds, don't worry, just take seeds in exchange for a small donation. As well as the seed swap, there will be a special preview of the new film 'Seeds of Justice' from the Gaia Foundation, and a talk from organic growing expert Valerie Muir of Valerie's Veggies, plus stalls, a children's activity, and tea and cakes from Trumpington W.I. Entry £2 adults (children free).

Many of us have been there before with packets of seeds harvested from our garden or extra packets we bought but didn't get round sowing. This year we will have a stall so aside our individual contributions, we are bringing in communal offerings. I hope it will also be a chance to meet up and 'put names to faces'!

2015 is the 'year of the Horse'

Horsetail alert: volunteers liming the beds

Happy New Year!

After a cold but sunny December (no snow for the Christmas holidays for us in Cambridge) we are preparing to grow this year's crops. Empty Common Community Garden is on a piece of land that was abandoned because of dampness and a very healthy horsetail population. The City Council have put in some drainage which will hopefully help. Bearing this in mind, here's what we are/will be doing this year:

• Liming the soil to raise the pH a bit. Horsetail does better in lower pH soils.
• Taking off the sporing heads as they emerge in spring. We then drown them in water for several weeks before dumping the sludge on a piece of waste land. We do not add them to the compost just in case the spores are still alive, besides the sporing heads are small so not a lot of organic matter is lost.
• Mulching the land with cardboard and then woodchips or council green waste compost and when the horsetail emerges hoeing it. Just mulching doesn’t work,  in fact it makes the problem worse because horsetail likes the damp conditions created by mulching, it grows straight through the cardboard and finds there is no competition so takes off. Horsetail isn’t good at competing with tall plants.
• Cutting plants at ground level and drowning these for several weeks. We then water the beds with the water used for drowning, add the sludge to the compost and so return it to the soil. This is to add the nutrients that the horsetail has accumulated back to the soil for other plants. Often some plants compete better than others because they are better at accumulating minerals. Horsetail is good at accumulating silicone from deep down and competes well against other plants in low silicon soils. Adding it to the surface makes it available to other plants, improving their competitive ability.
• Next spring we may try planting lots of marigolds in a bed as an experiment as they are said to be good at deterring horsetail.
• We are keeping a patch of silver leaf that arrived by itself and seems to have inhibited horsetail growth. It will be interesting to see what happens.
• We are not attempting to dig out the horsetail roots as they are super long - spreading wide and deep. They also have nodes on their roots that are activated to produce lots of root growth when a root is broken.

If you have any horsetail control tip to share, please leave a comment. If you'd like to know when the next blog post is out, please subscribe using the box on the top right. We will not pass your address to anybody!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

April 2014, catching up by the old shed

It has been an eventful year for Empty Common Community Garden, which celebrated its first birthday in the autumn. Although it's getting a bit bare in gardens everywhere, there are still splashes of colour with red berries, variegated ivy, heather and a few flowering plants and bushes that provide winter interest.

The weather is milder than expected and this week I found a blewitt mushroom. I also had a go at making my own wreath, with greenery from my own garden.

I am planning to make something interesting with pine cones I have collected around Cambridge rather than just spraying them gold. Today I found this fun seasonal make online:

These are pine cone turkeys, courtesy of San Jose' Library. I am hoping to make a couple for our mantelpiece, one for me and one for my daughter. We are heading for a festive break and blogging will resume in January 2015.

We have ambitious plans for next year, so watch this space to see how Empty Common Garden will evolve. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Pruning time!

Vine pruning lessons, State Library of South
Australia, Wikimedia Commons

Many trees are pruned in winter, when it's really cold. We are hoping to run a pruning workshop at some point, but in the meantime, here are a few quick tips. We are not exactly pruning vines, but I couldn't resist this vintage photo where a man wearing a kind of colonial outfit is giving lessons to adoring females in smart work clothes. Everybody looks so stylish, not exactly our modern-day, casual gardening gear! If you have any pruning tips to share, feel free to leave a comment. 

• Pruning starts in the first or second winter of the tree's life, this is formative pruning, which is followed by maintenance and renewal pruning after about five years. Be careful of what you do in the formative pruning stage, the tree might not be as 'forgiving' as later on.
• Buds on branches can produce fruit or shoots. Vegetative buds are small, triangular or pointed and they lie flat against the stem. Fruit buds store carbohydrates and become larger, fatter and may appear furry. For apples and pears, flower buds only develop on two-year-old wood and flower the following year to produce fruit. 
• Branches tend to grow upwards towards the sky and sun, but vertical branches do not fruit well. You need to control the height, as it will also make it more difficult to harvest the fruit. If you inherit a big apple tree, you might have to reduce its height and if you are quite harsh, you might not see any fruit for two years. [This happened to me, the cooking apple tree didn't mind too much and produced less apples, but the eating apple tree sulked and we didn't get any apple the following season.]
• The harder you prune, the more growth you get. It's best to prune weak shoots to half of the annual growth, stronger shoots only up to a third of the year's growth.
• Remove dead, diseased and damaged wood. Remove crossing branches.

These are just a few tips to get you started courtesy of our garden's members, watch this space for our very own workshop and/or check out the BBC's online guide to pruning.

The one about the exploding cucumber

Many of us at the Empty Common Garden love the Real Seed Catalogue company. Their seeds are special because they preserve varieties of fruit and veg that are disappearing from the stores. Commercial seed providers are narrowing the varieties we can grow and we are missing out on many interesting plants, especially British ones. Whenever I see a packet of seeds to grow Italian tomatoes I am a bit annoyed. I am Italian but having lived in Britain for two decades, I know they are not going to do well, unless you have a heated greenhouse or a blistering hot, south-facing wall. I keep trying and changing varieties, but my tomatoes get the blight every single year and the crop is disappointing. 

This year, we had glorious tomatoes at the Empty Common Garden but guess what... they got the blight. I am told there are resistant varieties and perhaps we should all shop more often at 

because they have seeds that can do well in this country. By the way, this is a genuine endorsement from myself and Charlotte, we are not receiving sponsorship from the company. We also buy seeds from local garden centres, but when Seedy Sunday comes, I hope to get some seeds from them.

Meet the exploding cucumber

One of the fun buys from The Real Seed Catalogue is 'Fat Baby', a climbing vine that produces spiky cucumbers. They taste like sweet peppers when cooked but have an intriguing way of propagating... they explode, with the seeds spreading all over the garden. I like picking them when small as they taste more like a cucumber, this way you don't need to cook them and you can use them raw in salads. When bigger you get less 'flesh' and have to remove the seeds. When big, you also need to cook them as they won't taste good raw. If you want to keep the seeds to plant the vine again next year, you can artificially pop them, just before the cucumber is ready to do it by itself. The website has also this H&S warning:

"HEALTH WARNING. DANGER OF EYE INJURY! HARD SEED IS EJECTED AT GREAT
SPEED. DO NOT HOLD RIPE FRUIT NEAR FACE. HARVEST FRUIT AFTER IT HAS OPENED. DO NOT ALLOW CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH FRUIT. We know this sounds silly, but we recommend that YOU WEAR EYE PROTECTION WHILE HARVESTING AND PROCESSING FRUIT."