Tag: Community participation

Last weekend we enjoyed the sixth crop of fortnightly ‘triple-header’ Growing Tooting workshops – one each in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth. (Plus there’s the fourth series: an extra Wandsworth group running on the intervening weekends).
As ever, thanks to Martin for the energy and co-ordination!

What did we do this week?
As a comprehensive gardening topic we looked in detail at Permaculture – a growing approach that aims to integrate natural systems with social and individual needs for food, clean water, energy… (click here or here for two in-depth web resources).

To make that practical, in one group Donna presented her own garden as a case study.

She filmed a video of the back garden, plus photos of the front, for us to get an idea of the spaces and how the garden fits into her life.

Donna’s team of advisers – an unusual opportunity!

‘Observing’ before diving in is as useful in gardening as it is in swimming. Thank you Donna!

How is the potato progressing?

Secondly about observing – in our classes we encourage participants to be ‘grower scientist – investigators’ alongside enjoying being outside and putting good food on the table.
Here’s an example from someone who likes to measure and celebrate her plants’ progress! Why not try it – you learn a lot.

We have our latest Growing Tooting Handout 6 available – click here to download. The handout includes interrelated features of good common-sense gardening (and of permaculture):

• Attracting wildlife to control pests
• Mulch
• Compost
• Mycorrhizal soil fungi
• No-dig gardening 

To illustrate combing several of these elements, the second Wandsworth group planted up a square foot raised bed which had been prepared with a no-dig approach. First we removed the weeds then covered with a couple of inches of leaf mould from one of the housing estate’s leaf pens, then covered that with sieved soil to achieve a fine tilth for sowing seeds.

You can see the separate layers

We planted spinach, nasturtium, basil, plus marigold and tomato seedlings under bottle cloches (we’re experimenting with companion planting for the latter two).

Finally: two more illustrations of this week’s topics:

Attracting beneficial insects.
It’s useful to provide habitats for predators such as ladybirds (the larvae eat loads of greenfly).
This is a roll of corrugated card inside a plastic bottle with its base cut off.

 
No-dig and mulch gardening.
One guru for this approach was Ruth Stout. We’ll share some excerpts from her 1970s book, which is worth looking out for.

A practical no-dig resource online is SPUDS (Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Disturbance of the Soil).

It really works.

Happy Gardening – Charles

Gardeners in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth are seeing results in the soil, in trying out new skills and having some fun together.
As our fortnightly free Growing Tooting classes continue, have a look below at what we’ve been doing, and do get in touch to share ideas or with any queries.

Very proud gardeners! 

Basil seedlings transplanted into the ground at Melanie’s allotment.

 
More proud gardeners, indoors this time:

Veronica, Diana and Morena sowing seeds, transplanting lettuce seedlings (Sainsbury’s, 60p), dividing Moroccan mint to take home in pots.

 
Back outdoors, gardeners of all ages at Ravenstone School are getting their school raised beds going

Growing Tooting Handout 5 This is now available for participants and for TTT friends who read this blog and who would like to catch up on the details. 
Themes are Pests, Companion Planting, Square Foot Gardening. 
Please click here to download and keep a copy of Handout 5.

Square Foot Gardening is useful for the home gardener because it helps you focus on making best use of space, putting plants together that make sense, and creating an interesting mini-landscape.

What’s in the square foot bed below?
Tallest plants top RH corner (= north side).
Gail’s donated tomato and borage (top RHS squares).
Maxine’s lemon balm and 2 strawberries (top LHS).
Seeds elsewhere – bell peppers (top), English marigold (centre), radish, dwarf nasturtiums, basil (bottom L to R)

Square foot bed planted with veg, herbs and flowers for pollination.

Here’s a small bed full of different herbs, spotted at Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses

Some more from weekend 5 on the scientific and growing judgements and choices we make when we are gardening:

Selecting seeds:
Bean bed in Balham: last year’s white flowered  beans (which weren’t very productive) and conventional scarlet-flowered beans to plant; sweet peas for extra decoration and pollination.

Trimming when transplanting to keep plants healthy:
Trimming off excess leaves on lemon balm and strawberries donated by volunteer, Maxine, who dug them up that morning; we put them in the square foot bed.

Adding nutrition to a plant in a pot:
Giving the Brown Turkey fig a top dressing of John Innes No 3 and planting with dwarf nasturtiums to give ground cover and colour.

And for some insights into high-end gardening, it’s Chelsea Flower Show this week, with lots of media coverage.
Good growing, everyone!

The third weekend in our practical, sociable and free Growing Tooting workshops went well in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth. 
A fourth ‘waiting list’ group starts on the 24th April in Wandsworth. 
Please scroll down this blog to see our earlier posts.

At this stage of our classes, participants have seeds sown or seedlings coming through in their own planting pots and trays at home: here’s some spinach on the right. We discussed together just how to get to this stage successfully!

We also looked at dividing clumps of perennial plants such as mint as in this photo. 
Each smaller clump can be planted out to multiply your crops. 
Hands-on superhuman strength sometimes needed if the old clump is dry…

We have a Third Growing Tooting Handout – all welcome to click here for a copy.

One group of participants has a new allotment, so the timing is great to share what they are doing and trying out.
A key message in the classes is to learn from each other, that’s certainly more fun.

You’ll remember we are encouraging participants to be partly garden-detectives and partly growing-scientists…there’s no need to shy away from some helpful technical tips when learning about growing good local food. One ‘technical’ but practical topic in the third handout is ‘crop rotation’ – swapping around what you grow where, year by year.

In our Tooting Community Garden plot, we do ‘rotate’ what is planted in the beds every year exactly as in the handout. We keep a sketch map of what we are growing, so we can remember what’s planted, and to help plan for next year.

Come and visit us sometime at the Community Garden: all welcome to pop in and chat about growing or help out. We’re open every Sunday from 11:00-1:00 at 5 North Drive, SW16 1RN. 
Latest info on Facebook: Tooting Community Garden.
Good Gardening!  – Charles

All went well in the second weekend of our free workshops devoted to growing our own good local food – one class each in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth. (Details of the Growing Tooting programme here).

What did we do last weekend? 

We compared everyone’s window-sill grown pea plants, 2 weeks after sowing.

Different conditions (amount of light and watering; depth of planting) produced different growth.

Overall there were crops to be eaten (or planted out) even without having a garden!

Plus: We looked at the components that make up healthy soil

We discussed what ‘food’ plants need to feed their leaves, roots and flowers

We looked at the herbs we like, what conditions they need…and shared recipes

We now have Handout Number Two – everyone is welcome to click here for a copy

A group also visited two participants’ breezy allotment – their very first opportunity to garden outdoors.
As a team, we tried to be observant detectives as well as scientist-gardeners: exploring what is already growing there (celery, blackcurrants, strawberries); proposing what to do first (make a plan, prepare beds, maybe cover future beds with weed-suppressing mulch or sheeting and dig later on); and shared visions of the harvest.

Thanks to all for your enthusiasm and sharing ideas and questions, however new to gardening you are.

This Sunday April 10th all local gardeners are invited to drop in at the Tooting Community Garden to say hello, have a cup of tea made with the volcano kettle, and share some seeds if you have spare.
We’ll be open from 11:00 to 1:00, at 5 North Drive SW16 1RN, tucked behind the big house.

On March 18th & 20th we started Growing Tooting by launching our new free series of 8 classes on learning to grow your own local city food by participating and sharing with others in your neighbourhood. 
That’s 8 classes in each of 3 locations in Balham, Tooting and Wandsworth. Many thanks to Martin for the tireless co-ordination!

Yes it’s ambitious to be offering 24 classes between now and the end of June. We’re thrilled that all the classes are now full. 
In fact, there’s a big waiting list and we may offer a fourth series tucked into this busy calendar…we’ll be in touch with those on the list.

Hands-on right from the start

In that first class we started with the basics:
What knowledge do participants have? 
What kind of space are you using for gardening? 
What do you want to grow?

What are annuals & what are perennials, and so what?

Re-purposed DIY planter

Martin prepared a handout for Session One, and everyone is welcome to a copy – please click here

Even though the classes are full, we’d like to share what we’re doing…and we encourage anyone to get in touch with us and find a local place to garden.
We want to help make local growing spaces much more visible, and get a useful network going for our area’s urban gardeners.

Encouraging new community growing spaces is the other objective of Growing Tooting. Our purpose has been to help 6 new sites start growing. Some of these are the locations of the growing classes described above, and the others are new initiatives where there’s great potential for getting growing together.
The six growing spaces are diverse in scale, purpose, style and in community setting. They are situated at a church, an enterprise, a primary school, a refugee charity and at two council estates:

1. St Mark’s United Reformed Church, Balham 
2. Route to Juice, Tooting
3. Ravenstone School, Balham
4. CARAS (Community Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers), Tooting
5. Wendelsworth Garden Fruit Project, Wandsworth
6. Avening Terrace Garden, Wandsworth 

We’ll report much more from each site, and we’ll share the learning from the combined gardening class and garden-creation activities of Growing Tooting: it’s all about building local participation to grow and enjoy good local food. Many thanks again to the Wandsworth Big Society Fund for giving the project financial support. Much appreciated!
– Charles

This free fortnightly programme runs in three different locations in Tooting, Balham and Wandsworth – and at different times of the week (see the schedule below).

In each series of eight fortnightly workshops between March and June we’ll be covering the basics of growing food at home, including wildlife-friendly gardening – even if you don’t have your own garden.

Everyone’s welcome, and no previous gardening experience is necessary.

  
Workshop series venues and start dates:
There are three locations; the full series of 8 workshops will run in each.
If you would like a copy of the flyer with all the venues listed, please click here to download.

Balham: We’ll run on Friday mornings at 11:00am, fortnightly from Friday 18 March. Venue: St Mark’s United Reformed Church, 53 Rowfant Road, SW17 7AP
Tooting: We’ll run on Friday afternoons at 2:00pm, fortnightly from Friday 18 March. Venue: Rechere’s Education, Health and Wellbeing Centre at Route to Juice, 163-165 Tooting High Street, SW17 0SY
Wandsworth: We’ll run at 2:00pm on Sunday afternoons from 20 March. Venue: Penfold Centre, Neville Gill Close, SW18 4JT

Please attend whichever series suits you in terms of timing & location.
We encourage you do join in the whole series for the maximum social and learning benefit – it’s not intended to be separate drop-in events.

Schedule and duration:
We have a calendar of all the 8 sessions at each location – click here to read or download a copy.
Sessions will last 90 minutes.

Workshop series style:
Interactive, practical and participative. We’ll also look at books and web links, and visit other gardens. We’ll build on participants’ knowledge and interests.

To ask any questions, and to book: contact Martin:

• on 07980 095152
• by e-mail at transitiontowntooting@gmail.com 
• by twitter (@tttooting) 
• on Facebook Transition Town Tooting 

Workshop series content:

• We’ll cover seasonal planning, preparation, sowing, growing and harvesting – always with an eye on what works well right here
• We’ll explore: What varieties are good to grow locally? How to manage compost, soil fertility and watering? What about wildlife gardening, and sustainability? How can we make or build what we need for our own setting? Which tools are most useful?
• We’ll show you that in the city you can grow successfully on balconies, in windowboxes, in containers on paved yards, on walls – and in back gardens
• We’ll introduce you to local community gardens
• We won’t forget about recipes, cooking and enjoying eating what we grow
• We’ll finish the series with a celebration!

What to bring:
All you have to bring is enthusiasm and readiness to learn! We’ll provide all the tools you’ll need.

Why join in?
As well as learning and sharing a lot about growing, you’ll meet new people, spend time outdoors and get some exercise – and grow healthy food. What’s not to like?

The wider Growing Tooting project:
The purpose of this whole Growing Tooting project is to encourage local people to grow good local food by sharing and teaching the basic skills of growing and gardening.
Plus, the project is helping to create a number of new community gardens across the borough. We’ll share more about that later on.
Our vision is that these growing spaces with be able to network to share experience, equipment and enjoyment….and help make Wandsworth a growing-friendly place to live. TTT is very grateful to the Wandsworth Big Society Fund for support.

If you have any questions, and to book your place on one of the series of workshops: contact Martin on 07980 095152 (or use one of the other methods above).