Tate Modern is growing something....

The Tate Modern art gallery has an interesting new installation in it's huge turbine hall. With a sprinkle of guerrilla gardening friendly mischief, and a pinch of the laws of chance and chaos which shape the gardeners' experience (maybe mine more than most!); Abraham Cruzvillegas' installation is a huge set of planters, filled with earth from London Parks. Lit and watered until the 13th April, the idea is to see what emerges. Already mushrooms and patches of green have sprouted. From random seeds lying dormant in the soil, as well as seeds thrown by visitors, the natural processes of growth and decay will make the artwork literally come alive.

'Empty Lot' by Abraham Cruzvillegas

The idea of holding up the chance seedlings, the rogues, weeds and unwanted plants as art appeals to me. The ragged assortment of greenery that is currently emerging does not match most people's idea of an ideal garden, but maybe we should look again at the brave shoots that colonise the most unpromising sites, and remember that beauty and worth is in the eye of the beholder.

Warm earth music for plants... and the people who love them.

Plant Sentience and Stevie Wonder: The secret life of plants (1979)

With a experimental-funk Stevie Wonder soundtrack, this documentary is based on the 1973 book of the same name. 'The Secret life of Plants' explores way-out concepts and entertaining pseudo-science such as plant sentience (plants can feel, man!) orgone accumulation (plants can focus energy, man!) and plant emotions. Yes, plant emotions. Great timelapse photography and the film's interesting alternative take on our green leafy friends make this worth a watch.





Was Roald Dahl onto something when he wrote 'The Sound Machine'?

His 1949 tale of a man who invents a machine that can hear roses shreiking as they're cut and trees groaning as they're felled?

Royal Academy of the Arts: Urban Gardening

An interesting looking event happening on the 27th Feb:

'CONTEMPORARY URBAN GARDENING - Provocations in art'

Artist Wendy Shilliam's rooftop veg plot

From the RA website:

Join us for a panel event exploring the current state and future potential of contemporary urban gardening.

Chaired by journalist and horticulturist Alys Fowler, this event will explore the subversive and exciting work of guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds, forager John Rensten and artist Wendy Shillam.
Panellists include:

• Gardener Wendy Shillam, currently undertaking a project in cultivating a 5m x 6m rooftop garden on top of her Central London home, containing thriving organic fruits and vegetables.
• Forager and founder of Forage London, John Rensten, studies wild food and leads city foraging walks in urban green spaces.
• Guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds, whose record of illicit cultivation began in 2004. His website is now a hub for those who cultivate land as guerrilla gardeners.

Permaculture Magazine

Another great mag well worth a look. Inspiring stuff for anyone interested in growing veggies and looking after the planet. and it's printed on lovely thick paper.

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/

 

Belated halloween special: a pumpkin's worst nightmare? Vegetable gardeners, keep the elephants away from your pumpkin patch.

The great You-Dig? No-Dig experiment.

I got my allotment at the start of 2015 and it was just a wild jungle of pernicious weeds. Couch grass, bindweed, horsetails, their roots making thick mats of tough tangle in the soil. Soil that would've been SOOO much work to dig over. 

Despite being a very lazy person, I have somehow managed to end up with a job that requires a lot of time and effort, a 3 year old person to look after (that also requires a lot of time and effort), a million and one hobbies and a 10 rod allotment in my sole care (apart from the 3 year old person sowing the occasional seed).

Imagine my delight when I peeked inside the cover of this book:

Charles Dowding: How to create a new vegetable garden from scratch.

I'd read his articles in 'The Garden' magazine and thought he seemed like a bit of a dude, so ordered his book and followed his advice for creating a new no-dig veg garden.

So what is no-dig gardening? It's just gardening without digging, using a thick dressing of mulch and relying on the gardener's friends, the little wormies, to look after the soil. 

Soil has a delicate balance of helpful microscopic life in it, and undug soil suits these little friends just fine. Digging can trash the structure of the soil and is not necessary for plants to thrive, as I was to find out.

Being a bit of a chicken, I used the bottom third of the allotment as my top secret experimental no-dig test bed (kind of like Q's lab in the james bond films, but with less exploding pens). I just dug over the rest of the allotment as normal.

But the no-dig beds? Well, I spent several weeks asking every shop in the local area for their old cardboard boxes, flattened them and plonked these straight over the weeds. Then, I bunged on a load of straw from our local riding stables, which came loaded with handy bits of horse poo (aka manure). Next, I collected up as many grass cuttings as I could and chucked them on top. I covered the whole lot with landscape fabric and forgot about it for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, I had a brood of little squash, courgette and tomato plants growing in pots at home. Come May, I scooped out some little holes in the mulch, put in some compost and planted the seedlings, crossing my fingers that the un-rotted straw and grass cuttings wouldn't poison them with a nitrogen overdose. See the photos below for what happened...

February: the plot before the no-dig attack.

 mulching with cardboard, straw and grass cuttings

May: The seedlings are planted out 

August: It's a jungle!

October: 1 million tomatoes

 November: The plants have died back, been pulled up and the whole thing has been tickled with a rake. The soil is lovely soft, rich, friable compost-y stuff. My onions and garlic are in under the fleece and I'm left with the warm glow of maximum results for minimum effort! Hooray for no-dig!!!

I ended up getting 8 big Crown Prince squash, tons of tomatoes, loads of courgettes, a little bit of lettuce, 2 vegetable spaghetti squashes and one tiny, wizened turks turban squash (a mole dug under the roots and the plant wasn't happy). I can safely say that my spade will be getting considerably less use next year, as I'll be going no-dig on the whole plot. Thanks Charles Dowding!